Owning a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device and attaching it to your home netwotrk instantly gives you a place you can back up your files or use for extra storage for an ever-fatter music or movie collection. Most of these come empty and you have to go out and buy hard drives to install into them; but once the drives are in place you’ll probably configured them in a RAID array that allows for redundancy if any of the drives should fail.
There are tons of options on the market, like the ever-present Drobo, which is a good product, but the fine folks at ExtremeTech went off the beaten path a bit to find a few other offerings from some other manufacturers that are worth considering if you’re planning to buy a NAS device and some drives to give yourself a place to back up your files. Among them are the Western Digital Sharespace (shown above), the Segate Black Armor 440, the Promise SmartStor NS4600, and the Intel SS-4200E. Lots of model names, but which of the devices has the solid spec to cut through the confusing numbers?