I bought a Buffalo TeraStation 2TB NAS box the other day. It arrived today – Wohoo!

The NAS box has 4 x 500mb drives in an external box (see above). The box has an ethernet port at the back allowing it to be plugged into the router and accessed across my entire home network.

The 4 x 500mb drives come pre-configured as RAID 5 (giving approx 3 x 500gb usable space) but it can also be configured as RAID 0 or RAID 1 through a simple web interface.

Check out the bottom of the window above – 1.36TB Available!

I’m now busily copying my music, video and photo collections onto it so I can free up that space on my laptop.

The drive is refreshingly quiet, has a simple web-based configuration tool and took all of about 10 minutes from unpacking to mounted on my Mac desktop!

Thanks Branedy for the recommendation – hopefully this will work better than the Western Digital MyBook I bought a while back which was a DOA!