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Networked Storage Gets Extremely Affordable

Narasu Rebbapragada, PC World

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Photograph: Marc Simon
Network-attached storage (NAS) for homes and small businesses is becoming cheaper and easier to use. We tested four new drives, three of which made our chart. All are simple to set up, all come with USB 2.0 ports for backing up to an external hard drive, and all support some kind of multidrive RAID configuration.

Our new Best Buy, Netgear's lightning-fast ReadyNAS NV+, is a rebranded version of our previous winner, Infrant Technologies' ReadyNAS NV. (Back in May, Netgear announced that it was acquiring Infrant Technologies.) The Netgear's shiny silver case holds four hot-swappable drives, good for 1 terabyte (1000GB) of capacity and configurable as RAID 0, 1, or 5, Or as Netgear's proprietary X-RAID, which lets you add drives and rebuild the RAID on the fly. The browser-based settings are highly configurable and well explained. You get quite a lot for your money, too, though this expensive device delivers more NAS than most home users will need.

Hammer's 500GB Myshare, our third-ranked drive, is a better home-user option. It lacks DLNA support for media server capabilities, but Hammer says that an impending firmware update should correct that shortcoming. This inexpensive dual-drive device turned in above-average performance and has a solid design that includes two USB ports, one of which allows the Myshare to back up files to an external USB drive automatically. On the other hand, it was the only drive of the group that didn't come with backup software.

Buffalo Technology's 1TB TeraStation Live has a nicely designed settings interface, the best on-screen display, and a lock for securing its case of four removable drives. It performed slowly compared with the others we tested, perhaps because of its default RAID 5 setting, which ensures data redundancy across drives. It was the only new device to lack print server capabilities too.

HP's Media Vault Pro mv2040 scored less than a point below the TeraStation Live in our ratings, just missing the chart. You can swap out only one of its two 500GB drives, and it has the fewest RAID options. It was a slightly below-average performer. HP sells this drive at its online store for small and medium-size businesses.

Find the Very Latest Hard Drive Charts

Click on the links below for the latest hard drive rankings or a comprehensive list of all hard drives we've tested.

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