Best Network Attached Storage For Mac

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What Is Network Attached Storage Nas
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Best Network Attached Storage For Time Machine
Network Attached Storage
2018 Best Network Attached Storage
Best Network Attached Storage For Mac
Best Network Attached Storage For Mac

Please share your experiences and reviews about NAS (Network-Attached Storage) below.In particular, rate their compatibility with Macs, OS X, iTunes, Time Machine, AppleTV, and other Apple-specific tools. Network attached storage solutions for a new generation. Here are some great ways you can use NAS to make the most of your Mac. So it looks its best no matter where you watch it.

Your beloved Mac sits at the center of your tech universe, but it falls short when it comes to managing and securing the scores of data you count on each day. NAS (network attached storage) fills in the gaps, acting as a central hub for all your photos, videos, music, and other files. A proper NAS-Mac setup can save time and reduce stress through easier downloads, improved organization, smoother backups, and more. Here are some great ways you can use NAS to make the most of your Mac.

Centralize your files

What Is Network Attached Storage Nas

Storing files in the public cloud is a great way to ensure they’re always attainable, but it’s easy to fail to sync the latest version or lose track of which ones you keep where, especially if you use multiple cloud providers to avoid hitting your storage limit. NAS can coordinate all those accounts, keeping tabs on your data whether it’s stored in iCloud, Amazon S3, Dropbox, or on your Mac. NAS can also automatically import and store data from mobile devices, including photos from your iPhone or iPad. This gives you a fully connected, completely organized -- and most importantly -- centralized system for your data, regardless of where it’s acquired or stored.

Share files quickly and easily

Sharing files typically means emailing them or sending them through a public cloud provider. With NAS, you can create personal cloud accounts for your friends, family, and coworkers. These accounts cost nothing and give others access to whatever files they need without requiring you to send them or upload them. Account holders can also upload their own files to the NAS, allowing for easy collaboration. To share files without requiring a login, programs like QNAP’s File Station can send a unique URL which, when clicked by the recipient, automatically downloads files from your NAS device.

Don’t waste time waiting for downloads

Downloading large files sometimes entails leaving your Mac running for hours while you wait for the download to finish. NAS devices allow you to download even when your computer is off or isn’t connected to the Internet. Set a download before heading to work, and it loads directly onto your personal cloud. Once it finishes, access the downloaded file from any connected device. For videos, QNAP’s TS-x51 model optimizes the file and format dynamically with on-the-fly transcoding, so it looks its best no matter where you watch it.

Protect your data, your equipment, and yourself

Apple’s Time Machine helps you back up your data, but it requires you to connect your Mac to an external storage device to keep it up to date. Hook up to a NAS and you can schedule automatic daily or weekly backups without having to hook up any extra hardware. QNAP’s TS-120 can also work directly with Time Machine, backing up files any time you’re connected to the home network. And if you’re concerned about security on your network, some NAS devices can be configured to operate as a VPN client, adding a layer of encryption to your web browsing. Mobile Devices can also take advantage of the VPN, as long as they can connect to WiFi.

Open Windows

If you’re like most Mac users, your computer acts as a conduit for all the data that makes your professional life run. At the office, that often requires you to work in concert with other operating systems. Some NAS devices can create a virtualized Windows environment like the TS-x53 Pro series' Virtualization Station, running applications and files that you couldn’t otherwise open. This can be handy when collaborating with coworkers who can’t agree on which OS is superior (they’ll convert eventually).

Empower your Mac to do what it does best: expedite your personal and professional advancement with awesome performance and intuitive controls. Letting NAS shoulder the burden of data management helps you and your Mac operate at the highest possible level.

This story, 'Make the most of your Mac by adding NAS' was originally published by BrandPost.

Unfettered File Access From Anywhere

In this age of high-resolution photos and near-constant video capture, the storage space in your PCs and mobile devices fills up faster than ever. While you can certainly use an external hard drive for offloading and backing up files from your PC (and by extension, from your phone), if you disconnect the hard drive and leave it in your office, you won't be able to get to those files from home, and neither will anyone else. There are ways to allow other users to share and access the files on your hard drive, but they may be challenging to implement, or carry security risks.

Instead, consider a good network-attached storage (NAS) device. As its name implies, a NAS is high-capacity storage that connects to your home or office network so that you and other users you designate can access your files from mobile devices and PCs without plugging in to the drive. Here's what you need to know to choose the right NAS.

What Can You Do With a NAS?

Once you decide that you need to store files on a network drive, you then need to figure out what you mean to do with them, in order to determine what kind of NAS you need.

