This is the product that I have needed at home for a long time. Not every house is set up like mine, so this might not do as much for you. I have 3 primary computers set up. When you use more than one computer, organization becomes somewhat of a nightmare. Get a MediaSmart Home Server. I had music, photos and documents on every computer. I hated sitting down at one and then realizing what I wanted to listen to while I worked was on a different computer. I had shared folders across my network, which works, but this is better.
One harddrive to rule them all.
Organization and data backup are probably the two main selling points for a home server. But another great feature is being able to stream your data from remote locations. This means you can sit at a friend’s house and pull up the contents of your server to show off the pictures from your vacation. Or sit at work and listen to your cds from home (this may encounter problems from your company’s firewall and IT policy). This is a great perk, but this is where that advanced knowledge comes into play. Depending on who your broadband service provider is, you may run into issues with which ports you can forward on your router to allow remote access to your server.
The documentation that comes with this server says, unfortunately, that it is not compatible as a print server. This would be great if it were. I’d love to be able to sit on my couch with my laptop and send print jobs across the network. (Allegedly there is a way to run your home server as a print server, but I haven’t attempted it yet.)
If you’re an iTunes user, there is another neat feature. You can access your server in iTunes from every computer on your network. There are a few minor inconveniences with this, but overall it is a nice feature if you use iTunes. You cannot edit id3 info on the songs when they’re displayed on the server like you can when the songs are stored locally on your machine. You cannot drag and drop songs onto your iPod from the server like you can when the songs are stored locally on your machine. You can get around this second issue by mapping a network drive to your music folder like a shared folder and browsing to it in Windows.
I’m really happy with this product. It works right out of the box and comes with a ton of storage. And if you need it, you can easily expand capacity. There are a few things that were inconvenient about it, as listed above, but the good outweighs the bad by a lot.