Network Attached Storage (NAS): What It Is and Why You May Want It

If you have multiple computers, chances are you've wanted to get a file from one system to another at some point. Maybe yous take some files on your phone that you want on your laptop. Maybe you have some media on a desktop that you lot want to stream to a smart TV. Possibly yous want a secure location to dorsum up your important files to. In any of these cases, Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a great option.

While Network Attached Storage every bit a concept has been around for decades, it's become more accessible and popular with home users and small-scale businesses in the last decade. Essentially, a NAS is but a bare-bones estimator with a large amount of storage and specialized software. You designate some files and folders that you desire to exist shared over your network, and then anyone can connect and access the files. Of course, you lot tin can put security restrictions in place to allow only certain people access to certain files, just that's the general idea. You can theoretically turn any system with a network connection into a NAS if you wanted, but that has its limitations.

Shared network drives are common in the corporate world to permit teams to interact on a fix of files, simply there hasn't been much of a use for that in the dwelling house until recent years. The almost basic form of NAS would exist a shared folder on a calculator. You tin can practice this easily in Windows, for example, by right-clicking on a folder and enabling network sharing. This will allow other Windows computers on your local network to connect and access the binder. However, you won't be able to access it remotely, there won't be any active management or monitoring, and some devices may take trouble viewing the folder.

For a more robust option, you tin can set up a file server on your computer. One common example of this would be using Plex for media sharing. Plex allows you to stream and view your content on many devices, and even remotely. It works not bad for some scenarios, but it is merely designed for media.

Another area where a NAS is helpful is for backups. Backing upwardly your data to a local device may protect you from a drive failure, but once more, at that place are limitations. Your average external USB storage device typically uses the cheapest drive possible to hitting a price point. If that bulldoze fails, y'all're out of luck, your data is likely gone. Since they're continued via USB, that means simply one device tin can admission them at a time unless you implement some advanced file forwarding. Clearly nosotros can exercise meliorate here as well.

There are countless examples of means to get some parts of the functionality of a NAS, but they all fall short in some way or another.

This is where a dedicated device comes in. At that place are many types of devices to cull from, only today we'll be taking a await at two from Synology which give a keen overview of the category in full general.

Hardware basics

As stated earlier, a dedicated NAS like one from Synology is just a bare-bones estimator with a lot of storage. Information technology has a processor and RAM only like a regular PC, merely they aren't very powerful. The CPU exists merely to manage the storage assortment and run some basic applications or services. The NAS runs a bones operating arrangement where yous can install applications and view the status of the array.

By adding some compute adequacy to the storage organisation, this removes the demand for a defended figurer that has to stay on all the fourth dimension. Information technology's all built in. Depending on your budget and use instance, yous can get a basic system with merely a few drives or get all the manner up to dozens of drives. The most common systems that a consumer would buy has anywhere from 2 to 5 storage drives.

Let's talk about those drives now. The majority of NAS systems don't come with drives; y'all have to purchase them separately. While you can certainly utilize standard desktop-grade hard drives, that isn't appropriate. In a NAS enclosure, the drives are all spinning side by side to each other causing vibrations and heat. This would reduce the lifespan of a traditional bulldoze like those establish in desktops or bones USB external storage devices. Drives designed for NAS usage will be clearly labeled as such. They accept higher durability, vibration tolerance, and longevity. While you certainly pay a premium for these drives, it's well worth it compared to having a drive neglect on you.

In addition to the physical drives themselves, a standalone NAS allows yous to organize them in a way that increases reliability. This is normally known equally RAID and consists of spreading data beyond several disks. That way, yous won't lose your data if a bulldoze fails. Of course, to get this, you need multiple drives and you'll sacrifice some storage capacity.

A unmarried-bay NAS won't offer any redundancy, so you rarely encounter those if ever. A ii-bay NAS volition tolerate up to a single drive failure with no data loss, but you lot only go l% of the storage. Moving up to three drives, y'all can tolerate a unmarried failure and yous'll get 2/3 of the storage. The sky'southward the limit from there with enterprise systems often containing hundreds of drives all working together.

You can come across that a two-bay NAS is much less efficient than those with more chapters. Half of your space is devoted to back-up, so y'all are sacrificing a bigger portion compared to systems with more than drives. As yous increase the number of drives, it'southward commonly best to increase the amount of redundancy. Typically a ratio of around v to one works well with one bulldoze out of each five beingness reserved for redundancy. With ten drives in your system, you lot'd want two reserved for redundancy and so on.

Implementing these reliable storage systems used to exist circuitous... Mod NAS devices figure that all out for you lot.

Implementing these reliable storage systems used to be complex. In that location were many dissimilar types of RAID (0, one, 5, half dozen, 10, etc...) that all offered different benefits. Modernistic NAS devices figure that all out for you lot. Y'all simply tell it how much back-up (or none at all) you desire, and everything is calculated behind the scenes. Synology calls their system Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR). This system operates like RAID 5 or RAID 6 under the hood. If you'd like a more detailed explanation of the differences, NASCompares has a great piece on that.

