HARD TARGET

External, scalable hard disks may be the future. Check out these two options
There was a time when a 4 GB hard disk elicited wondrous sighs over its storage. Today, there aren’t many machines that ship with anything less than 80 GB of hard disk. As for PCs, I have ranted about their low capacity, incapable of holding all the data, from the downloaded MP3s to the pictures from the digital camera. This week, I offer solutions to pad up your PC’s storage.
You could always get a hard disk with better storage (300 GB or so) or add a portable, pocket external hard disk with another 120 GB or 160 GB. However, it’s the third option that I will expound on in this piece: an external hard disk of 1-2 Terabytes.
With prices of hard disks falling, it makes sense to buy a scalable, external storage than one that is limited to one hard disk. Besides, external storage is always accessible even when you change your PC, so you won’t have to worry about moving data from one computer to the other.
You can connect the storage using either the USB (connects directly to one PC), LAN (connects to all the PCs at the same time), and Firewire, which will need a special port on your PC (comes preinstalled in Macs). I prefer to store on LAN, but this is slightly more expensive than the USB storage. If you plan to have more than one PC at home or are looking at digital media players to attach to your home theatre system, you should seriously consider the Network Storage or NAS option.

Netgear ReadyNas Duo
This is a good product that can connect both to LAN and USB and will last long. It comes with one preinstalled hard disk and you can add another as and when you need. You can buy the device with a preinstalled hard disk of 500, 750 or 1,000 GB. But as the 1,000 GB hard disks are expensive, I suggest you buy the one with the 500 GB preinstalled storage. At a later date, when the 1,000 GB disks becomes cheaper, just add one more hard disk and you will get a 1.5 TB storage. On the other hand, you could buy a 1,000 GB version and add another 1,000 GB to get 2 Terabytes of storage.
The second hard disk could just be a mirror to your first one, protecting the data in case one hard disk fails. In tech terminology, it is called RAID.
The built-in Embedded Bittorrent client will help you download big movie files directly on the device without switching on a PC. It works with Xbox, Playstation, Logitech Squeeze box and hence is flexible. It also supports Windows, Linux and Mac clients, so even if you change your OS, you will get the data. For details, visit tinyurl.com/3dr37a

Buffalo Drivestation Quattro
The fact that this device can take up to 4 hard disks makes it scalable to about 4 TB with the currently available 1 TB hard disks. On the flip side, it cannot connect to a network, but most home PC users may never have a network. Another downside is that you can only buy it with all the four disks. So the 1 TB model comes with 250 x 4 disks, while the 4 TB comes with 4 x 1,000 GB Disks, though you can swap these disks after buying it.
Like the Netgear, it also RAID enabled and you can copy your data on the other hard disk. The downside is that this box can’t talk to Linux-based PCs and hence most of your home theatre players may not be able to pick up the data. However, it can work easily with Windows and Mac machines.
The advantage of the DS is that it is cheaper, because it does not have LAN connectivity, but the build and quality of Netgear are much better.