Data sharing has become one of the essential tasks in the digital age. In today's household it's not difficult to find multiple computers. This myriad of digital photos, emails, documents, and multimedia files that all need to be shared among multiple computers need to be stored in a centralized location. There are a few solutions for sharing files. The most common way would be a server that centralizes the digital contents. However, servers are often costly and require a bit of computer networking knowledge. The other disadvantage of setting up a dedicated server would be the power consumption. Even with a fairly cheap and power efficient dual-core processor with a motherboard with integrated video would still consume somewhere in the upper 70W under idle and close to 100W under load.

A much better alternative would be using a NAS, a network storage server. NAS often has a much smaller foot-print than a server. It often runs on a stripped down Linux OS that does not require much computer knowledge to set up. It is much cheaper than a full server and due to its design it is often much more energy efficient than a server. Most NASes often consume power less than 50W even under full load. Contrast this to a simple system with 70W of power consumption, the 20 extra watts of power consumption adds up when you leave the system running 24/7. QNAP is a company that specialized in data storage. They have a wide range of NAS servers targeted at different environments. QNAP carries NAS ranging in 1-bay, 2-bay, 4-bay, 6-bay, or 8-bay sizes for different market segments. Depending on your need, you can choose their wide range of NAS where it will fit your budget and demand.



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