The benefits of SHR is that it's easier to setup and expand, it's compatible with dissimilar-sized drives, and offers a greater amount of usable storage with mixed drives. Nonetheless, it's slightly slower than RAID 5 and half dozen, isn't as flexible, and isn't compatible with other arrays like RAID is. For the type of user that would purchase this kind of NAS, SHR is definitely the style to go though.

For putting together this article, Synology sent over their five-bay DiskStation DS1019+ and two-bay DS220j to test with. Both are very popular and highly regarded NAS devices. I populated them with Seagate'south 14TB IronWolf Pro NAS drives. This isn't meant to exist a review of either of the NAS units themselves, only nosotros will accept a minute to briefly become over them to gain an agreement of what's the functionality and value they provide.

Starting with the smaller DS220j, drives are inserted by sliding off the side console. The drives spiral into place against rubberized grommets. The larger DS1019+ uses plastic sleds with a tool-less clamping mechanism. On the back, both units have gigabit network and USB three.0 connections.

The DS1019+ has an eSATA connection if you lot want to add an expansion unit. It as well has a second Ethernet port for link-aggregation or failover. On the bottom, the DS1019+ has two NVMe slots for SSD caching. This only makes sense if you need to read or write data continuously at speeds higher than the 100MBps that typical drives are capable of.

In terms of internal hardware specs, the DS220j comes with 512MB of non-ECC DDR4 Memory and a quad-core Realtek RTD1296 CPU. The DS1019+ is beefier with 8GB of not-ECC DDR3 and a quad-core Intel Celeron J3455. Equally is common with these types of NAS servers, both tin can exist configured as multimedia streaming devices. The DS1019+ has built-in video transcoders and is powerful plenty to stream 4K content.

The software layer

And so now we have these boxes with mini computers and lots of storage, simply what tin nosotros do with them?

Let's step inside the NAS' user environs to see how they operate. While I'll be covering specific details of Synology's user experience, the same concepts apply to other systems similar those from QNAP.

All commercial NAS units have a direction user interface and this software layer is 1 of the most user-friendly elements in a modern system. In the case of Synology, they take a well designed web-based arrangement. Logging in via a browser brings up the unabridged operating system. Information technology has a desktop, icons, and windows just like whatsoever other operating system. From here, you tin can setup the storage array too as a wide range of other features.

When you start turn on a NAS, you'll have to initialize the drives. Fresh drives will need to be formatted and provisioned to allow them to be used. You may be familiar with NTFS, FAT and Ext4 file systems used by Windows and Linux, merely they aren't really designed for larger storage arrays. One time you start growing into the tens of terabytes, y'all demand a peculiarly designed file system for big volumes. In the example of Synology, they employ Btrfs.

Afterward formatting, you will finish up with a storage puddle which you can recollect of equally a partition. From here, the next step is to start creating your shared folders and assigning permissions.

For a standard home user, you'll probably merely demand ane account. For more advanced users or business scenarios, y'all'll likely desire to setup multiple users with permissions. Peradventure y'all have some shared documents that everyone tin can read but only certain people can write. Possibly y'all gave a roommate access to your organization to back up their files, but you don't want them accessing your files. You tin set it up however yous want.

The last thing to practise before you can first uploading to your NAS is to create shared folders. Y'all demand at least one to get started and these are where you volition put your files. I created 1 for backups, one for streaming media, and one for miscellaneous files. Yous could put everything into i shared folder, but things can go messy and yous won't be able to customize as much. For case, my backups folder keeps track of intermediate file versions while my media binder doesn't. That'south just i reward of using multiple file shares.

There's an app for that

So far, nosotros've talked about how to setup a NAS, and so let's motion on to the interesting part - actually using information technology! To go the most out of an advanced NAS, you'll want to install some apps.

Synology'southward operating organisation has a congenital-in app shop simply like you would utilise on your telephone. From here, you can download all types of apps to assistance with backups, media playback, security, system maintenance, evolution, and more. At that place are about 140 different apps yous can install. About half are from Synology themselves and the rest are from third-party developers. At that place's even a virtual machine director in case you want to run Windows or Linux on your NAS.

The way these apps piece of work is that you lot install the server portion on your NAS and so a companion client on the device you want to connect from. You lot'll log in to the client plan and it will start communicating with the server.

On testing the NAS systems, I had running a VPN server, a Plex server, and a backup server. If you are thinking about using this for business, you can also run things like DHCP server, a spider web server, surveillance, and databases, all from the NAS. It can also join a domain and has back up for LDAP and SSO for user authentication and grouping management.

