Which features and capabilities make for a top scoring NAS? Whether the NAS is targeted to home users or business, there are few features that all our favorite NAS devices share Review Written By CEO Shaan Ali Ch of www.Brainstechnology.netNAS (Network-Attached Storage) devices have become a staple not only in business, but in home users' networks. A NAS provides data storage and sharing across a network. However, the NAS devices we have tested in PC Labs lately have extensive capabilities, backup, and data recovery options, as well as application add-ons to plump up the feature set even further.
Besides providing a way to store and share data on a network, many NAS devices can run in additional server modes. Just about all of the current NAS products on the market support UPnP and DLNA, and are ideal to use as multimedia servers. Just store multimedia content such as video on a share on a NAS, and your DLNA and UPnP supported clients can stream that data.
NASes can also function as iTunes and print servers. Others— mostly developed for small business— can run as email or lightweight database servers.
Increasingly, vendors are creating software on NASes that integrate with sites like Facebook or YouTube. With this integration, you can designate a folder to automatically upload pictures you place into it to websites such as Facebook or videos to YouTube. These NASes often have user-friendly features such as the ability to create slideshows.
Consumer and small business NAS may contain features that may be considered consumer-oriented and user-friendly, but that doesn't mean they lack capabilities that are of a more serious nature. Many consumer and SMB NASes support multiple drives, allowing you to setup RAID arrays for fault tolerance or to boost performance. With such NASes, you can easily set up copy jobs to schedule backup from all the computers on your network to a central location on the NAS. Many NAS vendors also partner with cloud service providers so you can back up the data on your NAS to the cloud for extra redundancy.
NASes for the SMB typically have some enterprise features such as iSCSI targeting for business network storage, and integration with directory services such as Windows Active Directory and LDAP. This type of integration means that such NASes will fit into an existing business environment and the users and permissions already established can trickle down to the NAS shares.
The NASes listed below are the top recently reviewed devices. These NASes contain many of the aforementioned features—some containing all these features. We divide NAS products into three general categories (note: some devices can fit in more than one category). There are consumer NASes which are often enclosed, single disk-boxes (though not always) or may not support hard disk drives at all, and only support attached USB drives for data storage. The second category is Prosumer, which is the smaller-end of the SMB. These NASes are ideal for power users and small business. These devices usually support multiple drives and offer some sort of data redundancy, in general data mirroring from one drive to another. The third category is SMB NAS. These NASes usually support terabytes of data and offer multiple RAID configurations, recovery options, and sometimes, hot-swappable components.
No matter the category of NAS, there are some specific aspects all NASes tested that score high, share. They typically have:
• Headache-free setup (particularly important for the consumer/prosumer)
• Have good read/write performance
• Have features that aid in doing the things users want in a NAS: sharing files, backing up data from Windows, Mac, and possibly Linux machines, or offering some cloud service for storage and backup
• Have good data redundancy and protection options (of particular importance for business)
• Offer security—either data encryption, and/or user access control
• Ship with well-written documentation and have an abundance of good help resources for users.
Here's a look at the top NASes we've tested recently in each category (keep in mind, this is a dynamic list and as we test more NASes, we'll update it accordingly):
Consumer
Consumer/Prosumer/SOHO
SMB
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