A few months ago, I took the plunge. I spent some Major Coin to purchase a network diskstation, specifically the Synology Diskstation DS413. It’s my first major home office computer system upgrade since my old T1 line 10 years ago.

What got me motivated was this: I have several computers in the office: A Mac, a PC, a laptop, plus my kids’ computers, and so on. For each one, I have an external hard drive installed — sometimes two. All those hard drives are for backup.

As I’ve written about before (here, here, here, and more), having an external hard drive for backup is a must, but how many is too many?

If you figure about $150 for each backup hard drive, suddenly I found myself with close to $750 in external backup hard drives. And while external hard drives are handy, they’re not error-proof. In fact, I’ve lost a good portion of my archives because they were stored solely on an external hard drive. (That’s why my Mac, keeper of the archives, has two external hard drives.)

After weighing the costs, I decided to fork over some dough for a networked hard drive solution.

I’m not referring to a hard drive connected directly to the network. If you want that solution, just buy a hard drive with a network connection. Or you can plug the hard drive’s USB cable into the network router. That’s the simple solution to network storage, but I wanted something more sophisticated and robust.

Specifically, I wanted a network storage server. That’s essentially a computer designed to dwell on the network and offer up its storage to any other network computer. The server has other features as well, including a backup program, media server, mail server, and other goodies, but what I really wanted was the storage.

The device I chose was the Synology Diskstation DS413, shown in Figure 1. I packed it with three 3TB hard drives, with room for one more if I like.

Figure 1. My Synology Diskstation DS413, shown next to one of the external hard drives it replaced.

The Diskstation uses RAID technology to manage the hard drives. RAID greatly reduces the chances of losing information should one of the hard drives take a dump.

Configuring the Diskstation took some time. After all, it’s a server and it’s alien technology (and terminology). The interface is accessed via the web, so you use a web browser to locate the server and then log in. Eventually I figured out how to set it up and allocate storage for my Mac and PC. It now serves as the backup system for both. I’ll be hooking the kids’ computers in the future.

The Diskstation came with a bunch of network services, none of which I use. I tried to use the photo/media server, but found it very limiting. And the other services don’t really work unless you own your own domain name and have a static IP. That prevents most home and home office users from using those features. Besides, I didn’t buy the Diskstation for those services, so I don’t feel cheated.

I’d recommend the Synology Diskstation, but it’s pretty sophisticated and it ain’t cheap. If you have only one or two computers, you can still use external hard drives as backup. Just remember to actually backup your stuff and ensure that if anything happens to the backup drive that you replace it immediately. But once you cross the threshold of too many external hard drives, consider a network storage solution. You’ll be better off in the long run.