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D-Link has a "home storage" device - a whole 20 Gb ... ?

"Well, you have to start somewhere," was D-Link's response to the question: "did you really mean 20 Gb, not 200 Gb?"

It's a home storage system. It's called the DSM-602H Central Home Drive, and costs $249.99 in the US which, admittedly, is about half the price per megabyte of storage on an iPod.

It has (we decided) to be either the strangest miscalculation in the history of storage, or a misprint. D-Link says neither. "It's an awful lot of space!" insisted the official company mouthpiece. "I have a huge MP3 collection, really big, and it only amounts to 12-13 gigabytes. I doubt most people have that much."

It's Universal Plug And Play enabled, it's based on Intel XScale processing, and (the clever bit) it works with Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP, Apple Mac OS and Linux operating systems.

But isn't it just a bit small? I mean, the market is full of five megapixel cameras that take video as well as images ... and Apple has just announced a single-use device - the new iPod - with 40 gigs.

And in a market where you can buy a PC with around 80 to 120 gig of disk, for around $800, would you really buy another disk for $250? Surely, you'd just increase the size of your hard disk?

"Well, when we announced our first MP3 player with 32 megabytes, everybody said it was too small; so we did a bigger 64, and then they said that was too small, so we went on," said the publicity executive. "We have bigger ones planned. There's going to be a 40 G and then an 80G and even one with a slot, so you can add extra."

Perhaps the meat of the announcement is that D-Link "is working with Intel" - as part of a project to develop "the digital home."

In other words, it's testing the water.

"It delivers the industry's first Universal Plug-n-Play (UPnP) network attached storage device that is designed specifically for the home user," says the release.

And D-Link gets the Intel approval stamp, in the form of a supportive quote: "The highly integrated Intel IXP420 network processor provided the architecture and LAN/WAN capabilities that D-Link required for the latest home networking product," said Doug Davis, general manager, Intel Network Processor Division. "We are pleased to be working with D-Link to support standards-based home multimedia connectivity for home networking devices such as their new Central Home Drive."

As long as they don't expect to get rich selling the 20G system, fine! Meanwhile, how about a pocketable FireLite - USB 2.0 Bus-powered, with 40 gigs of disk, for $200?