Why you need a NAS box

IN TODAY’S MULTI-DEVICE HOME AND OFFICE ENVIRONMENTS, A NETWORK-ATTACHED STORAGE DEVICE IS BASICALLY ESSENTIAL — AND THEY CAN DO SO MUCH MORE THAN JUST STORE FILES. WE TEST SIX MAINSTREAM FOUR-BAY MODELS.

WITH DATA STORAGE on PCs actually shrinking thanks to SSDs, as well as more and more threats that might wipe out your photo and video collection in an instant, there has never been a better time to get a NAS box.

A network-attached storage device is a box that you plug into your network, providing a shared storage medium for all the devices on your network. You can put your media and documents on them to share them between devices, and they make an excellent backup target for your PCs and mobiles. Many NAS boxes can also do a lot more than that: they can take feed from IP cameras and record them. They can serve websites. They can transcode movies so that mobiles can play them. Some can even do virtualisation, telephony, web content management and media playback.

Four-bay devices pretty much hit the sweet spot for a lot of home users. They let you configure drives in a RAID 5 array, which is pretty much the perfect balance between reliability and capacity (in RAID 5, if any one drive in the NAS dies, you don’t lose any data; the cost is the capacity of one of the drives). With a two-bay NAS, you lose half your capacity if you want reliability; with four bays, you only have to sacrifice 25%.

They’re also well priced right now. Most NASs come diskless, meaning that they have no inherent storage capacity and you have to purchase your own hard drives to put in them. Even so, you can get a four-bay NAS, as well as four hard drives to go in it for less than $1,000 total — which is a pretty great deal for having the reliability and features of a full NAS.