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It performed reasonably well in testing and comes with a generous selection of home entertainment, office productivity, and server-oriented apps. As its name implies, a NAS is high-capacity storage that connects to your home or office network so that you and other users you designate can access your files from mobile devices and PCs without plugging in to the drive. Read on for a breakdown of the top NAS devices we've tested, followed by a detailed buying guide that will walk you through how to find the best one for your needs. The front of the DS218+ features a removable plate that hides away the drive bays, as well as LED indicators for general status, network connectivity, and the status of each drive. You can adjust the LED brightness or set it up on a schedule so the lights dim at night. It also has an eSATA port so you can expand the NAS with external drives using one of Synology's compatible expansion units.

You'll also need a more powerful NAS if you want to store big media libraries, like a collection of 100,000 stock photos for your graphic arts studio, for example. Asustor designed the Drivestor AS3302T for use as a personal cloud server, but it can also be pressed into service as a web server, a media server, a backup repository, and more by downloading apps from Asustor’s App Central. Its tool-free chassis, magnetic cover, and easy-to-remove drive sleds make installing and replacing drives a snap. The F5-422 is a well appointed five-bay NAS device that delivered relatively fast file transfer scores in testing. It comes with a 10Gbps LAN port that lets you reap the full benefits of a high-speed network, and has two 1Gbps LAN ports that provide failover support and can be linked for 2Gbps connectivity. The chassis is not tool-free, but the drive sleds are easily removed by hand for quick hot-swapping.
Why QNAP TS-230?
The DS218+ doesn't support volume encryption to securely lock your entire drive, unlike the QNAP TS-251B, but you can encrypt individual shared folders. Even with the DS218+'s hardware encryption acceleration, you'll still see a ding to read-and-write performance with encryption turned on. In our tests, file transfer in encrypted folders was around 60 percent of the speed of transfer in non-encrypted folders. That hardware encryption acceleration also didn't help with SMB in-flight encryption at all, which slowed the file-transfer process to around 50 percent of the speed of unencrypted transfers.

It supports all the major players in cloud backups, and setup is very straightforward. We were able to get it connected to and syncing bi-directionally in just a couple of minutes, with prompts for data encryption and scheduling along the way—you can even set it to only sync specific folders. Synology's DS1522+ ships with built-in enterprise-grade data software and support for dozens of applications, OS and SaaS services. Featuring five hard drive bays by default and expandable up to 15 bays total, the DS1522+ is a compact and economical NAS solution with plenty of room to expand as the user's data storage needs grow. A NAS device is great if you need to store a lot of information and extra security for your data.
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The TerraMaster F5 offers some unmatched advantages over its competitors. It comes with simultaneous dual 4K transcoding and six layers of safety features to keep your file secure. Hence, it is perfect when you want to set up Plex and secure all your precious home videos. The F5 comes with an Intel Celeron J3355 processor (2-Core, 2MB Cache, and up to 2.50GHz). It also features 2GB DDR3 RAM, which you can upgrade to a 4GB DDR3 for customization. And, it offers you the full range of drive storage with support for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SATA HDD/SSD storage.
It is a ready-to-use device with no need for drive installations. The DS220+ comes with an Intel Celeron J4025 processor (2-Core, 4MB Cache, and up to 2.9GHz). But it fulfills the minimum requirement that Plex requires, and you have the option to upgrade it to 6GB. Thus, you have enough firepower for Plex to do what it does best, transcoding. It comes with disks and diskless variants that offer the flexibility of choice and capacity. The thing of this review is, you guys didn't scratch what is out there for NAS arrays, especially Synology's The model you chose here was one of their basic models.
Best Desktop Nas 2017 For Mac
You don’t get many I/O ports with the DiskStation DS220j, but you do get speedy file transfer performance, multiple RAID options, and quad-core processing power for just under $170. This two-bay NAS uses a sleek, glossy white enclosure and is equipped with a single 1Gbps LAN port and two USB 3.0 ports. You’ll have to remove a couple of screws to install the drives, which you’ll have to supply yourself as they are not included. Low-cost NAS devices are great for home use, but if you’re a small-business owner, you’ll want a NAS that offers speedy performance, multi-gig LAN connectivity, and high-speed expansion options.
And is a NAS not quite right for what you want, you realize now? For more storage options, take a look at our lists of thebest external hard drivesandthe top external SSDs, as well as our top-ratedcloud storage services. Some may do as little as offer a simple File Transfer Protocol manager as an app or simply a command line feature. This will certainly work, but you'll need to know something about configuring a secure FTP server to make sure your files aren't suddenly open to the whole internet. The better NAS devices offer an app that handles remote internet access. These come with easy-to-learn user interfaces and more advanced security options, including the ability to encrypt whatever files you're opening up to the cloud.
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That, after all, is the fundamental purpose of a RAID -- protecting your data when a drive fails. Even with smaller-capacity drives, and less than a terabyte of sample files, it took almost three weeks just to run the failure and rebuild tests across the entire set of seven candidate servers. The router forms the foundation of your wired and wireless network—it may be the most critical piece of technology in your home you don't think about, save your broadband modem. When your router is down, none of your devices can talk to one another or to the outside world. You can't browse the web, stream movies, listen to music, update social media, connect to your office, or pretty much anything else. About the only thing you can do is work on a spreadsheet and play Solitaire.

Its non-web UI hasn't been updated or improved much since I bought my very first Drobo back in 2009. You also can't use the dashboard on Linux, which is an unnecessary limitation. One thing I found particularly interesting was that two of the boxes I'm recommending most highly turned out to be the least expensive on a price-per-bay basis.
It uses QNAP’s intuitive QTS operating system, which makes it easy to create storage volumes, configure RAID protection, check disk health, and download apps. Creating a unique user account for each person who accesses your NAS is a good idea. You can do so on any of the NAS devices we tested by going into the user settings in the interface. Be sure to give each user the appropriate permissions—you don't want everyone to have god-level admin access to your NAS!

We rounded up the best options for use at home from the likes of Apple, WD, and Seagate, among others. QNAP TZ500 4-Bay NAS is one of the most popular and high-performing 2-bay NAS products. While QNAP TR-002 launches with a $949 price tag, it is still a great product at a low cost.
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