Stream Video/Audio and Download Torrents from a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Device Made Easy

Before you go ripping/downloading your favorite DVD’s and TV Shows to your hard drive you may want to consider an external NAS hard drive. With movies ranging from 600 MB to 12 GB (depending on quality and length) you can fill a computers hard drive extremely fast. I have been in the market for an external hard drive because I want to archive all of my DVD’s to my computer and then have the option to stream them from the external device to my media center (currently the PS3).

While looking for external hard drives you have to decide whether to get a DAS or NAS. You are probably most familiar with DAS drives as they are external drives that go directly into your computer (USB drives, thumb drives, etc). NAS hard drives are plugged directly into your network via ethernet cable or in some cases wireless) and can be accessed by any computer on connected to the internet. The key to remember with NAS is you don’t need a computer for it to work. They are basically mini computers with a processor and built in memory.

The NAS drives have many benefits which would include:
-Multiple computer backups, allowing you to back every computer on your network without having to plug in directly to the hard drive.
-ITunes Server, allows you to share all your media with everyone on your network.
-Print Server, allows you to share a printer with everyone on your network
-Remote access (without the need for it to be connected to a computer), so if you needed a file when you were at work you could connect to the drive via FTP and get the file.
-UPnP (Universal Plug n’ Play) compatible so you can stream directly from the drive to your PS3 (or other UPnP compatible device) without the need of a computer.
-Built in Torrent Client, allows you to download torrents directly from the NAS device. So lets say you missed the last episode of The Office and you want to download it via Torrent, but you are at work. Well since it is attached to the internet you can access the drive and add a torrent to the queue.
-Sharing files across Windows and Mac.

In terms of price the NAS devices are more expensive but they do offer much more flexibility. I have shopped around and my favorite NAS device to date is the QNAP TS-109 II. This device comes with everything preloaded including Twonky MediaServer (which usually costs about $40 by itself). This is great because it allows me to download torrents and stream them to my PS3 without the need of a PC. I found this particular device for $259 for the 1 TB (Terabyte) model. You can get more details on specs, etc from the QNAP website which can be found here.