If you feel inundated with a massive amount of information you are storing on your personal computer or notebook, such as photos, videos, music files, ebooks, PDFs, your electronic documents, and are looking for ways to securely organize and protect this information, you are reading the right article.
You will find here three major reasons why installing a simple home network storage device is a much better solution than buying just another hard disk to store and organize your data.
When you are done reading, you should be better prepared when the time comes to buy an additional data storage device for your home.
The three reasons for installing home network storage devices instead of just another hard disk attached to your laptop or desktop, are: Data access from anywhere, Access anytime, and a Separate secure storage for backups. Let's look at all three in more detail.
Data access anytime
When your new hard disk is attached to your laptop or your desktop, that hard disk becomes inaccessible as soon as you shut down your laptop or desktop. And when you travel, or work outside your home, that can happen quite often with a laptop. When, however, you have a networked storage device, that device stays on and attached to the network. So it can be accessed anytime as the network in your home will be on at all times. The energy consumption is not an issue as home network storage devices can consume as little as 20 Watt. Such devices can even be put to sleep automatically when idle and can be awaken as soon as a data request is received on the network.
Data access from anywhere
A huge number of homes today have internet, or LAN, local area networks already installed. Your existing network will be a route to your home network storage device. So it will be a simple matter to connect each computer on the network to your home network storage device.
But you can do more. Using a secure connection from the internet, you can decide to have your files stored on your house network device, available on your laptop or netbook when you travel. Also, you can stream your music and videos over a wireless broadband connection to your smart phone or iPhone. You can make your home network storage device a central information repository and information service to anywhere you have a connection to the internet.
Secure network backups
Backup is a safety procedure that many of us know we should practice but many of us don't practice regularly. The reasons are many. One of them is the possible complexity and possible backup failure when a device we backup to becomes unavailable. This becomes quite a non issue with an always-there, accessible-from-anywhere home network storage device. One big reason for backup frustration due to failures is removed. You can setup backups easily, in a "set it and forget it" fashion and you will have peace of mind that as long as your home network storage is operational, all your computers will be backed up safely.
For more information on the various options for your home network storage devices and their manufacturers, please see the website http://homenetworkstorage.org.