Having a ton of extra hard drives lying around doing nothing seems like a huge waste to me. In my efforts to put some of this storage to good use, I have been toying with the idea of building a NAS using standard hardware and one of the open source NAS packages out there; namely OpenMediaVault. With performance, size, and budget in mind; I am going to guide you on how to build a NAS.

Hard Drive defragging has become routine for many of us. Through the years there have been a number of utilities that claimed to make accessing data quicker on your hard drives by placing it sequentially on your disk. We have read many guides that suggested that we defrag our hard drives often and even Windows will suggest a schedule for defragmenting your hard drive. This is all well and good for traditional hard drives, but does this apply for SSDs as well?

Today, at 6:09PM, in my inbox... was something crazy. I try to keep up with all things XBMC as it has always been jockeying for prime position in my home theater. Well, the news is... Microsoft and XBMC are now in bed together. The good news is that XBMC will get the credit it deserves and the funds it needs to develop. The bad news is... if you are not running Windows, you will soon be out of luck.

Drobo has finally started to add some apps to their networked appliances to make them more useful for media hungry enthusiasts. Along with a copy module, Drobo has incorporated Plex for their 5N. Although Drobo is still far behind the rest of the industry in implementing features media enthusiasts look for in a network appliance, it is a step in the right direction.

FinalWire Ltd. today announced the immediate availability of AIDA64 Extreme Edition 2.85 software, a streamlined diagnostic and benchmarking tool for home users; and the immediate availability of AIDA64 Business Edition 2.85 software, an essential network management solution for small and medium scale enterprises.

XBMC.org released a public statement congratulating the folks over at OpenELEC for releasing OpenELEC 3.0.0. This release brings XBMC Frodo 12.1 with all its bells and whistles to the embedded OS.

QNAP® , Inc. today announced its new budget friendly Turbo NAS lineup TS-421U and TS-420U rackmount models for the workgroups and entry-level SMBs with fast-growing needs of economical network storage. The TS-421U features with Marvell CPU 2.0 GHz, and the TS-420U features with Marvell CPU 1.6 GHz. Both models operate with 1GB DDR3 RAM, and provide sustained high performance for daily routines in file storage, sharing, and data backup.

I have been a long standing user of LogMeIn. Their remote administration and remote control products have really made my technology life much easier. Unfortunately, all great things come to an end. LogMeIn has made some important changes to their service that will leave me searching for a new service.

It is no secret that I liked the Asustor AS-608T. The NAS is a work of art; it looks great and performs well. However, as someone that uses my NAS for bother personal and business needs, I have been looking for the 3rd party app development to kick it into high gear. Well, my wish has been granted.