Is there hope for home NAS?

First we used floppies to back up. Then the Zip Drive, now we burn to CD and soon rewriteable DVDs. Will consumers ever give up these cumbersome disks and move to network- attached storage? 

It doesn’t look good. Thus far, NAS has been a resounding failure in the home. Only about 3% of home network owners use a NAS drive according to In-Stat/MDR’s research. That’s fewer than half a million people. Why? Consumers, by and large, don’t back up their files.

We could spend a lot of time discussing why users don’t back up. Most of us know we’re one blue screen of death away from losing work documents and installed software. But have you considered what it’d be like to lose all your family photos and videos? While DVD and CD backup is better than nothing, NAS offers inherent advantages, such as automation. Convenience is a driver, too, as few of us remember to back up our hard disks on a regular basis.

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First we used floppies to back up. Then the Zip Drive, now we burn to CD and soon rewriteable DVDs. Will consumers ever give up these cumbersome disks and move to network- attached storage? 

It doesn’t look good. Thus far, NAS has been a resounding failure in the home. Only about 3% of home network owners use a NAS drive according to In-Stat/MDR’s research. That’s fewer than half a million people. Why? Consumers, by and large, don’t back up their files.

We could spend a lot of time discussing why users don’t back up. Most of us know we’re one blue screen of death away from losing work documents and installed software. But have you considered what it’d be like to lose all your family photos and videos? While DVD and CD backup is better than nothing, NAS offers inherent advantages, such as automation. Convenience is a driver, too, as few of us remember to back up our hard disks on a regular basis.

With media storage becoming increasingly important, In-Stat/MDR believes up to 20% of home network users will eventually turn to NAS.

The biggest factor driving this growth will be price. Most NAS boxes have been much too expensive for consumers, but that’s changing. For instance, I found Ximeta’s Netdisk 80G-byte drive for $139.99 at Outpost.com, and D-Link offers 20G-byte network drives for around $200. Still too high for mass adoption, these prices are largely driven by the cost of silicon, embedded Ethernet in some cases and the software. When NAS boxes drop below $100, volume will pick up significantly.

So when will this happen? Within the next 12 months, according to Broadcom, which is developing a line of consumer NAS-on-chip devices. These upcoming products will incorporate an Ethernet MAC, on-board encryption engine, and support for Network File System and Common Internet File System. This will allow the company to provide NAS manufacturers mass-produced targeted silicon instead of the more costly off-the-shelf embedded processors they use today. Broadcom sees an opportunity in NAS chipsets its competitors have ignored, not unlike the opportunity it saw in cable modem chipsets, a market Broadcom dominates today.

Read more about storage/backup in Network World's Storage/Backup section.