Network Storage Needs to Get Cheaper Faster

If you're like me, you are constantly nagged by worries of how much hard drive space you have left on your network. A few years ago, I didn't worry so much...a hard drive wore out before I filled it up.

Now, however, as audio and video files proliferate like Tribbles, they chew through even massive drives in what seems like record time.

To combat this, I keep investing in large internal drives and even larger external drives for the PCs on my home network, as you can see in the diagram below:

As you can also see, those drives that house our media are much, much more full and closer to needing to be upgraded to something bigger. All told, our network has roughly half a terabyte of storage available for media and we're currently using over two-thirds of that. By the end of 2007, I project that we'll be out of space, either on the media storage drives themselves or the backup drives that, er, back them up.

So, what should I do? Continue to invest in local USB2.0 external drives, one (or more) per computer? That's certainly an option, although the complexity of maintaining such a multitude of drives is a concern.

Another option is network attached storage (NAS) -- basically a hard drive with an Ethernet interface that is accessible from any PC on the network. The main problem with that approach is that it's significantly more expensive than local USB storage. For example, a 500GB USB2.0 drive can be had for $180 pretty easily (or $0.36 per GB), whereas the same capacity network device would run roughly double that or more (many popular large-size NAS units run about $1.00 per GB).

However, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. As NAS units become more popular and sell in larger numbers, they also become cheaper and with bigger capacities. The day that NAS functionality adds just a 20% or so premium over non-NAS external storage (versus the nearly 100% it is today) will be a good day...I just wish that day was yesterday.