August 25 - 5:25pm EDT   LG Electronics announced over the weekend it will soon bring to market the first Network Attached Storage (NAS) device with an integrated Blu-ray drive to consumers. Meant for home and small business users, the four-bay NAS not only gives users support for hard drives with up to 4TB of storage but also the option of backing up data onto Blu-ray discs regardless of where they are at home. [full story]

July 28 - 10:25pm EDT   Sans Digital has announced a new network attached storage (NAS) server with RAID and direct attach options, supporting connections to gaming systems. It is available in silver, the MobileNAS MN4L+, and black, the MobileNAS MN4L+B. The server offers digital media playback for the PlayStation (both PlayStation 2 and 3) and Xbox over UPnP and DLNA protocols, adding value to its home server appeal. It provides a Gigabit Ethernet NAS connection and can also be used as direct attached storage over an iSCSI connection. In addition to the iSCSI support, the unit also offers eSATA, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. [full story]

January 7 - 11:05am EST   Buffalo Technology today unveiled three new external drive solutions, as well as a new combination HD DVD and Blu-Ray reader-writer, at CES 2008 in Las Vegas. The company says its MediaStation Blu-Ray HD DVD drive is the first device of its kind to allow users to both read and write Blu-Ray content. While the drive can write to Blu-Ray optical media, it is only able to read HD DVD formatted discs. Using a USB cable, users can connect the drive up to a laptop or other mobile device to watch movies. The drive includes a full version of Nero, and will ship during the first quarter of 2008 for $650. [full story]

December 26 - 4:35pm EST   Network-attached storage has often been the reserve of businesses, and is only now catching on with home users wanting to share a common pool of files between their computers or with others online. But what about as the hub for a media center? With some help from Axentra's HipServ software, LaCie is hoping that its Ethernet Disk mini Home Edition is simple enough that it can stand as storage for iTunes or even a game console. We put the 500GB drive through its paces in our review to see whether it can stand in both for work and play. [full story]

December 21 - 5:10pm EST   Netgear today announced new drives in its ReadyNAS line of shared network drives, coming in 1.5TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB Desktop and 4TB Rackmount sizes. The drives feature a Gigabit Ethernet connector to hook the drive up to networking equipment with Jumbo Frames support which provides maximum data throughput speeds. The ReadyNAS drives feature RAID levels 0, 1, and 5, and use Netgear's proprietary X-RAID technology, allowing users to scale their RAID setups from 1 to 4 disks, or more. Netgear is selling the drives starting from $1100, and are available through retailers nationwide. [full story]