I use and Infrant NAS (www.infrant.com) with my Mac and Windows and it works like a charm. I recommend a RAID 5 based solution for maximum data security. For fastest backups use wired gigabit ethernet.

Look for new hardware based on the Windows Home Server. It looks very nice, but as of this taping it’s still in beta.

Apple also offers a form of NAS with it’s new Airport Extreme routers called Airport Disk.

Network Attached Storage seems like a great idea for sharing all of your data among all of the computers in your house….until you start transferring a great big pile of data, that is. The big limitation with NAS is that it transfers data only as fast as the slowest link in the equation — so if you have a 10/100 network card in the computer, you’ll only ever transfer data at 100 Mbps, even if the NAS features gigabit networking….and when you compare that to USB 2.0, FireWire or internal SATA speeds, that’s very very slowwww. And remember that the speed drops even more if one or more of the connections is wireless.

The new Shared Storage drives from Maxtor should feature gigabit networking on them, so if you want to achieve maximum transfer speed, you’ll want to make sure that everything along the chain (computer, router, and the NAS drive) uses gigabit instead of the slower 10/100. That way you’ll get the maximum speed possible.