NAS or USB HD? WD My Book World II?

[SAGEaustin]

Which is faster, a USB or an Ethernet NAS drive? I just saw the following NAS drive is gonna be out soon:

Western Digital Terabyte My Book World Edition™ II
http://www.mygadgetinfo.com/tags/nas/

It sounds good I think...can access it from anywhere via the internet and it just shows up as a local drive in Windows Explorer. But maybe all NAS drives can do that ....I've never had anything but an internal drive.
I was thinking that when I get my laptop this summer and get Sage placeshifter that if the connection isn't good enough away from home, I can just download the vid file from this NAS drive and play it locally!

Anyway, I'm in the market for some sage storage and would like your advice.

Thanks.

[stanger89]

I personally prefer a NAS over USB, since if the drive is going to be external, it seems like a waste to require a PC for it to work. With a NAS, you just plug it in, stick it on the network and you're done. As for which is faster, Gigabit Ethernet has ~ 2x the bandwidth of USB 2, but I've never directly compared the two.

and it just shows up as a local drive in Windows Explorer.

I don't know if that uses special software (which I hate) but you can map network shares to local drive letters in Windows.

One thing to consider is that most of these cheap NAS boxen use RAID-0 (or spanning) to achieve their high capacities.

Personally I'm quite fond of the ReadyNAS line from Infrant Technologies. If I remember correctly you can configure a ReadyNAS with up to 2TB of redundant storage. Of course they're more than the MyBook.

[SAGEaustin]

Thanks for the reply!

I think the My World has two 500GB drives in it that can be 1TB or redundant 500GB, and I think the software lets it show as a local drive even if the laptop is away from the local network but does have internet access.

Should I get that ReadyNAS instead? What are its benefits? Is it faster? Will any of these drives work OK for direct sage recording to the drive?

Thanks