With energy costs on the rise the thought of running a NAS device rather then a dedicated server or a beefed up PC for file sharing at home or work is becoming popular. The average NAS device runs one or two hard drives (usually not included, so the consumer can choose the size of the drives) and it runs a LINUX operating system with a web page interface for management. It also comes with a network interface which lately is Gigabit capable. The Gigabit interface will come in very handy for file transfers as long as your router or switch as well as PC are both also operating at Gigabit speeds. Some of the more expensive NAS devices come with so many features that users can offload average tasks such as running FTP for hours on end, sharing out a printer for other PC on the LAN to print to, RAID for redundancy, and media server just to name a few. All of these tasks can be handed off to the NAS device which will use a fraction of the electricity of a PC. It is also always available as opposed to when you power down your main PC rendering others on the network(s) who want to print or retrieve a file helpless. The friends at ICYBOX.de sent us their IB-NAS4220-B NAS to review. Let’s see what this device can do for us.
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Review: Techware Labs
Apr 2, 2008, 07:33 PM