The currently bachelor apps from Synology. There are more from third parties

Having so many apps is neat because it allows you to practice well-nigh anything, but information technology tin likewise become overwhelming. For example, Synology has at least 16 unlike Android mobile apps. Past my count, there are 3 different file explorer apps for viewing and syncing data as well as 6 different apps that y'all tin can employ for watching videos on a device. For a first time user, complication and disorganization like this can be daunting. I would prefer a more unified experience, only you certainly go your coin'south worth.

Naturally, one of the most obvious and useful things you can exercise with a NAS is to fill-in.

Naturally, one of the nigh obvious and useful things you lot can do with a NAS is to backup. The general best exercise is to follow the iii-2-1 rule of data backups. That ways yous should accept 3 copies of your data on at least 2 different mediums and 1 should exist off-site. A NAS makes this piece of cake. Synology's backup software allows y'all to select what files you want to backup also as how often y'all want to back them up.

You can also sync files across devices using the NAS and employ it as a personal Dropbox or Google Bulldoze. If you demand to share admission to some file, you lot can automatically create a sharable link to transport out. Password protection and timed access are supported equally well.

With a NAS, we're office mode to the three-2-1 goal, but not all the fashion yet. Backing up to a NAS will protect y'all from a device failure, small-scale water/electrical damage, and accidental deletion. Notwithstanding, if there's a serious natural disaster that takes out your device and your NAS, you're out of luck. That's where the third level of backups comes into play. For those ultra-important files, you'll want to dorsum them up to a deject provider like Amazon, Backblaze, Carbonite, etc. Synology has apps to automatically back upwardly data on your NAS to any cloud provider yous prefer.

This will come every bit an added expense, but thankfully online cloud storage has gotten cheaper over fourth dimension. Synology also offers their own platform for deject fill-in as well as the power to backup ane NAS to another NAS off-site. To get an idea of pricing, Synology's C2 service costs $6.60 per TB/month, while Amazon'south Glacier costs $4 per TB/month. However, Glacier adds an additional $10 per TB upon retrieval. This is but intended for disaster recovery, so if you lot need this, you'll have bigger things to worry near.

All these services so far take only been bachelor inside your local network. What happens if you are out of your house? Information technology would be smashing if you lot could still access everything. That's where Dynamic DNS and a cloud based connection organization comes in. Rather than connecting to your NAS locally through an IP accost like 192.168.0.2 or something similar that, you connect via a publicly routable accost. Synology calls this QuickConnect. Setting this up takes just a few clicks and allows you lot to log into your NAS anywhere via an address like https://MyNAS.QuickConnect.to. This relies on dynamic DNS to automatically connect y'all to your NAS without having to worry about port forwarding on your router or complex firewall rules. This is a very powerful feature and one you lot definitely want to make sure your NAS offers earlier ownership one.

I'm sold. What else do I need to know?

Nosotros've covered what a NAS is, how information technology works, and some of the cool things yous can practice with it. Let's wrap this upward by looking at pricing and how to choose a organization.

The two NAS units I received for testing, the DiskStation DS220j and DS1019+, toll $170 and $650, respectively. At that place are also larger more concern oriented models with faster processors and more storage capacity, yous can expect to pay a few thou dollars.

Generally, the processing ability of a NAS scales with the number of drive bays. They figure a user that only needs a few drives volition also probable not demand as much computation. For the habitation user that wants a place to support all their files from all devices, a 2-bay unit should exist great. Depending on how much storage capacity y'all want, you lot tin easily build a complete system for a few hundred dollars. A setup with the DS220j and two 4TB drives will cost under $400. That gets you 4TB of redundant storage and a bones platform for streaming or running other simple services.

For a more advanced abode user that would want to run boosted services on pinnacle of their NAS, stream HD/4K movies, and employ more than 15TB of storage, a 4-bay unit would exist the way to get.

These units volition accept a more powerful processor and can support college quality media streaming. Some have upgraded network connectivity if that's a feature you lot're interested in. Something like the Synology DS918+ or Qnap TS-431P2 tin be purchased for around $500. Depending on how much infinite you lot need, you lot'll likely pay some other $500 for drives.

For the small to medium concern customer, I think a NAS makes perfect sense. You lot can take, manage, and store employee backups. You tin use information technology as the office file server to aid with collaboration. You lot tin utilise apps to take care of your database, mail, VPN, surveillance, authentication, DNS, and web servers. It's not that powerful of a server though, so yous'll need to keep track of how much stuff y'all programme to run on it. A NAS isn't a total substitute for a proper IT setup, only for a small company that needs the storage anyhow, there'due south no reason not to go this route.

A NAS is much more than than simply a place to put your files. Proceed in heed that they are a flake pricey and y'all can still accomplish some of the functionality by retrofitting an old calculator with RAID and networking cards. However, it's hard to beat out the flexibility and simplicity of having everything in 1 box.