For example, sharing access to Office files like spreadsheets and Word documents with your coworkers is a simple job for a NAS. If you're using the NAS to back up your laptops overnight, that's pretty straightforward, as well. But if you're serving HD videos over your home network to two tablets, a laptop, and your smart TV, all at the same time, you'll want a NAS with higher specifications for memory, processor, and network capabilities. You'll also need a more powerful NAS if you want to store big media libraries, like a collection of 100,000 stock photos, for your graphic arts studio.

Like any computer peripheral, the features offered by the various NAS units vary greatly to meet these different demands. So you'll need to understand the terms and features before you go shopping.

NAS Drives: Buying Basics

Since a NAS device is, at the simplest level, just a container for a hard drive or drives (with some added intelligence), the number one spec for any NAS unit is its potential storage capacity, determined by the number of drive bays it includes. Most consumer-grade and home-office NAS units have one or two bays, while models designed for the office have four or more. But that's not an absolute guideline.

We don't generally recommend NAS drives with just a single bay, unless they are to be used strictly for backing up data that will also reside on computers on the network. That's because of the lack of redundancy out-of-the-box. (Some single-bay NAS drives will allow you to attach a second NAS device or an external hard drive, to that end.) You don't want the only copy of your data residing on just one drive on the network. Also, the drives in these single-bay devices tend not to be user-accessible, if the NAS ships with a drive pre-installed.

For most home users who aren't video-file hoarders, a two-bay NAS should be sufficient, provided that you buy big enough drives from the outset if you'll be mirroring them. Err on the high side of capacity, though; it'll cost more now, but you don't want to have to rebuy two hard drives for your NAS to get a higher effective mirrored capacity. Remember: Mirroring takes two physical drives. More on redundancy in a moment.

Buying a NAS: Populated or Diskless?

Some NAS drives are sold pre-populated with disks, oftentimes already formatted for use in a particular RAID configuration, while others come 'diskless.' Each NAS vendor has its own tendencies in that regard. But surprise, surprise: The NAS-device makers who are also manufacturers of hard drives (Seagate, Western Digital) favor pre-populated NAS drives for obvious reasons—they lock in a sale of their own hard drives when they sell a NAS. (Not an insidious motive, mind you, just good business.) The 'indie' NAS makers that aren't drive manufacturers, such as Synology and QNAP, are more likely to sell their NAS devices diskless, though they (or more accurately, their resellers) may also offer units pre-populated and configured with drives for shoppers' convenience.

If a given NAS is offered in both pre-populated and diskless form, we suggest checking out the cost difference and making sure that the drives that are provided in the populated model work out to a good value. With pre-populated-only NAS drives from Seagate and WD, the cost of the internal drives tends to be harder to distinguish from the cost of the NAS unit.

Which Drives to Use Inside Your NAS?

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NAS makers that sell diskless NAS drives recommend certain drive models or families that have been tested for use with their NAS drives. This might coincide with the hard drives they actually manufacture, or not. Take a look at these drive-compatibility lists before you buy. If you already own a bank of hard drives you intend to install, you'll want to look for such validation. If yours are not on the list, it doesn't mean they won't work, but if you are buying drives new, it's best to stick with the NAS maker's recommendations.

Some drives from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and WD are tagged as specially designed for NAS use. Most of these 'NAS certified' hard drives have been tested to run 24/7/365, which is a bit much for regular, consumer-level drives.

If you are looking at Seagate drives, the NAS-class drives are called the 'IronWolf' and 'IronWolf Pro' lines. Straight IronWolf drives are what you're after for outfitting a NAS drive in a home; they come in 1TB to 14TB capacities, at this writing. IronWolf Pro drives are rated for service in enterprise or commercial situations. HGST's drives are the Deskstar NAS line, and Toshiba's are in the 'N' series. On the Western Digital side, the NAS-specific drives are the 'WD Red,' in capacities from 1TB to 10TB, with the 'WD Red Pro' series meant for enterprise use.

Safe (Storage) Space: Let's Talk Redundancy

As we mentioned earlier, NAS units that have more than one drive are built to offer the option for redundancy, so in two- and four-drive configurations the extra disks can simply 'mirror' the contents of the other drive. Example: A two-bay unit with two 4TB drives would offer only 4TB of usable storage if you leave it in mirror mode. The other drive is in a sense invisible, as it's used to make a second copy of all the files from the other drive in the background.

