Appliance of Science

Usually on a Saturday I go up town and think about buying things that I don't really need. Yesterday was slightly different, in that I actually bought something. Staples were getting rid of some external disk drives and stuff, and tucked away down the side they had a network storage device from Maxtor.

This is like an external disk drive, but rather than connecting it directly to your computer you plug it into your home network and it then presents network shares for you to browse to. The bad news is that it will work a bit more slowly than a directly connected device, the good news is that everybody on the network can see and use it at the same time, without a computer being switched on.

At only seventy quid for a 200GByte device I thought it was a reasonable deal. And so it has turned out. I've loaded all my pictures onto it and I'm going to use it as a media server for the house.  I can even plug in external drives (it has two USB sockets) and give myself around half a terabyte of storage. Wowzer. I can remember when 20MB was a lot...

Of course I've since found people on the web reporting that theirs lost all their work when the drives crashed, but so far it seems OK....