You may not know this, but there is a fast moving trend among power users which began in the corporate office and will end in your home. You may not be aware of it yet, but very soon you will be telling others about it. A few years back, IT directors noticed that it might save their company a lot of money to have a device which did all of the same functions as a file server, but without the cost and overhead of an operating system. Since licensing costs have soared in the corporate environment, devices known as Network Attached Storage (NAS) servers have started showing up everywhere. Up until recently, these items were usually somewhat expensive, and very limited in functionality. With technology evolving at a tremendous rate, it didn't take long for the NAS servers to completely replace the networked file servers and reach prices that even home users could afford.



Link: Bjorn3d