Introduction

I've been on a constant quest that's evolved since I used my first computer. When I started to learn how complex they could become I dreamed of having the sci-fi home of the future that I saw in Back to the Future II. A place where media and information could be found with most any device. Networking has often been the solution to this, linking one computer to another in order to transfer or share files and has often required new devices or learning new protocols to handle each task.

I've been building and tweaking various builds of a home theater pc for a few years now. I have found them to be the perfect solution to turning any TV in my house into a hub which can access all my media. I would centralize the large majority of files on my main PC and then set up network shares to allow connections. This created a unique problem, as anything connected to it would drop out anytime I needed to reboot. A simple thing like a driver or system update required me to make sure everyone in the house was prepared for the quick reboot.

The Patriot Valkyrie Networked Attached Storage, or NAS, is a central depository for all of your files. Patriot's Valkyrie NAS can function as an external drive that is accessible from any computer on the network. With a 500MHz processor and 128MB DRAM, it's also able to take over various server functions that can all be tapped into from any browser in the house over the local network. With services like P2P pc-less downloads, FTP servers and an iTunes server there is no need for a computer or an expensive server to serve as the host.