Fantastic 4-bay NAS boxes
A 4-bay network-attached storage device is the perfect multi-user storage device for today’s busy digital homes or small offices. Nathan Taylor tests 10.
Anetwork-attached storage device (NAS) is a wonderful thing. Most people who own a NAS wonder how they ever lived without it. They provide massive amounts of shared storage, as well as common services that even home users can make use of (like media libraries and backup and sync tools). They let you store your photo library in a safer place than your PC’s hard drive and they let you quickly browse and stream content to the many media players stationed through the house. And with the rise of the SSD, they’ve become even more valuable, since you probably have less storage capacity in your PC now than you did a few years ago.
This month, we’ve taken a long, hard look at some of the 4-bay NAS models currently available on the market. They’ve come a long way in the last few years. NAS boxes used to run on crummy ARM processors that your mobile phone would have laughed at — now they’re a lot faster and more powerful. Many will now go essentially as fast as your network does, while still performing a host of other tasks in the background. It’s definitely a good time to be in the market for a NAS.
HOW WE TESTED
For each device, we performed a simple copy test and measured both the write and the read speed, in megabytes per second (MB/s). All tests bar the Seagate — for which we used the included drives — were performed with three Hitachi 4TB drives installed and set up in RAID 5 (since RAID 5 tests performance more than other modes).
For NASes 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 test device only has a single port, this is not really reflected in the results.
Looking at the results, you’ll see a lot that hover in the 90–105MB/s range. This is essentially the NAS maxing out the Ethernet connection, which is where link aggregation comes into play. It means that the NAS likely has more performance to offer for when multiple devices are accessing it simultaneously.