The two-bay Stora takes aim at home media collections with centralised storage, backup, local sharing and remote access.
Netgear’s
Stora isn’t for the average APC reader, but it’s quite likely the ticket for your parents and tech-wary friends.
This step down from the popular ReadyNAS series has been built with the mainstream consumer in mind.
The compact and, dare we say, almost stylish black box doesn’t look like anything like a chunk of PC hardware, except for the front-mounded USB port used for quickly adding content from a flash drive, memory card adaptor or portable hard drive. (You can also connect a printer to share across the network).
Inside lurk a pair of 3.5 inch drive bays, one of which is filled with a 1TB drive in the off-the-shelf $399 model. Like the ReadyNAS Duo, the second drive bay is used for mirroring the first drive as a backup measure rather than expanding the total storage pool.
Netgear says the drive works with Windows, Mac and Linux systems, and has the tick of approval for the DLNA home networking standard as well as Windows 7.
In addition to sharing files over the local network and acting an an iTunes and home media server server, the online MyStora.com service can be used to share photos, videos and other content through a simple Web UI to nominated remote users such as distant family and friends.