Media Storage Challenges in the Digital Home

Networked Attached Storage is certainly becoming more mainstream over the past year. As the article mention, its no doubt due to the massive amounts of personal digital data everyone has. Everything from recordings, to family photos and downloadable movies. A healthy dose of competition certainly helps. In the past, anything labeled as an external storage device was marked up substantially over its internal brethren.

From the article:

I'm wondering, do most consumers really need more media storage capacity, or
simply better utilization of the storage that they already have at their
disposal? For those of us who have wireless access points, and/or wired home
networks, an intuitive application to better manage the placement and update of
available local hard-drive and remote/virtual 'shared folders' may be all that's
really needed.

In the HTPC world, NAS certainly makes sense with the options now available. It keeps a lot of hot noisy hard drives out of an already hot system.