Audience - This review might sound useful to those who already have a home network setup at their place and may be even to those who at least have a Router along with a Desktop \ Laptop. So Router is the key here. If you do not own the above "Objects", nor intend to acquire them in near future, please do not bother to read further because you would be in a same situation, as a Polar Bear in Sahara Desert (I mean no offence, I just like to create one-liners, hope you have liked this one . He He He).
For those who have the above requisites(Desktop/Laptop+ Router) at home along with an obsolete desktop, please continue reading further. Rest of the people who do not wish to or can not procure an obsolete desktop may drop out at this time.
Legend:-
HDD - Hard Disk Drive
PC - Personal Computer
GB - Giga Byte
So now I have the attention of those people who either have / can have or soon will have -
Multiple PCs at home
A Router("Wired with Multiple LAN Ports" or "Wireless")
Obsolete Desktop without Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse(Capable of running at least Windows 98)
The idea is to create a Network Storage, accessible to all PCs at all times. Now thats not complex. Just plug in all your PCs to the Router, create a network and share your Hard Disk Partitions that have the data which you wish to share with others. So is this what all of us want or there is something more interesting we can do .
Ok, lets build some background first .
Now the data you generally share with others is obviously non-personal. That means that data is something you are comfortable sharing with others. Now a days storage capacity is not a problem, why, because the time I bought my first Desktop, the generally available max capacity of HDD was 10.2 GB. The first PC I ever touched was having a capacity of 2.1 GB and that too was very expensively upgraded from 1.2 GB. These days minimum available HDD comes with a capacity of 80 GB. My present desktop has a 250 GB HDD, even a 500 GB HDD in a PC is not mind boggling any more. The most interesting thing here is, no matter how much space we have on our HDD, it fills in real fast. You will agree no matter how big a refrigerator you buy, it eventually fills up and then you adjust the stuff.
As per my observation, most general form of shared data is -
Collection of Movies
Music
Photographs(Home Videos)
Software Setups
Scanned Documents
So consider a scenario that one of the Laptop at your home has got the latest movie downloaded from the Internet but the owner of the Laptop has gone out and to your utter dismay, you find out that he/she won’t be back till evening. This is just one scenario and we did not discuss any serious thing yet, like a scanned document you need right now and its with your family member who has gone out of station with his/her Laptop.
Well, if all of the shared data does not have to reside on multiple individual machines, instead it was on a Single Centralised Network Storage, then what -
Then, there won’t be a need of sharing of HDDs, dependency on other PCs, no requirement to get all PCs up and running all the time so that all shared data is available.
What I am proposing is a Centralised Network Storage which has all the Shared Data and is available as a separate entity and which is on network all the time. So as and when you are on network you have access to all Shared Data without worrying about whether other PCs are on network or off-network.
You can avail this facility by purchasing a Storage Central kind of thing, for ex - from Netgear. That would cost you between 8, 000 to 10, 000 excluding HDD, its your decision what capacity HDD you wish to put into that Storage Central right from 80 GB HDD to 500 GB HDD. It supports up to 2 HDDs. Once everything is in place all you need to do is plug in Storage Central into your Network and switch it on and there you go with your Personal Home Network Storage.
https://netgear.com/Products/Storage/NetworkStorage/SC101.aspx
Please do not blame me if this URL does not work, it is working right now as of 27 Oct 2007.
*But isn’t 10, 000 Rupees on a little higher side and that too excluding HDDs!
Remember that Obsolete Desktop without Monitor, we were talking about earlier. All desktops as a general trend can support up to 4 HDDs.
So, now we have this Obsolete Desktop with HDD and a LAN Card. This actually can be transformed into your own Storage Central. Just put a HDD of whatever capacity suits you, the max capacity of a HDD that you can put is only limited by capacity of the motherboard. Share the partitions of this HDD( by plugging in borrowed Monitor / KB / Mouse from your main Desktop), install LAN Card, set up network on this Desktop. Copy all your Shared Data onto this Desktop and this is now your own Storage Central.
Storage Central from Netgear would cost -
10000 - Storage Central
03000 - 250 GB HDD
13000 - Total
Our just created Network storage would cost -
2000 - Obsolete Desktop without Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse
3000 - 250 GB HDD
0150 - LAN Card
*5150 - Total
*You save roughly 8, 000 Rupees!
Well, I plan to invest these 8, 000 Rupees with Motilal Oswal Securities who are providing huge returns from Stock Market these days . Do you want to know more about that:) . Stay tuned .
I will be back .:)
Taurgo.