I've been looking for a simple home NAS box and I'm realising that there's a heck of a lot of choice out there and quite a lot of devices have arrived in the last 6 - 12 months (and at the recent CES).

I never thought I'd buy a NAS for home.

The primary reasoning behind not buying one was I've never trusted my network at home. It's always been rubbish so I always thought that buying a NAS would just make things worse in that I'd have a bunch of files on the NAS and I'd need to reboot numerous devices every time I wanted to access those files.

However, since Wi-Fi and I parted company I now trust my home network. It's rock solid. It works. Everyday. I hardly ever reboot the router any more.

So...the whole idea of a NAS comes back into play.

When it comes to a NAS, I don't want anything fancy.I want a box at the simple end of the spectrum. Something that's small, cool, quiet and needs zero admin and simply offers some network-shared disk space to PC/Mac clients.

I also don't need a tonne of shared space. Most of the data that I store is not important to me. The only bits I'd want to store on the NAS would be things like photos, music and the odd document and spreadsheet. Frankly, 200GB would probably do it and 500GB would certainly be enough.

So...it could be achieved with a single hard-drive but I'd like at least 2 to get some redundancy in there. 3 would be nice but boxes with more than 2 seem to be quite a bit more expensive than those with 2.

I've been searching around a bit and the current contenders are these;

I also thought a little bit about one of these;

but I've not read any great reviews on those just yet - general reviews seem to suggest that they are slow.

My current leaning is towards the Lacie or the D-Link. The D-Link appears to be about £160 plus hard-drives whereas the Lacie appears to be about £230 with 2x500GB disks in it so I guess the D-Link would work out maybe £50 more expensive.

Still searching... :-)

Hmmm...Late entry arrives in from Dave. It seems that the magical-looking Drobo now has DroboShare.

Although it looks like that might work out as an expensive option as it's $499 for the Drobo and then $199 to shove it on the network. So...that'd be £350 I guess but it's probably more like £500-£600 when you factor in the "UK tax" for American goods :-) Also, the "share" isn't available in the UK yet from what I can see.

Pity because that's probably the optimal solution for me.