Digital Home Thoughts: It's Not What You Store, But How You Transfer It

"Several years ago, users had to replace their PC’s hard drive or install an additional one to increase storage capacity. However, today there are many options with which to expand storage space by adding external devices, including 2.5” portable drives with 640GB (and soon 1TB of capacity) and 3.5” products that offer up to 2TB on a single hard drive."

The conclusions that Tom's Hardware arrives at is hardly surprising. There is a clear choice for performance, and a clear choice for convenience. For everything else, well, there's room enough for everyone. Reading through though, I would point out that this matters more to people who need a directly attached storage device; either you have a single computer, or your files are your own. With households having multiple computers and home networks, I felt the article should have covered NAS based solutions as well, since they allow for much more flexibility. Adding networks into the mix, my suggestion is if you intend on doing a lot of file transfers, like what Tom's Hardware was doing with 300GB samples, gigabit is an absolute must. Even at the theoretical limit of Fast Ethernet, it still pales in comparison to a USB connection. In fact, you could probably copy the files to a USB hard drive, walk up to the other computer and offload it faster than what Fast Ethernet can do! Anyone have any suggestions on how to increase storage capacity in an efficient way?