As we switch our lives to the digital world, more and more people would like to have a central repository for their content. Solutions have existed for some time, but for a while, getting a NAS and setting it up properly was out of the reach of the lay person who would rather spend time playing with the tech, than spend time setting it up. To be fair, nobody likes to tinker with router settings – especially when the network works just fine.
Seagate Central is a replacement for the GoFlex Home storage device from last year. It features a faster processor (dual-core) and has more memory (256MB). Just like other Seagate products, this one is optimized for DLNA (for content streaming over the home network) and can have up to 4TB of storage. Interestingly, it has been design to sit next to the Television, like a small set top box.Beyond merely storing the content, it also makes it accessible from your mobile devices, or from any web browser that has an internet access. That’s is really when handling the public Internet accessibility without having the user touch the router comes into play. This is one barrier of entry that most low-enc/cheap NAS devices won’t do because the overall service is more expensive to run (the device may need to talk to Seagate run servers…).
Talking about web, the Seagate Central Storage system can also backup all your Facebook photos. This is a trend that has become more prevalent over the past year, and I’m sure that we’ll hear horror stories of lost Facebook content in the future, so that’s an interesting one if you’re heavily “invested” in Facebook.
This device is announced at CES, but will be available in March of 2013, and the capacity varies between 2TB ($189), 3TB ($219) and 4TB ($259), which is a rather impressive pricing, given that the cheapest 3.5″ 4TB drive that I can find on Newegg costs $309 (HGST H3IK40003272SW) and is apparently not so well rated…
Filed in . Read more about Nas, Network Attached Storage, Seagate and Storage.