Backup basics covered: the best two-bay NAS boxes

Need a personal NAS to back up your work? Nathan Taylor tests six.

So your PC’s storage just doesn’t cut it anymore for all the media you’ve downloaded. Those fancy new SSDs do have a downside after all. So maybe you’re looking to up your capacity with a network-attached storage device — a device that can offer not just additional terabytes but actually provide extra services, like DLNA streaming to your smart TV, automated backup to and from PCs and cloud services, remote access to files, shared file access, live file transcoding for mobiles and maybe even more.

Below, we’ve looked at six of the top two-bay NAS boxes available today, perfect for someone who’s willing to pay a little more to get a device that does a lot more. They’re all fast, and some offer a vast host of additional features, like direct output to a TV screen, business and content services and much more.

HOW WE TESTED

For each device reviewed here, we performed a simple copy test and measured both the write and the read speed, in megabytes per second. All tests — bar the Seagate — were performed with twin Hitachi 4TB drives installed and set up in RAID 1. For the Seagate, we used the included drives.

For NASs that supported link aggregation (that’s using two Ethernet ports and load balancing across them), we did use both Ethernet ports. However, given the client device only has a single port, this is not really reflected in the results. Link aggregation in general doesn’t make a single client go faster — it makes multiple clients access the NAS faster. As it is, pretty much all of these NASs (except perhaps the Seagate) effectively max out a single Gigabit Ethernet connection.

“Maybe you’re looking to up your capacity with a network-attached storage device — a device that can offer not just additional terabytes but actually provide extra services.”