Features
What bells and whistles do you get?
The good news is that all six of our drives support core Mac services: AFP file sharing, Time Machine backups and audio-only iTunes media servers. Netgear’s ReadyNAS drive wins bonus points for allowing you to configure Time Machine on a user-by-user basis, complete with drive quotas. Support for iTunes is built into five of the drives, with only the Synology DS216se requiring you to install it separately via its app store.
Speaking of apps, which widen your drive’s capabilities even further with support for more sophisticated media servers like Plex and online platforms such as WordPress and Joomla, both Synology and Netgear drives led the way with support for over 70 apps each. The Zyxel comes a distant third with 13 apps (but techie users can get more by manually installing the Fun Plug package), while the WD My Cloud and Personal Cloud opt for quality over quantity with 11 and eight apps respectively. Bottom of the pile comes the LinkStation 420, with no app support at all.