When you are managing lots of data on your home or home office network, it is tempting to expand your storage with a simple external hard drive. It provides additional space for your backups, for the media files such as videos and audios, photos, and documents. However, this solution mostly leads to information overload. In this article, two important reasons for switching from an external hard drive to a network storage server are presented. Two reasons are: It prevents unnecessary data duplication and prevents the storage nightmares. It is not difficult to implement home network storage server. Once you have reviewed the reasons for switching to network storage, it might be very easy for you to make a decision to switch.
Network storage prevents unnecessary data duplication
Have you ever had a series of digital photographs stored on your computer and wanted to share them with a family member? Then you ended up copying the files to their computer? This is the kind of unnecessary data duplication that usually happens when we want to display, show, or use the data that we have stored. Data duplication like that takes time, and not just computer time, but operator time as well. With network attached storage, you can store the data in one, pre-determined place, and when someone needs to access those data for any purpose, like slide shows or HDTV viewing, the data can be streamed straight from the network attached drive without any duplication.
Preventing storage nightmares
Related to the data duplication problem is the data storage nightmare problem. Once you need to start duplicating data across the computers, it becomes unclear where the source of the data is, which disks or directories need to be backed up, and so on. As for the backup, you end up backing up all hard drives on all computers and your storage needs grow and grow. This eventually leads to backup failures, and loss of data. Data storage becomes a nightmare to the point where even a disk failure and starting storing data from scratch feels like a relief! But with implementing a home network storage server, you pre-determine where the original files will be (usually on the network server by default), and you can easily prevent the unclear data source nightmare problem that way.
