Synology Diskstation DS211j: My plan for world domination involved gathering all the media taking up oodles of disk space on the computers in the house, including my sons’ vast and growing music and video files, into one place tucked in a corner. There are lots of products that appear to be designed to do exactly what I wanted – but lots of them seem to get very bad reviews notably the nicely designed iomega StorCentre. The Synology drive is currently priced at £265 by Amazon (with two 1T drives installed) and gets much better reviews. Their support and website information is impressive, the actual interface is nice

and crucially the box itself is very quiet. As promised it serves iTunes music perfectly, photos (in spite of IPhoto’s ridiculous system) quite well but movies play just a little too slowly over my network and falter every now and then. The drive can be accessed via a handful of iPhone apps and can be set up as a web server. So far, I recommend this.