NAS, Network Attached Storage, will be the gadget to own in this new year. Maturing technology coupled with the benefits it brings to the consumer will ensure a success story sooner or later. More recently, at MacWorld Apple's CEO Steve Jobs unreveiled the Time Capsule. Or on a local scope, the Suzuki's SumoDRIVE, produced and manufactured locally. Comparing the two devices will give us a clearer picture to the emerging trend of wireless storage.
Portability
This is what SumoDRIVE is made for (which limits the drive space to 30GB). However considering the fact that if I can bring my portable hard drive around, I can easily plug the USB cable into another computer. I mean I want a wireless function in a device only when the device is not too mobile. Nevertheless, SumoDRIVE can be a flashy gadget to impress others. So in this case, I do not see NAS moving into this area anytime soon.
Features
Time Capsule is certainly more of a full blown NAS and it could function as a router as well. So it is like a router with storage. As Apple begin to move into the NAS market you can see that NAS is going to get popular. And Apple did not forget to include Wireless-N almost a must-have for new gadgets. Actually since I am going to backup my computer wirelessly, I want to have it done quickly too, hence Wireless-N will be important. Only the fact that my notebook does not support Wireless-N is holding me back from moving to the new standard.
Another key feature that I feel NAS should have is the ability to add more drives. Recently I am looking at RAID, a method to configure several drives such that they will back each other up. In a nutshell, you can backup your data in the configured drives and if one of the drive breaks, you can do a recovery from the other drives and retrieve the lost data. In our case here, Time Capsule do allow you to connect another external hard drive through USB but no RAID.
The bottomline
NAS is still expensive for most of us as the idea of central storage is rather unfamiliar. Price plays a part too. 500GB Time Capsule costs S$489 and 1TB's is at S$788. An internal 500GB hard drive costs no more than S$250 (I check the prices today and it range from S$150 to S$249). So you get the idea. SumoDRIVE on the other hand costs about S$300++ I think as I do not know where you can get it. In short, NAS could prove to be expensive but the good idea of backing up my MP3 library wirelessly means I might want to bring out my old PC and D.I.Y it to be my NAS!
