The Canvio Home Backup & Share is Toshiba’s new home network appliance (or home network attached storage/NAS) and will come with either 2TB or 3TB of disk storage. The device will be marketed as a personal cloud storage since it can server content both within the home and over the public internet as well. This has become a must-have feature since a big part of the appeal for customers is to control their own data, both in terms of hosting, but also in terms of recurring subscription fees – that’s particularly true for multi-terabytes users.
As expected, the Toshiba Canvio can also be used as a classic NAS device for home media file serving and storage. As such, it comes with a backup option and Toshiba has pointed out that a single application would make users life simpler. And this is really where the competition is today: simplicity. While NAS OEMs have been good at churning new devices, the next frontier is really about how easy things get. Network storage is growing quickly, but it is very (very!) far from tapping the potential of the market (basically anyone who has a home network).
The main reason is that most people don’t want to deal with network settings and things like that. Fortunately, things have been going in the right directions, and when a modern router is available, things can be setup fairly easily. Unfortunately, I haven’t tried this particular NAS for myself so how easy things actually are remain to be seen. The 2TB version goes for $199.99 and the 3TB version sells for $259.99.
Filed in . Read more about Nas, Network Attached Storage and Toshiba.