Networking Audio Video 2007 Holiday Gift Guide Part 2

Our first gift guide focused mainly on some of the more high profile streaming devices on the market. Any of them would make for a great present under the tree this holiday season. But what if they don't want a streaming device, but rather infrastructure devices like hard drives and whatnot. Well that is the focus of our second gift guide. Products to help expand the amount of available storage as well as maybe helping you stream without needing an actual streaming device.

Read on after the jump to see our recommendations.

NAS devices

NewerTech miniStack

The NewerTech miniStack is a great addition to any home network as it allows both USB and Ethernet connectivity for your files. This NAS can house up to a 750GB hard drive allowing for a lot of new storage to be introduced to your network. One of the really nice things about this device is it has the same form factor as the Mac Mini so it will blend in very nicely.

Qnap TS-109Pro

QNAP makes great network hard drives that come pre-installed with a bevy of great media streaming capabilities. The simple setup, web interface makes these devices a joy to use. They have really done a great job making this a simple process without losing any of the advanced features that make this so attractive. We were blown away at how easy everything was, we assumed we were doing something wrong because most things make you fight to get it configured and working properly in your environment. This would make a great for anyone that wants to not just add some more storage to their network, but also offload the media sharing from their power hungry PC to this low power hard drive.

Hard Drives

The basics of all media streaming is the hard drives that store the data that is being served. There are a lot of ways to go when adding new hard drives. If your computer has enough space and power you can add a bunch of drives to it, you could buy an external hard drive and just use an open USB port, you could fill up that fancy NAS server you bought with a bunch of drives, or, well you get the point. There are endless ways you can go. We thought we would just share out thoughts with you on what to buy.

Seagate Internal HD

If you are going to go the route of internal hard drives to purely stream media then we would have to recommend the 500GB Seagate Drive. These days the 500GB drive is in the sweet spot when it comes to price vs. size. Sure you go out and buy a 750GB or 1TB drive, but you will end up paying a premium for those drives and often you can buy 2 smaller drives for less money. So if it was up to us what to buy to expand your home network storage capability ( and assuming you have more then one slot to put an internal hard drive in ) we would recommend going with these drives. With the 5 year warranty that they come with it makes it almost a no brainer when deciding on which brand.

Seagate External HD

If you are looking for an external drive we have to once again turn back to Seagate as the manufacturer to pick. We have a lot of hard drives from them and none of them have given us a problem. Again the 500 GB size is the one we would say you should go for. For no other reason then that it will allow you to add a large chuck of storage to your system for short money with a reliable drive.

Video Encoders

Elgato Turbo.264

If you need something to transfer all you movies to a smaller device like the iPod or PSP or something you are going to need a video encoder. These devices offload the work normally done by your computer and will, in most cases, allow you re-encode your movies much faster then using some software of your computer. Since everything is all tied up in one device it is optimized for just doing video encoding so you can really cut down the time it takes to do the encoding. The best one on the market today has to be the Elgato Turbo.264. This makes short work of all your encoding needs. And being such a small device that fits in a USB port makes it very convenient as well.

We hope you have found something useful in this gift guide. Look for more as we come up with other ideas that we think people might enjoy.

Looking for more amazing gift ideas? Check out our extensive set of holiday shopping guides on electronics, fashion, cooking, and more.

November 21, 2007

Networking Audio Video 2007 Holiday Gift Guide Part 2