Having previously touched on the vast amounts of data the average consumer is generating these days thanks mostly to the wide variety of digital cameras, camcorders, iPods, and other personal media players available, I thought it might be interesting to look at a few consumer level backup storage devices released today.

First up is the LG N2R1, a RAID 0 or 1 enabled dual hard drive NAS enclosure with up to 2TB of storage.  With an MSRP of $400, the N2R1 falls into a vast market of dual drive network attached storage devices.  In an effort to stand out from the crowd, besides its DLNA compatibility which allows it to interact with DLNA certified media players, thus enabling easy access to your digital media, the N2R1 includes both an integrated DVD burner and 802.11G wireless meant to tap into the ubiquity and convenience of wireless home networks.  The DVD burner, although highly insufficient in terms of that media’s 4GB storage capacity relative to the 2000GB overall capacity of the LG device, allows the user to quickly and easily create specific targeted data backups for easy transport or sharing.

Western Digital, in an effort to make its flagship product smaller and sleeker, announced updates to the MyBook Essential external hard drive line, also capable of up to 2TB of storage at an MSRP of $230.  Although the MyBook Essential boasts 256-bit hardware based encryption of user data and automatic backups via Western Digital’s easy to use SmartWare software, it is not a NAS and must be connected directly to a PC via a USB 2.0 port.  Also, since it uses just one hard drive, it doesn’t incorporate any RAID features to protect against hard drive failure.

Both devices provide data backup options to suit most people’s needs.  But as our lives, entertainment, and memories become increasingly digitized, even the vast amount of storage offered by these and other products will succumb to the heavy loads placed on them by the billions of bytes needing storage that our lives generate.