Question about NAS

[AndreL]

NAS stands for Network Attached Storage and I understand that it is plugged into the network router but I have no idea how it operates... Is it like any "shared drive" where you can read & write files (kind of a file server) or just a one way storage device? They are producing some smaller one for home network now (1 terabytes). In case of the first alternative (R&W) what is the pros and cons compare to having the HDs on one computer and share them?
Hope I'm clear.
Thanks.

[danieldk]

NAS servers usually provide shares over SMB or sometimes NFS. You can use a normal computer to provide a NAS, but dedicated devices usually have low-power hardware. If you'd like to have something on the low-end, Linksys's Storage Link for USB2 disks is an interesting device. It is priced somewhere around $80, and you can attach USB2 harddisks to it. The nice think is that it runs Linux, and you can flash the firmware to install other Linux versions, like Debian (weeeeh). There's also a bit of tweaking that you can do on the device's board to double the clock frequence :). More information can be found at:

http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/

I plan to get one myself in the future :).

[AndreL]

Some routers also do this, no? Are they as good as a dedicated device?