A great post from the guys at 3Leaf about consumer network attached storage. I agree 100% with Sean and Scott that a consumer shouldn't have to buy, build, or kludge their way into a decent quality storage environment for the home, especially as demands for consumer storage increase as devices proliferate. This Christmas was the Christmas of the digital cameras. Over the next year many people will be amassing gigabytes upon gigabytes of photos. Most will burn them to CD and, as a result be forgotten like so many photo albums. Next Christmas may be the Christmas of digital video cameras as video editing becomes a standard feature on most computers and prices for digital video cameras fall. I don't need to mention MP3's. DVR's, however, are just breaking out of their shell onto the PC with the MediaCenter PC and other similar devices that bring Tivo functionality to the desktop or laptop. All of this means an exponential increase in storage demand by consumers. Companies like Network Appliance, HP, and IBM should launch consumer product lines targeting the 500GB to 1TB range for $500 to $1,000 that simply plug into a home network and allow a consumer to manage the array via a web browser.
