Most dedicated NAS devices are not cheap, though. However, the gloriously sounding Addonics company has just released its own device that lets you take any existing USB hard disk and turn it into a NAS device in its own right, letting you share your existing hard disks with your entire LAN (and even across the Internet).

Think of is as a DIY NAS Adaptor – or NASA, for short!

The Addonics NASA, then, comprises a 10/100Mbps Ethernet port that you plug into your Ethernet socket, and a USB port, into which you plug your external hard drive, or even a USB printer.

Any machine on your network (i.e. that’s connected to your switch) can then access your hard drive, turning it instantly into a NAS.

If your switch is connected to the Internet via a router, then machines can retrieve files from your hard drive from the Internet via FTP.

How can they do this? The NASA isn’t just a dumb USB-Ethernet converter, you know – this things has brains! Specifically, it has a built-in FTP server that external clients can communicate with, as well a BitTorrent client, which lets you suck up your media from the Internet and dump it onto your new NAS device, even without any PC being left on controlling things.

Better still, the Addonics Nasa even has a UPnP server, meaning your dumb hard drive can share its media with other UPnP-equipped devices such as an XBox 360 that are also connected to the network.

Perhaps best of all, though, is the price – just $55 for a tiny box that lets 64 people share your external hard drives, and gives you a dedicated NAS from an old external hard drive that you only used occasionally. Genius!

[Source: Addonics, via Engadget]

Now media files, if you’ve ever looked, aren’t exactly small, so Buffalo decided to give the new LinkStation Quad a hefty amount of storage space. Actually that’s an understatement – they gave it 4TB of storage space!

This gigantic amount of storage space is enough to store millions of high-res images or thousands of videos. You can think of it as a giant black hole of storage, into which you can dump all your media from pretty much any source you want.

With connectivity options that include USB 2.0 and Ethernet, plus DLNA support, the LinkStation Quad will connect to your PC, Mac, digital camera, iPhone, mobile phone, and virtually anything else you can think of. Better still, because it supports DLNA, you can transfer your content to any other device seamlessly – in fact, getting your pictures from a digital camera, for example, can be achieved with just a single click of a button.

DLNA support also gives the LinkStation Quad a few other neat features, including the ability to stream content to other DLNA-equipped devices, including TVs or even a PS3.

As if all that wasn’t enough, the LinkStation Quad comes with a built-in BitTorrent client,which can be configured from any Web browser. Once it’s been configured, you switch your PC off and leave the LinkStation Quad to its devices, hoovering up the vast amounts of torrent files you’ve no doubt selected, which will be ready and waiting for you once they’ve all downloaded.

Once you’ve stored all your content, the LinkStation Quad makes sure it’s all nice and safe. The Quad in the name comes from the fact it contains four hard disks, each with 1TB capacity, and your data can be replicated across the hard disks for backup purposes using a number of different RAID configurations.

Buffalo have certainly gone to town with the new LinkStation Quad. It’s more functional than attractive, but as you access it via your PC, Mac, or connecting device, there’s no need to see it anyway!

If you’ve reached the stage where you’ve realised you’ve got far too much media for your PC or Mac to handle, the Buffalo LinkStation Quad looks like the perfect solution. Shame it’s doesn’t support Wi-Fi, but you can’t have everything I guess.

The Buffalo LinkStation Quad is available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB options, priced

That market is still based ultimately on storage – thousands of tunes, videos and pictures require enormous amounts of space – but the storage companies have added innovative new twists to the humble hard disk and started producing new products that genuinely help people to manage their ever-growing library of media.

Take I-O Data, for example. At this year’s CEATEC 2008 exhibition in Japan, they’ve been showing off several hard disks that are entirely autonomous. An autonomous hard disk means you can do things such as plug any camcorder directly into it via USB and it’ll record directly to the hard disk without the need for a PC.

Like I say, it’s still all about storage underneath, but who’d have predicted hard disks would need to become autonomous just a few years ago?

Sticking with the storage theme, I-O Data have also released a new NAS, the I-O Data HVL4G. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage, meaning the unit acts as a central repository for all your data, which can then be accessed by any machine across your network. In I-O Data’s case, “all your data” quite literally means up 2TB’s worth!

Most impressive of all though, is the I-O Data Spider Zero. This intriguingly-named device is a hard disk TV recorder with built-in TV tuner that can record up to 8 different channels simultaneously.

Obviously, this requires a lot of space, and storage space is something that I-O Data specialize in. The spider Zero therefore comes in 1.3TB or 2.5TB versions.

This year seems to have been the year of the trillion, with “a trillion dollars” being bandied about quite readily on the news, and a trillion bytes (i.e. 1 TB) becoming increasingly popular as hard disk storage capacity. With all that space has come opportunities for gadgets that can create the content to fill it, and it’s refreshing to see the storage companies as much as the more traditional home entertainment companies rushing to fill it.

[Source: Akihabara News]