The basic home PC setup doesn’t seem to be so basic these days: What once consisted of a single family PC has now been extended to include personal systems for nearly every member of the household, including wired- and wireless systems; plus home theater PCs; and even Internet appliances. As home networks grow to scales rivaling small office networks, so does the desire to share files and store data centrally.

Setting up a dedicated server for home use is rarely a practical solution. Likewise with "classic" strategies, such as lugging around a portable drive enclosure for backups -- since many users' movie, music, photo and data collections can hardly be expected to fit onto a DVD.

A more efficient solution that has been available to businesses for quite a while, Network Attached Storage provides a shared drive without the need for an always-on computer to host it. These devices -- which typically connect to a home network via Ethernet or 802.11 wireless -- are working their way down to the consumer market, and Vantec is ready with its tiny, incredibly lightweight, and fairly inexpensive wired solution, the NexStar LX.

Similar in size, shape and appearance to the Apple Mac Mini (and, dare we say it, Aopen’s MiniPC), the NexStar LX at first seems to be a NAS-capable version of Vantec’s highly-praised NexStar GX, an external drive enclosure. Along with its good looks (it's also available in black) and moderate pricing, can the network-attached NexStar still deliver the same sort of commendable performance we've seen in the GX, and continue Vantec's run a leader in value?