The Best NAS (Network Attached Storage) Devices for 2019

Unfettered File Access From Anywhere

In this age of high-resolution photos and near-constant video capture, the storage space in your PCs and mobile devices fills up faster than ever. While you can certainly use an external hard drive for offloading and backing up files from your PC (and by extension, from your phone), if you disconnect the hard drive and leave it in your office, you won’t be able to get to those files from home, and neither will anyone else. There are ways to allow other users to share and access the files on your hard drive, but they may be challenging to implement, or carry security risks.

Instead, consider a good network-attached storage (NAS) device. As its name implies, a NAS is high-capacity storage that connects to your home or office network so that you and other users you designate can access your files from mobile devices and PCs without plugging in to the drive. Here’s what you need to know to choose the right NAS.

What Can You Do With a NAS?

Once you decide that you need to store files on a network drive, you then need to figure out what you mean to do with them, in order to determine what kind of NAS you need.

For example, sharing access to Office files like spreadsheets and Word documents with your coworkers is a simple job for a NAS. If you’re using the NAS to back up your laptops overnight, that’s pretty straightforward, as well. But if you’re serving HD videos over your home network to two tablets, a laptop, and your smart TV, all at the same time, you’ll want a NAS with higher specifications for memory, processor, and network capabilities. You’ll also need a more powerful NAS if you want to store big media libraries, like a collection of 100,000 stock photos, for your graphic arts studio.

Like any computer peripheral, the features offered by the various NAS units vary greatly to meet these different demands. So you’ll need to understand the terms and features before you go shopping.

NAS Drives: Buying Basics

Since a NAS device is, at the simplest level, just a container for a hard drive or drives (with some added intelligence), the number one spec for any NAS unit is its potential storage capacity, determined by the number of drive bays it includes. Most consumer-grade and home-office NAS units have one or two bays, while models designed for the office have four or more. But that’s not an absolute guideline.

We don’t generally recommend NAS drives with just a single bay, unless they are to be used strictly for backing up data that will also reside on computers on the network. That’s because of the lack of redundancy out-of-the-box. (Some single-bay NAS drives will allow you to attach a second NAS device or an external hard drive, to that end.) You don’t want the only copy of your data residing on just one drive on the network. Also, the drives in these single-bay devices tend not to be user-accessible, if the NAS ships with a drive pre-installed.

For most home users who aren’t video-file hoarders, a two-bay NAS should be sufficient, provided that you buy big enough drives from the outset if you’ll be mirroring them. Err on the high side of capacity, though; it’ll cost more now, but you don’t want to have to rebuy two hard drives for your NAS to get a higher effective mirrored capacity. Remember: Mirroring takes two physical drives. More on redundancy in a moment.

Buying a NAS: Populated or Diskless?

Some NAS drives are sold pre-populated with disks, oftentimes already formatted for use in a particular RAID configuration, while others come “diskless.” Each NAS vendor has its own tendencies in that regard. But surprise, surprise: The NAS-device makers who are also manufacturers of hard drives (Seagate, Western Digital) favor pre-populated NAS drives for…