Most households are equipped with more than one PC or notebook, which are usually all connected to the router. In a small home network in the file management is encountered sooner or later on difficulties. Suppose you save your collection on the PC of your workspace.
Picture gallery
These photos are then only available to you if you are either sitting directly in front of this PC or when you share the directory with the pictures in the network - and leave the PC switched on. Who wants to run his computer 24 hours a day, just to access his digital photos at any time? This alone prohibits the considerable energy consumption.
Centrally located on the network storage
Always store your data on the computer you are working on, all your files are distributed across multiple devices. It is really annoying when you work on specific documents over a longer period of time. Later, you will find that you have accidentally worked on different computers on different versions.
Access to the network storage
How to set up a home network
Connection to the home network router
Even if you store your images and documents on different external media such as USB sticks or external hard drives, the corresponding disk must always be available on the computer you are using. You must also connect it to the computer. A relaxed working with notebook on the sofa is then often not possible. However, if you store your data centrally on a network hard drive, the problems mentioned above are saved.
Even network drives for private use are now increasingly referred to as "NAS". The abbreviation stands for the English term Network Attached Storage, which can be translated as "network attached memory".
In contrast to a conventional external hard drive, a NAS is not connected to a free LAN port of the router via a USB cable directly to a PC or notebook but via a network cable.
A NAS in the home network behaves similar to a PC with network or folder sharing enabled. Like a PC or notebook, the network hard drive is a completely independent and independent device in the network - but with a significantly lower energy consumption.
Each PC in the home network can access the shares or network drives of a NAS. Network devices or releases are often referred to as "shares" by many device manufacturers.
Releases can be protected or defined without restrictions. Each user and device on the home network has unlimited access to unprotected shares. Use of restricted shares requires user names and passwords.
The shares (or shares) of a network store appear in Windows Explorer in the column on the left under "Networks". There, Windows lists all devices that provide shares in the home network. Many manufacturers have a small tool for the network storage, which can be used to display the NAS shares directly or to integrate them as traditional drives.
Before using the NAS on the home network, you must connect the device to your router. On the back of the network hard disks there is a LAN port. This is connected by a network cable with a free LAN port at the switch of the router. As network cables are only installed in the fewest households, there is usually no other option than setting the NAS near the router.
The NAS is then set up via any computer which is also connected to the home network. For the comparison test, network hard disks with multimedia functions were selected, which were available for retail at less than 100 Euro at the time of testing (end of August 2011).
Setup and operation
Five units of this price class finally found the way to our editorial office. The following section shows the most important test results for the different devices. For a comprehensive overview of the functions and test results of all tested network drives, please refer to the comparison table at the end of the article.
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Transfer speed and backup
Three NAS devices from our test field were already equipped with an internal 1 TB hard drive. The Stora of Netgear and the ShareCenter Pulse from D-Link, on the other hand, are only sold under 100 Euro as housing and without internal memory.
For a 1-TB disk, an additional cost of about 40 euros has to be planned. For this, both devices take up to two internal hard disks and offer at least twice as much space as their three competitors.
Alternatively, the data can be secured particularly easily and comfortably on such a so-called 2-bay NAS by means of data mirroring. The installation of the internal hard disks succeeds both with Netgears Stora as well as with D-Links ShareCenter.
Energy consumption
All the boards are integrated in the test by the included network cables. Please note: In order to be able to use the best possible transmission rate of a NAS device in the home network, all devices in the network (computer, router, cable) must be equipped according to the Gigabit standard
After connecting to the home network and start the NAS, the initial setup takes place. This is usually done by any computer that is also connected to the LAN. Each NAS in the test field provides a German-language setup wizard on CD.
The user makes the first important settings. Only D-Link has so far renounced the American translation of his English-language setup help. Pleasingly, all NAS devices tested with the exception of Buffalo make the user aware of an administrator password for accessing the web interface in the NAS.
The web interface surprises the user with many confusing settings. This problem helps with detailed online help. Our reviewer My Book Live from Western Digital offers an exemplary solution. Bubble with explanations will appear as soon as you move your mouse over the round, blue i-symbol.
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D-Link also provided detailed explanations in American in the ShareCenter. This only works if you have previously downloaded and installed the American language file from the manufacturer web site. Unfortunately, the online help in the margin column can not be scrolled, but is simply cut off at the bottom.
Buffalo also provides quite a comprehensive online help, but only in the English-language user interface. If you switch to the American interface, the online help has suddenly disappeared. In LaCie's Network Space 2, no online help is installed, and even with the fewest settings Stora finds few help.
The manuals of all devices in the test are very detailed and successful. For some manufacturers, the American version is not found on the supplied CD, but only on the manufacturer side in the support area.
With the transmission rates My Book Live from WD clearly ahead. With 90 MB / s, data can be copied from the disk to the computer, written to the disk at 48 MB / s. For comparison, Buffalo's LinkStation Live was the slowest disk in the test field, with less than 34 MB / s.
When writing, D-Links DNS-320 took most of the time: with just 15 MBytes / s dripped the data from our test calculator on the 2-Bay NAS. With read access, on the other hand, this device showed a transmission rate of more than three times as fast as 50 MBytes / s.
Using the included software or the Windows "Backup and Restore" tool, automated data or system backups can be saved on the NAS from all PCs or notebooks in the network. But the security of the media and documents on the NAS must also be taken care of.
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The internal hard disk of a NAS can just as easily pass as a PC or notebook. Devices with two internal hard disk drives, such as Netgears Stora or D-Links Share Center, allow data mirroring via RAID 1. The second built-in hard drive is used for data backup only.
All NAS with only one internal hard disk need a different backup option. Buffalo's LinkStation Live, LaCie's Network Space 2, and DLink's ShareCenter also allow automated backups to a USB storage device connected to the NAS.
WD's My Book Live does not have a USB port, but it can save its own content to any other share on the home network. However, this data can only be restored on an identical NAS from Western Digital.
The energy consumption of a device such as data security plays an important role. If a network hard disk is switched on around the clock, it also consumes electricity. Therefore, an energy-saving mode is particularly important in which the NAS hard disks enter the power-saving sleep mode as soon as they are not accessed in a certain period of time.
Guide: Saving energy
Except for Buffalo, all test candidates showed up here as smart power savings in the home network, which after a few minutes without access to power recordings of under 6 watts down. Buffalo uses an outdated system for its energy-saving mode.
It does not work, for example, when accessing webradios, networkable TVs or media players on the network hard disk. However, Buffalo wants to solve the problem with the energy-saving function in the next device generation.
Download: Table
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