Best NAS drives tested

Network-attached storage (NAS) is the ideal place to keep files and media for access all around your home or small office

We test six of the best networkattached storage options for your home or small office environment

The NAS units tested here contain a processor running server software, with a variety of extra apps, and two or more bays into which you slot standard SATA III hard drives. They may be sold as enclosures or with drives. Using multiple drives lets you implement RAID schemes (see www.snipca.com/33906). RAID 0 splits data across two or more drives, which can improve speed. RAID 1 mirrors your data to two drives, so if one fails you won’t lose files (known as ‘redundancy’)

– but you’ll need two 1TB drives to get 1TB of capacity. RAID 5, for three or more drives, sacrifices less capacity while surviving any one drive failing.

An external 4TB USB 3.0 hard drive costs around £80, so why pay three times that for a box to which you add, say, four 1TB hard drives at £35 each – or four 2TB at £60 for redundancy? Because NAS processing power lets you access data over your home network more flexibly from PCS and other devices. You could set up your video collection to stream, via apps like Plex, to your smart TV; create an itunes server to play music to your Sonos speakers; store and view your family photos; run your own online storage server instead of relying on the likes of Google Drive; host a website; run your home-security system, and more. Check the manufacturer’s website for full details of each NAS’S features. USB ports are also built in to use external drives as additional storage or backup.