Power Needs

Well, it looks like possibly I'm going to need another plug. And possibly an uninterruptible power supply. I just learned about NAS -- Network Attached Storage. NAS lets you have storage that is not tied to a single PC, but rather accessible from any PC in the network. In our case, we have the one home PC (despite minor agitation from the offspring, we still have just the one), plus each of us has a take-home lap top PC. Both laptops have wireless capability, and can talk to the Netgear router, as does the home PC and the cable modem. That's our little network.

As I understand it, the NAS box (whatever one we get, if and when) plugs into the router, and thusly becomes accessible from any PC. Our printer, which is currently hard-plugged into the home PC, and not accessible from the laptops (the files on the home pc aren't, either, despite the assurances of my network guy at work that it's really easy to do), can plug into the NAS device, and in theory become accessible to the laptops, while still being accessible to the home PC.

But the big deal is that the NAS box can give a huge amount of storage (or what counts as huge now; check again in a year). The smallest box I saw was 160 gigabytes; the largest was 1.2 terabytes. They physically range from the size of four hardcover books to about twice that. And with stuff on the NAS box rather than the individual PCs, it would be immediately accessible if we swapped to a new PC. No data swapping. (Probably just data files, though. I don't think that I want to contemplate what it would take to make Windows accept remote executable files. I'm sure its possible, I just don't want to contemplate what it would take to make it work.)

Downsides? Oh, sure, you betcha. For one, if you have something fail on the NAS box, then hey presto, you just lost a lot of storage. Not sure if they come with internally redundant backup. For another, they're not cheap -- by my standards, anyway-- starting at around $500. And of course, there's The Power Question. I wasn't kidding about the UPS concept. We already have the router, cable modem, speakers, two printers, and phone modem plugged into the surge protector. I think there is one slot left.

But it's sexy!