Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay (8TB)
A VERY AFFORDABLE OPTION THAT DOES THE BASICS WELL.
MUCH LIKE D-LINK, Seagate seems to have largely deprecated its NAS line of products. The most recent consumer NAS, the Personal Cloud 2-Bay, is verging on three years old now. And yet, if all you want is basic media services, this is still a pretty fantastic buy. Sure, it doesn’t have the processing power or features of some of the competition, but for a bargain price of $500, you get both the NAS and two 4TB hard drives built in. Assuming about $180 for each hard drive, that makes the NAS itself work out to about $160, which is a bargain unmatched. For that price, you get a sealed desktop-style case, suitable for placement in an AV cabinet. There’s only a single USB port for a backup drive, and only a single Ethernet port — not that the latter matters, since the device is incapable of maxing out an Ethernet link. It runs on an unspecified ARM processor.
It runs Seagate’s NAS OS, a Linux-based solution: a simple, tab-based affair mostly focused on delivering the basics — file and DLNA services, backup and sync. There is a modest selection of additional tools you can install, including Plex, a neat little surveillance manager, ownCloud, BitTorrent Sync and WordPress. When it comes to the suite of third-party app offerings, we’d say it’s somewhat better than WD, a little weaker than Netgear, and well behind QNAP, Synology and Asustor.
The fact is, however, that most people will never use those third-party apps. If you’re one of those people who simply wants file and media services, then this is actually a very nice offering. It’s not particularly fast, but there are well-designed mobile apps for setup and media access, including remote access, and the whole thing is really very plugand-play.