Network Hard Drives for Your Home

Network Hard Drives for Your Home
“Unlike the hard drives you use every day, network drives have a different set of issues to consider.”
by Jack Dunning

The growth of the home network has been almost accidental. For most people, it started when they added a router on their Internet connection. They may have wanted to share the Internet with another computer in the house. Or, if they had only one computer, they may have been looking for the additional security of the router's firewall. At the time, many of these users didn't realize that by installing a router in their house, they were creating a home computer network. Once available, the home network is a tool for sharing, whether it's data, printers or other devices.

In the past, if someone else wanted to use a printer over a home network, it was shared through the attached computer. This meant that the host computer was left running and online, just in case someone wanted to print. If anyone used the print-serving machine, they could experience a slowdown whenever network printing started. The solution was to plug the printer directly into the network (a network printer), bypassing the host and making it directly accessible to all the machines.

Once people could see each other's computers over the network, they soon realized that they could use the files on those remote computers. Users were soon creating their own file servers by mapping logical drives to the hard disks on the networked computers. These mapped drives could be used for backup and file sharing. Sometimes a single computer was designated as the file server. However, just as with the print server, the dedicated file server, if used for personal computing, experienced conflicts when other users were attached.

Today, the demands for data storage are increasing at a rapid rate. As applications such as graphic storage and data streaming increase, the demand and need for separate computer network storage also grows. The home computer has become part of a larger system—the home network—which needs independent storage systems called Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices—or network drives. Similar to the network printer, a NAS device is not dependent on (or attached to) another computer on the network.

A network hard drive is a mass data storage device that, rather than plugging directly into a computer, hooks up to an Ethernet connection, and is made available to any computer on that network. It has its own independent operating system for working with any type of computer (PC, Mac, Linux, etc.), while serving as a data server. Because it is designed to plug directly into an Ethernet connection and operate on its own, it's not the same external hard drive that gets plugged into the USB port on a computer, although the internal spinning hardware may be the same.

At some time you will probably consider installing an independent network drive into your network at home. Maybe you want to share family photos, listen to tracks in an iTunes library, record video from a webcam, back up all the computers on the network, or stream video. You know that you will need a high-capacity drive, but there is much more to picking out a network drive than merely looking at storage space. The features on today's network drives vary a great deal. Before you do buy one, there are a number of factors that you should consider. It's like deciding which computer to buy. But first, let's take a look at your network.

Network Speed

Your home network will most likely be the limiting factor in data-transfer speeds that you will experience with a network hard drive. The drives themselves will generally outstrip the speed of the network. The network drives I researched include a one-gigabit Ethernet connection, which is slower than the drive capability. Most of today's home networks are limited to 100 megabits by the router and/or the network cards in the computers.

The network drives, if operating on a one-gigabyte network, are capable of transferring data at speeds about 30 times faster than most cable modem Internet connections and about 100 times faster than DSL (actual performance will vary). However, in order to experience that rate of speed, your computer on the other end will need a one-gigabit network card and a hard-wired network connection (Category 5e or 6 cable). Plus, any other network device in the chain (the router) will need to operate at one gigabit. The actual data rates achieved will depend upon the speed of the slowest device in the chain of communication. While gigabit network cards are common in today's new computers, older systems often have 100-megabit (or less) limitations.

Some people complain that their network drive is much slower than their little USB drive attached to their laptop. The USB 2.0 hard drive will max out at 480Mbps (the USB 2.0 limitation)—less than half the max speed of the gigabit network connection. When it's noticed that a network drive is operating much slower than their attached USB drive, it is usually because of a bottleneck (100Mbps card/router/switch) in the network.

Older networks with Category 5 cabling can also cause a slowdown. Although Cat 5 cable will achieve faster speeds, it is rated only for 100Mbits. For optimum performance in a 1-Gbps network, Cat 5e or Cat 6 cable is recommended. For any cabling, actual performance will depend upon the length of the runs, bends and turns, and outside interference (primarily other power sources).

If your home network is primarily wireless, then your data-transfer rates are most likely limited to 54Mbits (80211g), close to half of the speed of the older wired 100Mbits. (You should be able to check the network settings in your computer to see the speed of your network cards—wired and wireless.) Even when network cards for the 80211n Wi-Fi standard become more available, the theoretical speed will only increase to 600Mbps, with actual throughput expected to be much lower, depending upon the physical range of the transmitter.

If you want to maximize the performance of a network drive, especially for any sort of data streaming, then each link in the system must be maximized. This includes using gigabit routers, switches and network cards and, whenever possible, hard-wired connections. If your home network is wireless, don't despair. Most network applications don't need maximum throughput. There are many uses for network drives (data backup and syncing, photo and file sharing, etc.) that don't need the one-gigabyte network speed. In these situations, the current Wi-Fi connections will be more than adequate.

