The digital home is here, and to feed a hungry media rich world you need a terabyte or more; at least that’s what NAS vendors (Network Attached Storage) are banking on this year. Large hard drives are nothing new, what’s novel for 2008 is the appearance high capacity, inexpensive, consumer friendly NAS systems for the home.

Despite CES 2008 being largely unimpressive, with regards to new innovative product launches, there was one interesting theme that persistent all over the show floor; the appearance of RAID based NAS boxes for the home. In the past home based storage has been limited to external USB or Firewire boxes, but not any more. Thanks to the raise of home networking and the digital lifestyle, every member of the family from parents to teens and even little ones have storage needs.

Here are a few of the standouts in the home storage arena:

Netgear – Ready NAS Duo

HP – MediaSmart Server

Lacie Ethernet Disk mini – Home Edition


The truly unique aspect about these offerings if just how consumer friendly they are! No need to be a network admin or have your local geek force out to install them.

If you have been looking to add storage to your home computer this is the method you should employ, any of the above products will do wonderfully.