Ultimate home media centre
A TWO-BAY NAS BOX CAN CENTRALISE AND SIMPLIFY YOUR MEDIA LIBRARY AND MAKE IT EASY TO SHARE WITH THE WHOLE FAMILY. WE COMPARE EIGHT OF THE LATEST.
IF HAVING A home media and file server sounds like a sweet deal to you, but you don’t have the $1,200+ for a fully-loaded four-bay network-attached storage (NAS) box, then a two-bay model can be a much more economical option. These modern day two-bays can now store up to 20TB of data, which is a whole lot of video even at 4K resolution. What’s more, they have enough processing power to do much more than just serve files. Most can transcode media on the fly, download media in the background, talk to cloud services, monitor your IP cameras and more. The latter-day NAS is more than just a place to store files — it’s a fully functioning media hub.
WHAT A NAS DOES
A lot of people tend to think of network-attached storage as just another storage medium, like a USB hard drive, except that, instead of plugging it into a USB port, you plug it into a network port on your router. The truth is that current NASes are much more than that. Yes, they do store files, and can be used as a backup target and place to store important documents. They also share those files, so anybody on your network can access them. Your mobile can watch videos stored on the NAS at the same time as someone on your PC.
But NAS boxes are also a variety of different servers at once. You can install Plex on your NAS, for example. This organises your media library and allows Plex clients to stream video from it. You can set up your NAS to organise your photos into a web-based browsable library. You can have your NAS automatically download new TV episodes for you. You can have it back up you data to cloud storage. Depending on the model, it can monitor and record your IP cameras, acting as the hub of a surveillance system. You might use it as a media player, streaming hub, TV recorder, email server and many more things. If a PC can do it, a NAS probably can as well.
Most NASes are sold without disks, so in addition to the NAS, you’ll have to buy hard disks for storage. A 4TB HDD typically runs around $180, so factor that into your cost equation.
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 were performed with twin Hitachi 4TB drives installed and set up in RAID 1. For the Seagate, we used the included drives.
For NAS boxes that supported link aggregation (that’s using two Ethernet ports and load balancing across them), we used 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 box itself faster.