Independent Operating System

Network drives have their own microprocessor and operating system. In order to operate independently, a network drive needs to be a computer. That means it will come online and offer continuous availability regardless of the state of any other computer on the network. This is the major difference between the standard external USB drive and a network drive. While the USB drive piggybacks off the host computer's OS, the network drive doesn't need a host.

For standard external drives, there are format issues between Windows PCs, Macs and Linux machines. In some cases, depending upon the format of a hard drive, a particular operating system will be able to only read a drive formatted for another OS, while not being able to write to it. A network drive handles these problems through its operating system, which ensures that the drive works with each system format type (CIFS/SMB for Microsoft, AFP for Apple, etc.).

The Iomega Fast Ethernet Home Network External Hard Drive uses the EMC LifeLine Home operating system. EMC LifeLine is capable of acting as a media server while supporting direct digital camera downloads, Bluetooth transfers, video surveillance and printer serving. Plus, it has many other features that enhance its function as a network driver.

EMC LifeLine is a commercially support NAS operating system, but many of the network drive operating systems are open source versions of Linux or Unix-like operating systems. It is not necessarily important to know which OS is being used by a particular drive as long as it gives the features and performance that you need. (Many of the manufactures don't offer information on the operating system used, which leads me to suspect that they are using one of the free open-source programs.)

Remote Access Over the Internet

One of the benefits of a network drive can be accessing it remotely over Internet. The Western Digital My Book World Edition network drives include MioNet, which is an online service that allows you to access the drive from any place in the world—as long as you have an Internet connection.

Most of the network drives offer some type of remote access. Many of them may require that you get a fixed IP address for your router from your Internet service provider. There is also the option of setting up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for remote access. There are alternatives, such as getting an SSL VPN router or using the free Hamachi VPN service.

Disk Mirroring for Safer Data

Another option to consider, especially if you will have important data on the network drive, is using a two-drive NAS device with a RAID 1 configuration. In this setup, two identical drives are used simultaneously. Everything is written to each of the hard drives. If one fails, the other continues working. This gives you the opportunity to replace the failed drive without losing any data. This technique is commonly used in servers—especially those that need to run 24 hours a day.

My Book World Edition II Dual Drive is an example of a network drive designed for RAID 1 mirroring. It's available in two-terabyte and four-terabyte configurations. The actual amount of storage available when the drives are mirrors is half the total specified (1TB and 2TB respectively), since each drive holds an identical copy. The only way to use the full advertised capacity is by implementing a RAID 0 configuration (no mirroring), which defeats the purpose of having dual drives.

Dual-drive devices will cost about twice the price of a single drive, usually running about $300 to $400 for a home network drive. If you want the extra protection of mirroring, then it may be worth the extra dollars.

USB Ports

Most of the network drives have one installed USB port for adding another device. In many cases this would be a printer, another USB drive, a digital camera hookup, Bluetooth device, etc. However, if you're planning to attach any other device, be sure that it is supported by the network drive software. Some of the network drives may support additional USB hard drives, but not a printer—it's software dependent. If you know what your needs are going to be, then make sure the network drive matches those needs. Most of the network drives only include one USB port. To get more, you will pay more.

For an example of a NAS device that offers more, one of the more highly rated devices is the Synology Docking Station DS-109 and the DS-209 (for dual drives). (It's important to note that these are docking stations and do not include the hard drives. The hard drives need to be purchased separately.) Notice in Figure 1 that the DS-109 has three USB ports (one on the front and two on the back), as well as an eSATA port for connecting another hard drive (on the front).



The Synology Docking Station will also support your own e-mail server and up to 30 Web sites.

Choosing the Right Network Drive

There are many reasons to want a network drive. Rather than doing everything on each computer, a network hard drive gives you a central location for sharing and backup. Whether listening to a music library, watching streaming video, or merely backing up all the computers in the house, a network drive is ideal for sharing, while not burdening any one computer. Other network applications, which can be supported by most network drives, include sharing printers, monitoring webcams, 24-hour downloading (BitTorrents), and accessing files remotely over the Internet.

Picking a network drive is like buying a computer: You need to get the one that is right for your applications. It's well worth the time to read the reviews by real users for each product. They can be found at CNET, Amazon and other sites that host user reviews. They may save you from making a mistake, such as buying a device that is too limited, or one that doesn't offer the capabilities you need. The network drive buying decision goes far beyond the storage capacity of the drive—get the features that you need.

As well as those mentioned above, some of the other drives that may be worth looking into are LaCie drives and the Hammer Storage myshare Network Hard Drive. If you have a particular experience with any of these, or other network drives, we would like to hear about it.