There is an emerging technology for people who need more storage at home (or in small businesses) and who don’t want to always leave every computer in their house. It’s called ‘network attached storage’ and it basically means you can make a hard drive available to your network without the need for it being attached to a PC.

The range of solutions is not huge at the moment for the consumer who doesn’t have deep pockets.

WEE have tried the D-Link Network Storage Adapter (DNS-120) with some mixed results. It basically plugs into your network and provides space for two USB hard drives or flash memory card to be plugged in, thus making them available to all users on the network. Well, that’s the theory, in practice it’s not quite that simple of course.

But first things first, what the lousy folk at D-Link don’t make clear on any of their advertising or information for download is this — Buyer Beware — you can only use drives formatted in FAT32. Now that’s fine for flash cards, but for hard disk drives it’s not, most large ones are formatted with NTFS – and they won’t work. There is a later firmware update that will allow you to read NTFS drives, but not write to them.

What is annoying is that this limitation is not well documented in the ‘pre-buy’ material you can get about the DNS-120.

Not a great deal of use.

However, if you’re over that hurdle and happy to continue, then the other problem is it’s just a pretty unreliable unit. Sometimes it shows up on the network okay, and other times it has to be restarted all the time to show up. I have found that it’s better not to let XP try and connect to the drives automatically on connection, I rather mount the disks manually each time. Bit of a bore, but at least I can get to them.

So, our honest view is that there is still a way to go before network attached storage delivers on its promise.