If you only occasionally back up one or two PCs, or stream media, any of the boxes we tested will meet your needs. And few home users need more speed than even the slowest box in this roundup can give them right now.
In the next year, updated hardware from many vendors should level the playing field again. The jump in performance, however, has yet to fully trickle down to the next tier of consumer-grade NAS boxes from vendors such as LaCie and Buffalo though far more affordable, these models lack the punch of top-of-the-line products. Pricier, high-end boxes for small business can now read data at rates up to about 110 MBps and write it at about 100 MBps–almost twice as fast as most internal or direct-attached drives. Inside the box, faster CPUs and chipsets, and more memory, have improved performance significantly. Hardware features tend to vary with the price of the box, but they commonly include USB 2.0 and eSATA ports for sharing printers or backing up to external storage solo or dual ethernet jacks (dual for connection sharing or redundancy) and direct copy buttons for copying the contents of thumb drives and other storage attached to the NAS box without the need to access the box’s HTML interface. The USB 3.0 ports on some premium models are the main outward sign of change. Our ranked charts for Network-Attached Storage Devices: One or Two Bays and Network-Attached Storage Devices: Three or More Bayssummarize what we found. To see how far NAS technology has come in recent years, we tested five two-bay NAS boxes and six three-or-more-bay units, and examined their feature sets.
#WHAT IS THE BEST NAS DRIVE FOR MAC PRO#
The high-performance QNAP TS-459 Pro II earned top ranking on our chart of NAS boxes with three or more bays. Either way, remote management takes place via a Web browser or client software.
#WHAT IS THE BEST NAS DRIVE FOR MAC WINDOWS#
Modern NAS boxes run a full-blown server OS–in most cases Linux, but occasionally Windows Storage Server 2008. Most NAS boxes have two to eight hard-drive bays and use RAID for data redundancy. Usually, the connection relies on wired ethernet, but some boxes can connect wirelessly. Since it uses network protocols to transfer data, a NAS box is operating-system-agnostic: Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs alike can use the storage without special drivers. Today’s top NAS boxes also handle backups in conjunction with online storage services, link to mobile devices for sharing, act as video surveillance controllers, and even work as Wi-Fi hotspots. The network-attached storage (NAS) box–an external storage device that attaches to your network router rather than directly to your PC–has become an essential tool for any home or small business that deals with shared data and media.Īnd the breed continues to evolve: Capabilities now extend far beyond simply serving and streaming files to PCs. Synology’s two-bay DS212+ NAS drive is a full-featured speedster with an outstanding operating system.
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