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However, keep in mind that for that price, you're getting a highly sophisticated NAS system with features just as robust as its physical durability. If you fear the unthinkable event of a fire and losing precious photos or replaceable or sensitive data stored on computers or external drives, the IoSafe Bay NAS eases those fears. The design is fireproof up to 1550 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes. It's also submersible up to 10 feet underwater for as long as 72 hours. It’s easy to use and includes 8TB of storage, but the EX4100 is available in models that run up to 24TB if you need that extra capacity.
The DS920+ is a 4-bay diskless NAS, so you’ll have to buy and add the disk drives yourself. You may think that the asking price is a little steep considering that no drives are included, but it’s a bargain upon further inspection. You get the same versatile Synology software as the best overall pickand based on user reviews, most have no trouble setting up and using this NAS.
Best NAS 2022: Network-Attached Storage Drives for Backups, Media and More
If you do prefer ext4 for any reason, you can set up the DS220+ to use that file system instead of Btrfs when you create a volume. This process also allowed us to test the quality of each NAS device’s drive bays. A good NAS has drive trays or slots that make the drives easy to remove but are sturdy enough to ensure that the drives fit tightly and securely, with no chance of getting disconnected by a random bump.
Stuffed with 16TB of Seagate's finest and 6GB under the hood, it sings for me each time I push or pull files to it. My eldest still chugs away, babysitting a UPS battery, ready to send shutdown signals to my server garden if we go to candle power. Sequential Read/Write tests using 4GiB of files, written in 1MiB blocks. These were tested in single threads with a queue depth of 8 and again with a queue depth of 1. Drobo happens to be the most expensive on the list, running nearly $500 without the drives.
QNAP TS-451D2-4G 4 Bay 4K NAS
One of the best uses for a NAS is a streaming hub for various media, and the QNAP TS-251D-4G handles streaming easily. It has Plex integration and a built-in HDMI cable that you can plug straight into your TV and quickly access all your media on the big screen. It also features a built-in AI-powered smart photo management that allows this NAS to sort your photos using facial recognition, geotagging, and other metrics. While this NAS only holds an included 8TB of total capacity, it'll set you back a pretty penny.
After the initial setup, you’re prompted to download Drobo’s Dashboard app for Macs and Windows PCs. This installs a pulldown menu into the main menu bar at the top of your Mac’s screen, providing instant access to the drive’s main features. Router with Shared External USB Drive I've had bad luck in my previous, brief attempts at attaching USB storage to routers-rough performance and dropped connections abounded. This was with a few older non-Apple 802.11g routers, but naturally, I assumed the AirPort Extreme base station's AirPort Disk feature for connecting external drives was going to suck as bad.
NAS drive features to look for
Mobile apps for iOS and Android make it easy to access on the go, though they aren't the best-designed ones out there. There is also a web interface available if you don't happen to have one of your devices around. I use an ioSafe machine as a second backup to my main Synology box. That way, even if my network is breached, the ioSafe is powered down except for a few hours each week. My drives are protected physically and air-gapped from the internet. We looked at the QNAP TS-230 as a budget-priced two-bay NAS, but its ARM-based processor is not recommended for Plex media service beyond H.264-encoded videos.
Second, like the QNAP, the Lockerstor has HDMI output, possibly moving this from the server closet to the family room. Because most NAS devices ship diskless, you have to provide and install your own drives. You can even keep the price pretty low with something like a Raspberry Pi–powered NAS for around $250 , though even with a Raspberry Pi 4, a NAS like that isn’t very quick. If you’re curious about installing TrueNAS Core, this YouTube guide walks you through the process, and this forum post includes a list of hardware recommendations. For example, a typical business scenario might be sharing access to Office files, like spreadsheets and Word documents, with your coworkers and perhaps backing up select office devices on a regular basis. Additional layers of data security and serving files to a relatively large number of users is typically where businesses need to be careful about NAS storage.
It comes with a built-in operating system too, which makes it way more sophisticated than either of the WD options on this list. Unlike the WD Cloud Home, which is a plug-and-play product, this device has a learning curve. In this post, I hope to not only bring more awareness to NAS drives for Mac but also to give you an idea of the best ones currently available. At the end, I’ll also cover what I consider to be important criteria to consider before making a purchase. After a week of working, EX2 stopped being automatically discovered in "shared" list and the only way to access it now is via direct connection via afp.
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. In addition to streaming the photos and media files on different connected devices to the network, an advanced NAS also offers a remote access option to fetch an important file from your office. If you are switching from an offline hard drive to an online personal NAS drive, the QNAP TS-251D-4G 2 Bay Home NAS is a perfect option for you. This online storage device comes with all the necessary features to facilitate the Mac users in 4K medium transcoding and streaming. Hence, you can easily set up a secure multimedia entertainment center in your home. Depending on whether your NAS comes with hard drives pre-installed or not, you may need to start by inserting hard drives into the NAS’s drive bays.
Furthermore, you can use Buffalo’s Data Recovery Service after registering an account. The Promise Apollo Cloud 2 Duo Storage Device outshines the rest of the NAS devices with its free private social sharing cloud services. As a result, you can share videos and photos by adding up to 40 private members. Not only that, but you can send time-limited links to an unlimited number of people, which is excellent. You can also download the My Cloud mobile app on your iOS device to access the stored data. Another great news is that the app can access the data placed on the My Cloud NAS server using a different Wifi or a cellular network.
Some of these devices are extremely easy to set up, like the Promise Apollo Cloud 2. It's also very easy for a network attached storage project to get very expensive, very fast. TerraMaster makes some great devices, and the aptly named F2-220 is no different. Like others, it comes empty, relying on the user to install any set of drives they'd like. Given the app-centric nature of the device, streaming options are effectively endless with the Diskstation. After software expansion, the device is able to send audio and video to Samsung TVs, Roku players, Apple TV, Google Chromecast, DLNA devices, and more.
