Smart Home Blog

Today NAS isn’t something unattainable for home users. Its price is going down while the amount of media content is going up. So, many companies offer their solution for SOHO segment. One of them is Synology. Its new NAS DS211+ has a few very good features which distinguish it from many other similar devices. First of all, it’s quiet. Its noise level is just about 20 dB(A) thanks to a 92mm low-rotation fan. Believe me this is very important. I have DLink DNS-321 and the noise produced its small fan is really annoying. Also device is energy-efficient. It takes about 24 Watt.

The DS211+ supports two 3.5″ hot-swappable hard drives with summary capacity up to 6TB. Additionally it sports gigabit Ethernet, three USB and one eSata ports. Plus SD cardreader. A 1.6GHz processor and 512MB RAM should be enough to have a good performance for UPnP or Samba services. Using additional packages from Synology it’ll be possible to install Squeezebox Server, Webalizer or phpMyAdmin.

The Synology NAS DS211+ is available now for about $400. It isn’t so cheap as DLink devices, for example. But the hardware and software quality cannot be inexpensive.

Seagate and Paramount Pictures recently announced their agreement to pre-load a selection of 500GB FreeAgent Goâ„¢ ultra-portable hard drives with Paramount movies. It’ll be 20 movies. It isn’t so much but as a first step it’s very very clever decision. It’s also good news because consumers and producers are ready for digital media libraries for a long time. But film companies are too stiff and decision of Paramount Pictures promises that the rest big movie producers will also partner with Seagate, Western Digital or some other producer of HDD to offer their pre-loaded movies on HDDs.

Personally I like that solution and I think it’s much better then DVD or Blu-ray. Sure when Internet channels will have enough power to deliver SD or HD content everywhere online media libraries will dominate. But now distribution of media content on the external HDD is the most appropriate way to deliver movies to the consumer.

If you have external USB hard drive and would like to access it without PC the Pogoplug is probably what do you need. This stylish adaptor turns any USB storage device into NAS. Additionally to sharing files it provides UPnP service to stream media content by home network. The Pogoplug can be easily configured via web interface. For Linux geeks it provides SSH access and a few open source components. The functionality of the Pogoplug can be expanded by uploading a new firmware. So, later some new features might be added there.

The Pogoplug is available just for $99 which is near to cost some one bay NAS without HDD. But using USB hub you can connect to the Pogoplug more then one device.

You can watch demo video about configuration Pogoplug after jump.
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NAS for the SOHO is not so expensive now. So, to make access to the various files from different PCs much easier it’s better to add it to your home network. But if you already have some USB connected hard drive you can transform it to NAS using NASU2 NAS adapter.

It’s equiped with a USB 2.0/1.1 and an Ethernet 10/100Mbps connection. Additionally NASU2 provides an ability to power most 2.5″ USB hard drives or any low powered USB storage device.

For uses NASU2 offers both SMB (Server Message Block) and the open source Samba network protocols. So, it’s doesn’t matter which OS runs on client PC – MS Windows, MacOS X or Linux. It always will have access to the data on the storage. To access to the storage outside the LAN NASU2 provides FTP connection. Additionally you can use that adaptor as print-server or Torrent client. Not bad for the 50 bucks device, isn’t it?

[via Business Wire]

If you think that HTPC is too complicated and expensive the new product from Emtec might be interesting for you. Movie Cube -R actually an external storage (up to 500GB) but with amazing functionality. It allows to MPEG 4 playback and recording without PC! What you need to do is connect that media HDD to the TV using its video ouput and that’s it! You can record your favorite TV show or play video already stored on the Movie Cube -R. It has navigation buttons on the front panel and supports remote control.

The Movie Cube offers a simple way to connect your digital camera to download and store photos. It also can be connected to the PC via Ethernet or USB and used as ordinary external storage.

Emtec offers a several models of Movie Cube -R with different capacity: from 160GB to 500GB. The price is started from $300.00 which is quite reasonable for device with such features.

[via Engadget]