NAS vs sharing external harddrive

[rasczak]

as some of you know, I have a little problem with data. hehe. i am looking into getting a NAS, but is there a performance hit if i decided to go and buy an external hdd and share that instead?

your thoughts would be great.



joe

 

[CalvinHobbes]

Actual performance would be about the same. With a NAS you don't need to "host" the drive on any of your PC's, it's always available to anyone on the network. Either is only going to be as fast as the slowest point. A USB external drive could be slower depending on what's in the NAS and what your network throughput is like.