My home is my data cloud.

Music, lyrics, videos on private hard drives to collect data is always higher mountains. Those who are not only in the room wants to use, needs a network disk. Matthias Kremp has three very different specimens tested.

 

The shock comes when inserting. When I plug the hub of the media outlet in the press, immediately heard a strong noise. Sure, once he got power, has the device turned on, noise now as adult PC. Fortunately not for long. After about ten seconds of the past haunt. Only a gentle Lüftersäuseln evidence yet that the device is switched on. And of course the display, which appeared in the front is.

Plate instead of the server: private network hard drives make data collection via home network and the Internet, often referred to suck as a media center

Especially, I have a central storage for my data was put into operation. And not only for my, but also for the data of my family. With us, everyone has a computer and so we are certainly no exception. The industry association Bitkom is that in three out of four German households now at least one computer. In one quarter of households, it is the Allensbach Institute found are even more computers in use.

And they have all their software packages are installed, are often very different purposes. As music collections are created, filled out tax returns, letters, movies and photos archived. Only rarely, however, which I suspect are the computers networked so that they can exchange data each other. And even though: Do I want to network via a photo on my computer that my daughter on her hard drive, it must both run. And this is rarely the case, would be mostly pure electricity wastage.

Spoiled for choice

Remedy should have a small home server create. But such devices are expensive if you buy as a complete package - and complicated, if you build it yourself. Much cheaper and simpler but there should be just a network drive in the home network to integrate. The cost only a fraction of what a server would be an important, but often offer similar functions, they have proper operating system on board.

But the selection is great. There are DIY housing, prefabricated systems and deluxe versions, which include multiple disks, and in addition such as a Card Reader, to print images directly from digicams read out.

Three very different examples, I have tried. The results read on the following pages.