If you already have drives you would like to use, or are preparing to migrate an old NAS to a new one, it would be in your best interest to check the drive compatibility list of prospective manufacturers for the most up-to-date lists of drives tested and confirmed to work with your NAS device. Synology updated its policy last year, to some consternation amongst users, in such a way that many drives were released from its list of supported devices. Which of the too is best is beyond the scope of this article, but it would be best to familiarize yourself with them to some degree while deciding on your purchase.ĭrive Compatibility: Believe it or not, not every NAS is fully compatible with every drive you can fit inside it, and your choices may become more limited as time goes on. Without going too deep, ext4 was built on ext3 and is generally considered more stable, while Btrfs offers newer features and is designed specifically for NAS in a way that ext4 was not. There are two primary file systems in use in the products we tested for this page: ext4 and Btrfs. Internal File System Support: Different NAS offer different file system support, which can have bearing on a user’s choice. Number of Drive Bays: Although you can get some truly massive storage from NAS-tuned drives these days, there’s no substitute for data redundancy, and the more crucial your data-or at least, the more attached you are to it-the more important increasing your drive count becomes. If you’re on the hunt for the best NAS for you, here are some basic considerations: Quick Tips for Choosing the Best Network-Attached Storage Device Feel free to make suggestions in the comments. The NAS devices we chose to evaluate were partly determined based on availability of product, so if we didn’t get your favorite device in this list, it may simply be that we were unable to get our hands on one. But where price made sense, we tossed in a couple of four-bay options, as well as a single-bay budget choice, for good measure. Most of the machines we tested were 2-bay devices (designed to hold two drives). We spent the last few months testing out several of the best NAS drives for the home / home office user, to sort out the best across categories like Best Overall, Best Budget NAS, Best Media Server and Best NAS for Backups – and we’ve even detailed a couple of unique options for ultimate security and networking versatility. We’ll focus on the consumer end of this broad spectrum, just as we did with the best network switches.

Best nas for home cloud