Tip of the Month
Every month our Director, Axel Oudijk, gives business users a top tip to help prevent problems that might adverseley affect their office network in the future.
Tip of the Month - February
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
This month we offer a tip for the home and small business user who may be fine working on a peer-to-peer network. Medium to large scale businesses work with Servers, whose main use is to store and share data between the networked desktops. The great way about working like this is that if a desktop machine suffers a hard drive failure, the data can still be accessed by other desktops in the office and the business can continue to run.
We have seen PC and Laptop users come to our repair centre with broken hard drives, literally in tears because of the thought of losing their cherished mp3’s, photos and family videos. We’re so busy we don’t have time to remember to backup onto a portable drive every day, but there is a solution that has drastically come down in price in the last year which is well worth looking at: Network Attached Storage.
For the home user you can attach one of these handy boxes to your wireless router and then send all of your pictures, tunes, videos and documents to one place. This means they can be shared by anyone in the house and you have a secure backup too!
If you’re running a small business where your 2 or 3 desktop PC’s are connected to each other ( peer to peer ) then you can use a Network Attached Storage Box as a file server which is more secure and easy to backup. Try the Buffalo Link Station 500GB NAS for around £95 or the Buffalo 1TB (Huge storage !) LinkStation Pro Duo Network Attached Shared Storage for about £250.
If you’re a music buff then for £250 you could also try the Sonos ZonePlayer 80 (ZP80) Now you can play all your favourite music, all over your house, on all your favourite audio equipment—your home theatre receiver, stereo system, powered speakers, and more. Just connect a Sonos ZonePlayer™ 80 (ZP80) to any amplified audio device in any room, and that device is instantly and seamlessly part of a wireless, multi-room digital music system.
Maybe you’re a bit scared to set up this equipment yourself in which case you could always call on a local company like ourselves to deal with the initial headache! Once set up these systems are very simple to use.
