Times certainly have changed ever since I started using computers back in the 1980's. Oh yes, I feel a memory flashback coming up. I know a large part of you guys can still remember copying data over 5.25" floppy disks on that good old Commodore 64.The floppy unit was actually running over the serial port and the data that a floppy could hold was 170 KB (!)

Who still remembers this command ? LOAD "*",8,1 

Good times people, good times. The reason for this somewhat unusual introduction relates of course to storage and our needs and demands. Times have changed and our storage requirements have moved from kilobytes, to megabytes, to Gigabytes and now even Terabytes of storage. And sure, it won't be long until we reach Petabytes either. Oh and after that there's Exabyte and then Zettabyte.

So we just passed the Terabyte marker. With our hefty demand in storage capabilities, the industry had to constantly adapt and introduce new features in hardware. Storage units got much bigger in volume over the year, 2 TB HDDs have just been introduced onto the market.

In that line of storage solutions there is one product series growing fast and now reaching SOHO and consumer based markets. They are called NAS units, network attached storage. And there has been a lot of development in this nifty little boxes. Pretty much they are little servers that you can hook onto your network and then function as file-server.

The NAS units are often small, do not use a  lot of power, are highly configurable, offer redundancy as some models even can handle RAID internally. There however is a company active in the market that took things to a completely new level. They are called QNAP and their Network Attachable Units are amongst the most advanced available on the market today. Their products feature multiple HDD's setups, partitions, RAID, USER and USERGROUP based access, FTP, web server, MySQL, Hot swappable drives, really these are just some of the features that a QNAP NAS unit can handle.

And though expensive, a product like this is just too darn handy when it comes to file-storage and management over your network. Today we'll have a look at their the QNAP TS-439 Series Turbo NAS product. A 4-bay NAS unit, pop in 4x 2TB drives .. and you just added 8 TB of data storage over a 1000 Mbit/s network connection. Downright handy, and very impressive.

Let's head on over to the next page where we'll introduce the product to you. But first have a peek.