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Network-attached storage (NAS) used to be an arcane and pricey option for sharing files via a home or office network. But now, the latest drives are packed with tools that make adding a NAS device easy for anyone without a degree in information technology. That's good news for consumers: Networked homes are more and more common, and more and more devices can connect with computers and with network-attached storage (TiVos stream music, game consoles can read video files--the list goes on).

After a protracted period of little evolution, the NAS drive market is now undergoing two big shifts. First, the price of entry continues to drop, as hard-drive prices fall. The price-per-gigabyte for a 1TB NAS drive has decreased by more than half from two years ago. Second, and more notably, companies are courting home users with sleeker case designs; streamlined, user-friendly interfaces; and eye-popping, living-room-conscious features.

We tested five new NAS drives in the PC World Test Center. These models--two of which made our chart--represent a diverse cross-section of the NAS options available today. All of the drives have the same basic purpose, but they take different paths to providing similar functionality.

One unit, the $547 Synology Disk Station DS207+, came configured with 1 terabyte of storage across two drives. Two others, the $299 HP Media Vault mv2120 and the $400 Netgear ReadyNAS Duo, came with a 500GB drive and an open drive bay for additional storage (or a second drive for disk mirroring). A fourth model, the $299 LaCie Ethernet Big Disk, had a single 1TB drive inside. And a fifth, the $1075 Synology Cube Station CS407, spread 2TB of storage across four drives.

The results of our tests? The ReadyNAS Duo earned first place on our Top 5 Network-Attached Storage Drives chart; the Synology Disk Station DS207+ also leaped onto the chart. Those two models stood out from the pack thanks to their ease of use and their home-friendly features.

Ready, Set, Store

Netgear's ReadyNAS Duo lacks some of the advanced redundancy features of its larger sibling, the ReadyNAS NV+, simply because it is a two-bay NAS device (with the second bay kept empty for future upgrades). Still, the Duo sailed through our performance trials, finishing all but one test at record speeds, beating even the NV+, our previous NAS-device performance champ.

This handsome unit has sturdy construction, with easy-to-access drive bays. Pop in a second drive, and by default the Duo will mirror the primary drive's contents to the second drive. Some people will like this protection--especially when using the device for backup--but I wish the Duo made it easier to toggle between RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring). An extra boon: The device stores its operating system in flash memory, so you could replace the primary drive with a larger one.

The Duo comes with a handy utility, RAIDar, for setting up the unit on a Windows or Mac system and configuring the Duo's high-octane features, including photo-sharing server software (so you can e-mail an embedded link for a secure connection to your drive); media streaming to UPnP- and DLNA-compliant devices (the latter is the Digital Living Network Alliance standard); and support for Apple's iTunes, Logitech's Squeezebox SqueezeCenter, Microsoft's Windows Media Center and Xbox 360, Sonos's Digital Music System, and Sony's PlayStation 3. Uniquely, the Duo even has an embedded BitTorrent client so you can download directly to the device.

Synology: Colorful, Clear Navigation

Synology earns high marks for the stellar software bundled with its four-drive CS407 and two-drive DS207+. A Linux-based operating system, Disk Station Manager 2.0, marries the depth of what the ReadyNAS is capable of doing with a terrific user interface that makes any task a simple button push away. Want to stream files to game consoles? No problem. Need to create a photo-sharing site? Simple--just enable the feature and drop files in a folder. (That makes the task even easier than it is on the ReadyNAS Duo or the HP Media Vault.) Both Synology models even have SSL/TLS protocols on HTTPS, which makes for more-secure remote access to the drives via the Web. (The ReadyNAS Duo also offers this feature.)

The two units proved their performance mettle in our tests, producing similarly speedy numbers near the top of the pack. Their only performance hiccup was in our test for writing a large (3.06GB) file, where they were notably slower than the competition's average.

Both Synology devices lack removable drive bays; however, you can replace drives that are screwed inside the chassis, and mounting and securing drives inside the enclosure is easy.

The obvious difference between the two systems is that the DS207+ is a little smaller, since it supports just two drives, while the CS407 houses four. For data redundancy across drives, both models can be rigged for RAID 0 or RAID 1, and the CS407 adds RAID 5.