Usually, the user has the option to reconfigure the drives to gain the capacity of the second drive, if desired. One way you can do this is via 'striping,' in which the data will span both drives. Striping by itself is chancy; under some circumstances, it enhances the speed of reads and writes, since you're accessing two drives at once. But if either disk fails, it's possible that all your data will be lost, so we don't recommend this approach. It essentially doubles the failure risk.

Many NAS units also support a JBOD mode ('Just a Bunch of Disks'), which lets you address each drive as a separate drive letter and save data to discrete drives within the NAS box. This is marginally safer than just basic striping, but any data you save to a given drive is still vulnerable to the failure of that specific mechanism.

It's also possible to combine striping and mirroring across three or more drives for enhanced speed and data security. In such an arrangement, the NAS would copy the data across the drive array in such a way that the failure of one of the drives would allow the NAS to reconstruct the array (and thus save your data) if you swap in a replacement drive. This is mainly of interest to business users that need to maximize both redundancy and data transfer rates.

Best Network Attached Storage For Time Machine

Media-Streaming Subtleties

If you think a NAS drive will let you stream any type of media you have to any device or TV, keep in mind certain devices will only play certain types of files, and you'll need to get software and hardware to work together to make this happen.

For example, that, ahem, sweet DVD rip you have of Titanic in AVI format will not open on an iPhone without some jiggering. (It needs to be in MP4 format to be recognized.) Software can get around that problem, such as the ever-useful VLC Media Player utility, and some NAS units work with Chromecast, Apple TV, Roku, Android phones/tablets, and other types of hardware. It can be complicated, though, to guarantee that a specific file or file type will play on a given device, so look at the specs of the NAS closely to determine its capabilities.

A late development in NAS circles is special kinds of support for streaming 4K video, and the spec sheet is your friend in these cases. Some NAS with 4K acceleration will convert this high-resolution video on the fly to formats better suited to the bit rates of devices, such as smartphones, that are requesting it. This is an esoteric need at the moment, but know that some NAS makers will charge a premium for some of these features. It's also possible to get such on-the-fly transcoding for other, lesser resolutions. This is where the CPU that powers a NAS comes into play: a low-end Intel Atom versus a much more robust Core i3, for example.

Connectors and Controls

Most NAS drives have one or two USB ports that you can use to connect a printer or external storage drives, letting you add those to your network via the NAS itself. Once they are plugged in, just like everything else on the NAS, they can be shared with all the connected users. A frequent arrangement: A NAS drive will have one USB 2.0 port that is usually used for printer sharing, and a USB 3.0 port that can be used for external storage. (USB 2.0 is much, much slower than USB 3.0, but a printer doesn't need the fast pipe, so a USB 2.0 port is just fine.)

Some NAS units also have a 'copy' button on the front panel designed to make copying the contents of an external drive, such as a flash drive, to the NAS a one-button-press affair. You just connect the drive and tap the button, and everything on the external drive is safely copied to the NAS to a predesignated location.

NAS drives, by definition, will come with an Ethernet port, possibly two for redundancy or channel-bonding (essentially, using two Ethernet connections to enhance speed) with very high-end business models. Recent high-end models may also offer the option for 10-gigabit Ethernet, for screaming data transfer rates, though the throughput of platter hard drives makes this moot for most consumer and SOHO usage cases. (That said, a few models come with a PCI slot that may let you install an enhanced network card.)

Network Attached Storage

A few models will also come with an HDMI port; this would let you use the NAS as a media server with a direct connection to your HDMI-equipped HDTV.

Remote Access: Serving Files From Here to Anywhere

In addition to the above sharing features, most NAS drives let you send web links to people to allow them to access remotely certain files or folders located on your NAS. Your NAS can thus serve like your own private Dropbox or Google Drive, but with way more storage capacity—and no monthly bill. Many NAS makers tout this. (Look for the much-bandied term 'personal cloud' around this kind of feature.)

With this functionality, you can also access the NAS itself from any internet connection, not just via your local network. As a result, you can download files you need on the road, or stream a movie or music files resident on your home NAS to your laptop in a hotel across the country or the world, network bandwidth permitting. Most, but not all, NAS drives offer this kind of feature, so be sure to do your research before you pull the trigger if it's a must-have. (Ourselves? We wouldn't get a NAS without it.)

Below are the top NAS devices we've recently tested, ranging from simple home-oriented models to multiple-drive arrays that can serve dozens of users in an office environment. Whether you want to serve media files to the rest of the house, keep office documents in a single, accessible repository, or simply back up your digital life from your PCs, tablets, and mobile phones, there's a drive here for you.

2018 Best Network Attached Storage

For more storage options, take a look at our lists of the best external hard drives and the top SSDs, as well as our top-rated cloud storage services.