During testing with my work laptop I experienced setup problems that lead to several conversations with Dave Callahan, director of IT at Computerworld. He thinks less network-savvy small and home office users should steer clear of FTP. "It's a stupid idea to share to the Internet," he says flatly. "You don't want anyone from the outside coming anywhere near your network."

Do you really need the configuration headaches and the risks of opening up ports to a home network -- especially when remote FTP services are available on the Internet? I decided to pass.

On the security front, all of the units I tested provide password-protected access to the network storage device's management console, and most allow the creation of usernames and passwords to access shared folders. Some let you set permissions to allow read-only or read/write access. For most home and small office environments, however, basic password access to the resource is probably sufficient.

The configuration utilities that come with these products can be password-protected. However, anyone with physical access to the device can defeat that by activating a reset switch on the unit. From there, secure access to drive shares can be disabled. All of these devices are small and could easily be carried away under a jacket, so if you have a lot of visitors, consider keeping the devices in an area where they will be physically secure.

Buffalo Technology Linkstation Pro Gigabit Shared Network Storage