Best Nas Raid Install And Manage

Err on the high side of capacity, though; itll cost more now, but you dont want to have to rebuy two hard drives for your NAS to get a higher effective mirrored capacity.

Bottom Line: The Asustor Nimbustor 2 AS5202T may be pricey, but this two-bay NAS delivers fast performance and is equipped with top-shelf hardware and loads of apps.

Read Review Synology DiskStation DS1019 649.99 Pros: Speedy performance.

Best Nas Raid Install And Manage

Synology DiskStation DS218j 170.00 Pros: Very easy to install and manage.

Its easy to install, offers a wealth of apps, and delivered speedy performance in testing.

Read Review Promise Apollo Cloud 2 Duo 449.00 Pros: Easy to install and use.

TerraMaster F2-221 NAS 270.00 Pros: Supports 4K video transcoding.

While you can certainly use an external hard drive for offloading and backing up files from your PC (and by extension, from your phone ), if you disconnect the hard drive and leave it in your office, you wont be able to get to those files from home, and neither will anyone else.

There are ways to allow other users to share and access the files on your hard drive, but they may be challenging to implement, or carry security risks.

Instead, consider a good network-attached storage (NAS) device.

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.

What Can You Do With a NAS Once you decide that you need to store files on a network drive, you then need to figure out what you mean to do with them, in order to determine what kind of NAS you need.

For example, sharing access to Office files like spreadsheets and Word documents with your coworkers is a simple job for a NAS.

If youre using the NAS to back up your laptops overnight, thats pretty straightforward, as well.

But if youre serving HD videos over your home network to two tablets, a laptop, and your smart TV, all at the same time, youll want a NAS with higher specifications for memory, processor, and network capabilities.

Youll 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.

So youll need to understand the terms and features before you go shopping.

NAS Buying 101 Since a NAS device is, at the simplest level, just a container for a hard drive or drives (with some added intelligence), the number one spec for any NAS unit is its potential storage capacity, determined by the number of drive bays it includes.

Most consumer-grade and home-office NAS units have one or two bays, while models designed for the office have four or more.

We dont generally recommend NAS drives with just a single bay, unless they are to be used strictly for backing up data that will also reside on computers on the network.

Thats because of the lack of redundancy out-of-the-box.

Some single-bay NAS drives will allow you to attach a second NAS device or an external hard drive, to that end.) You dont want the only copy of your data residing on just one drive on the network.

Also, the drives in these single-bay devices tend not to be user-accessible, if the NAS ships with a drive pre-installed.

For most home users who arent video-file hoarders, a two-bay NAS should be sufficient, provided that you buy big enough drives from the outset if youll be mirroring them.

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