There are just as many business-oriented NAS drives available as there are consumer
versions and just as with the consumer, the business user can get a little overwhelmed by the
sheer choice. As before we have three to review, all from the SMB lines of the manufacturers.
To aid with consistency, we’ve selected three business class NAS drives from the same manufactures as the home,
consumer models: Synology, QNAP and Buffalo; it will be interesting to see how they compare next to their home
user siblings.
THREE BUSINESS CLASS NAS REVIEW
NAS Drives for SMB Users
Group Review
If the role of the consumer NAS has changed significantly in
recent years, you’d think the business led NAS would have
stayed somewhat static; after all, the role of a business NAS is
simply to provide a backup and file server role, isn’t it?
There’s more to a modern business NAS though than you would
first imagine. First, it generally needs to be a more powerful
‘computer’ than the consumer versions; it’s usual that the
business NAS’ processors are more powerful, faster and have
64-bit architecture over the home-based 32-bit models.
Furthermore, there’s more memory available to cope and drive
the faster processor.This elevated performance isn’t there to simply drive the
business-focused apps and other installed hardware. Consider
that a business NAS is designed to serve the needs of multiple
users simultaneously, both in the office and those working
externally. Therefore that performance impact is there to ensure
your business doesn’t suffer from slow access, poor
performance and down time.
A lot of business NAS drives tend to offer more drive bays as
standard. Whilst two bays are often the norm, you can easily
expect to see four, six, eight, twelve and considerably more the
further up the enterprise scale you go.This high degree of scalability is the key for a successful
business NAS. Not only can you populate with numerous drives
but in most cases you’re also able to connect a NAS with other
model NAS drives from the same company; thus creating vast
100TB plus clusters of storage, for example. This is the extreme
end of the business scale but it signifies the operational
benefits of adopting such a technology into your own company.
There are usually other aspects that cover business use, such as
multiple Ethernet ports, more internally installed fans, hot-swap
drive capabilities and encryption engines built-in to the NAS.
Surprisingly, you also find that a lot of business NAS drives
share the media capabilities of the consumer models. The likes
of 4K transcoding, media streaming and so on are all a part of
the modern day business NAS.Advanced Cloud Uses