As part of my new goals for 2009, I’m going to post more regularly and share more of my living tech experiences and tips for others to benefit. It also serves as a record of what I have found, crawling through the net.

So the first series of articles I’m working on is, having a digital home storage system.

Why?

Because, more of our lives are going digital..

How many of you DON’T convert your new CDs to mp3?

How many of you DIDN’T take the Christmas/New Year/Wedding/Birthday pictures using a digital camera?

How many of you DON’T use a computer? (and if you don’t, I’m quite interested in knowing how you are reading this post )

But how are we storing all these pictures/videos/documents?

Keep buying hard disks? burning to CD/DVD-ROMs?

They work.. and there are many ways of doing this.. but I’m have been thinking for some time about this… getting the most value for money but yet and more importantly, protecting my digital memories.

I want a simple system to meet all these requirements.

1. Big storage
2. Backed up (mirrored storage -> with Raid 1 at least)
3. easy and fast access to all the files
4. reduce the need of multiple files on different computers
5. lower power usage – so can be left on 24/7
6. Can even be accessed thru the internet
7. can be used as a server for my media (mp3/video) files.
8. share photos easily with user and group access restrictions (big bonus)
9. my whole family can use (my non-tech parents and sister)

So after careful researching, I decided on getting a NAS. A Network Attached Storage, basically a machine that houses harddisk(s) and you connect it through your network router/switch.

The next post, I’ll share with you the different NAS systems I have looked at.