With the wealth of NAS drives available for the consumer, it can be a tad challenging finding
one to suit your needs, and that still offers good value for money. Most of the NAS drives
you’ll come across are of excellent quality but some offer a little something more than the
average model.
We’ve got three different NAS drives in for review, from Synology, QNAP and Buffalo. All are considered consumer
units and suitable for the home or even the small office.
THREE NAS GROUP REVIEW
NAS Drives for Home Users
Group Review
The role of the NAS has changed in recent years, thanks in part to
the consumer push for more storage and better ways in which to
stream content to our various smart devices. As a result most NAS
units are dedicated media servers, offering streaming of the
media stored on the drives via a number of protocols: DLNA,
SHOUTcast, iTunes and countless more.
Beyond the media serving capabilities, a home NAS can act as a
surveillance station, connecting to security cameras and
recording the feeds. You can use one as web server, hosting your
Wordpress blog or a content management system. There are
apps to connect to Dropbox and other cloud services, to keep
your backup files in sync with each other. You can even use a NAS
as a Virtual Private Network server, taking over the role form your
router and providing your internal Internet connected devices a
private and secure connection to the outside world.
The number of apps available for a particular NAS unit depends
greatly on the manufacturer of the unit and how they go about
creating apps that can be integrated into its operating system.
For the most part, there is a wealth of available apps from most of
the big names in the NAS industry; especially with the three units
we have for testing here.In terms of the operating system on a NAS, you can usually find a
heavily customised version of Linux. This ensures the NAS is
operating without consuming too many of its own resources, whilst
offering a secure and easy to use interface with which to interact.The Cloud duties on such units are just as impressive. Chat, file
sharing, calendar sharing, collaboration across folders and files
with anything up to 2048 individual users on a single NAS. The
beauty of using a NAS drive as a cloud server is that it’s
marvellously scalable for the individual. You can expend its
storage by buying bigger capacity hard drives and installing
them, most have multiple USB ports that allow you to fit further
storage. You can download different modules to enhance or
enable other NAS cloud features and you can assign groups and
create users with limited or whole access to certain folders stored
within the filesystem.Advanced Cloud Uses