You’ve heard so much about NAS systems, you know how useful they are, and you want one.
There are so many companies building them, there are so many options. Where do you start?
PC Magazine has some useful tips. Things to keep in mind are:
Multiple drives don’t always mean more capacity. Sometimes multiple drives are there for redundancy, so one drive is mirrored by the other. If one fails, the other can still be accessed. Many NAS boxes let you turn off the RAID settings so that if there’s two 500GB drives inside you can use the full 1TB capacity; but not all of them will, as some vendors think they know best what you want. And that’s redundancy. (To be honest, they’re probably right.)
Setup user-level access on the NAS, so that only select people (be they your employees or your kids) can do whatever they want. Not everyone should have the privilege of creating new folders or deleting old data, after all. Better yet, make sure you can create groups of users and change their level of access and sharing all at once.
Backup is not always a given, but it’s getting to be a major selling point. Apple’s Time Capsule NAS, coupled with the Time Machine software (on Mac and Windows), is all about automatic backup, for example (but also builds in a networking router). Some new NAS boxes that aren’t from Apple are getting Time Machine support . You’ll find variations on backup scheme with more Windows centric NAS products.
Expandability for more storage is sometimes an option. In fact, many NAS products have USB ports built in so you can plug another external drive right in. Plugging in a printer might also work, so you can instantly share printing across the network.
Make your pick based mainly on capacity and price. Performance on these kinds of systems is not going to be very noticeably different from one unit to the next. That said, it never hurts to get one with Gigabit Ethernet if that’s an option.
Remote access has a couple of aspects. First is that you in general have control over the settings of your NAS from afar. Second, you get access to your data wherever you go, be it around the house, the office, or on the road. Since many NAS boxes are consumer friendly enough to have media streaming capability–even of your iTunes library–that means accessing your media as if it were your own personal Pandora.
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