If you were to look at a list of the best wireless routers on the market today, you would no doubt notice that the differences are generally fairly slim. However, two of the most highly rated models (the Cisco Linksys E3000 and the Netgear WNDR3700 RangeMax Dual Band) have a lot of things in common. Both have similar interfaces, about the same range, and are at the same price point. However, the Cisco and the Netgear gladiators differ in one potentially important area above all others: their capacity to function with network based data storage solutions. While you may or may not consider that to be an important factor in your buying decision, you would be well advised to at least think through how important this is to you and your network.
Some networks (especially those which are accessed by a fairly small group of users) do not need network storage. For them, it is a generally wasted feature. If most of what your network users need to deal with are connectivity issues, you can focus your time on those and security, instead of on wringing out a slight amount of additional efficiency from what you have got. For many types of networks, people use their own computers, and thus do not need any kind of additional file storage on the network itself.
However, in some kinds of networks (such as those in computer labs, where every individual terminal is publicly accessible) storage can be a significant issue. And when people start trying to save their files onto a central storage drive, it can begin to significantly tax the resources of that drive’s processor. This is a manageable situation is there is one drive for storing files and another for storing programs. However, when both are stored on a single drive, the situation can start to become ridiculous in a hurry. Keep your focus on storage if your network will really need to use it.