If someone asked us what the most important aspect of computing was, we’d answer: back up your data! But unless you have an automated system, backing up your data is likely one of the first things to get dropped by the wayside when your schedule fills up. Western Digital’s got your back: its newly announced My Book Live Duo NAS features dual hard drives that can be placed in RAID 1 for redundancy, so your precious data lives on if one of the drives goes kaput. 
Ah, network attached storage; whether you’re building your own or buying premade, nothing beats a NAS box when it comes to storing and streaming media files across a network. For the most part, NAS boxes offer a stripped-down interface and very few bells and whistles, making them fairly energy-efficient compared to full-fledged PCs. Hey – aren’t netbooks low-powered too? Yep, and now that most everybody’s passing up netbooks in favor of tablets, a new report says that Intel may be planning to shift some focus for its low-powered Atom chips from netbooks to NAS boxes.
A lot of the comments left on our recent NAS box showdown revolved around the fact that 1) it isn’t too difficult to build a NAS server of your own and 2) all of the options were kind of expensive for home use. A newly released NAS server looks to provide an answer to the second issue. The $220 Synology DS212j (brethren to the well performing DS411+II covered in the showdown) was designed with home use in mind, as evidenced by its low price point and user-friendly features that help turn the server into a cloud storage device.
When the previous version of a product holds a spot in our Best of the Best hardware rankings (see our 
When it comes to computer networking products, there are a few companies that always come to mind. Buffalo is one of them. Storage devices have always been a part of Buffalo's repertoire, so including the TeraStation Pro Quad in this roundup was a no-brainer. But while enterprise-geared products are business as usual for Buffalo, is the Pro Quad consumer-friendly?
Promise Technology has been quietly making a name for itself as a major player in the storage space, producing a number of RAID and NAS solutions for all types of needs. The SmartStor NS4700 is the company's four-bay, performance-oriented NAS. The NS4700 ships without hard drives, but in our testing we used four 2TB Seagate Barracuda Green drives.
Iomega's new StorCenter px12-350r is a rackmount network storage array (NAS) for small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and distributed enterprises. The px12-350r replaces the ix12-300r as Iomega's flagship rackmount NAS and comes loaded with 12 bays with support for up to 36TB, though SMBs can also opt to slap high performance solid state drives (SSDs) in there as well.Ditch the discs! We show you how to rip, convert, store, and stream all your media—while retaining the highest possible level of quality
Listen up, mediaphiles, because this might just be the last time we tackle the preservation of physical media in the hallowed pages of Maximum PC.
If you're finding that, as you get older, your digital file collection is growing faster than your receding hairline, then OWC's Mercury Elite-Al Pro Qx2 storage container might be just what you've been looking for. Inside this desktop sized aluminum enclosure is up to 12GB of storage/backup, which is provided by up to four 3TB hard drives in four hot swappable drive bays. And yes, it supports RAID, as well as a host of other technologies. More specs after the jump.
