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Depending on whether your NAS comes with hard drives pre-installed or not, you may need to start by inserting hard drives into the NAS’s drive bays. Next, connect the power and local area network cable from your router to the NAS, and power it on. Following this, you will likely follow guidance by the software included with your NAS to finish the rest of the installation process. It will involve locating, formatting, and other steps, depending on what you plan to do with your NAS. This setup is ideal, as it allows you to expand the storage capacity of the NAS over time, and even swap out defective drives without losing data in some models. If you're on a tight budget and don't need to store a ton of data, the Buffalo LinkStation 210 is a great option.
Like other options, Plex also transcodes on the fly and automatically adjusts its performance and quality for available bandwidth. During my testing, I had no trouble with streaming wirelessly over my gigabit router and mid-tier Internet service, nor did I encounter any codec errors from playing an incompatible file. We looked at the QNAP TS-230 as a budget-priced two-bay NAS, but its ARM-based processor is not recommended for Plex media service beyond H.264-encoded videos. So although it may be fine for a single stream of highly compressed videos, a NAS array with an Intel or AMD x86 processor is better for home use. If you’re curious, nearly every NAS maker, including Asustor and Zyxel, offers a live web-based demo of its operating system that’s worth checking out. The DS220+ eked out a slim victory in three of our four speed tests, with transfer speeds between 62 and 110 megabytes per second.
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Otherwise, if something goes wrong with the NAS, you may have problems getting customer support—or worse, you may discover that you voided the warranty. Creating a unique user account for each person who accesses your NAS is a good idea. You can do so on any of the NAS devices we tested by going into the user settings in the interface. Be sure to give each user the appropriate permissions—you don’t want everyone to have god-level admin access to your NAS. If you want to give someone the ability to upload files to the NAS, give that user account write permissions as well as read permissions.
The result is a hosting platform that has built in redundancy, stability, and security, in order to provide a better hosting environment. Though it’s a bit on the pricey side, particularly considering that it doesn’t come with drives to fill its two drive bays, the Asustor Lockerstor 2 AS6602T is the way to go if speed is a priority. When we inserted a fresh drive to simulate replacing a failed drive, it rebuilt its array without trouble. With the NAS running, we pulled the drive out of the second bay, and the NAS beeped at us until we acknowledged a drive-failure notification. We also received an email notification at the address we’d set up previously. Logging in to DiskStation Manager, we found another notification, as well as instructions for how to rebuild the drive array in the Storage Manager once we had replaced it.
Fedora Server
It also includes an HDMI-out port, which is handy for monitoring surveillance systems or if you want to view media directly from your NAS connected to a TV. If you plan to use the DS220+ to store video footage from an IP camera, you have to license each camera on your home surveillance system. You get two of those licenses for free, but beyond that you have to pay $50 per camera. You get quick access to every package you install with DiskStation Manager’s drop-down menu. We used a Kill A Watt EZ to test the power consumption on each NAS when it was performing a task , when it was idle, and when it had its energy-saving options enabled.
Other handy features include the ability to easily schedule backups from multiple devices and share files with others by creating private links. Unusually for a device that’s just about as easy to set up as an ordinary external hard drive, it also comes with advanced security features. We think it's the best NAS for the average person who wants a straightforward device. Design-wise, QTS takes at least some of its inspiration from iOS, loading up all your add-on packages as icons on a desktop. As with DiskStation Manager, it’s a good idea to check out the live demo of QTS before you buy so you can see how it works. You can also turn the DS220+ on and off according to a schedule, and it supports Wake-on-LAN and multiple fan-speed modes, the latter of which can help reduce the overall noise of the DS220+.
Plex Media Server
That said, if you’ve never administered your own email server before, I can recommend giving it a try. If nothing else, like running a web server, you can truly learn a lot about the technical side of how email works. Email is a very old technology too, so not only is it well documented, it’s quite nostalgic too, like a link back to the past. PCMag supports Group Black and its mission to increase greater diversity in media voices and media ownerships.
Many NAS devices have even added photo-management tools and file-syncing services that attempt to replicate various cloud storage offerings. While those NAS tools aren’t as rich with features as commercial storage services from Google, Apple, and others, they can at least provide an adequate alternative to pricey subscriptions. The four-bay QNAP TS-451D2-4G has hardware similar to that of the two-bay NAS boxes we like but adds two drive bays for additional storage, redundant backup, and a bit more speed when storing files.
Like the DS220+, the TS-251D-4G-US posted speeds of 109 to 110 MB/s for large multi-gigabyte files and transfer rates around 89 to 96 MB/s for folders filled with thousands of music files. Unlike our main pick, the TS-251D-4G-US can encrypt whole volumes, not just folders. Both the DS220+ and the TS-251D-4G-US are fast for home file-storage and background tasks such as backing up your family's laptops, downloading torrents, and automatically transcoding videos from a queue. The front of the DS220+ features a removable plate that hides the drive bays, as well as LED indicators for general status, network connectivity, and the status of each drive.
Subsonic is a longstanding contender in the media library game, albeit one that was originally designed for networking a large music library from a network. As such, video streaming, as well as mobile and browser app streaming, are among certain premium features that require a simple $1/month subscription. Like Plex, Emby uses a client/server setup, where you install the server onto a host device and then install a playback client onto a Roku, Apple TV, or Samsung/LG Smart TV. Alternatively, you can use the web app on another PC. If you are using the free version, these must be on the same local network as your server.
The beauty of a NAS device is that it can use some version of a technology called Redundant Array of Independent Disks . This tech allows the software that manages the NAS devices to distribute and duplicate the data it stores across multiple hard disks. That means even if one of the drives fails completely, the RAID system can simply take in a new, completely empty drive and repopulate it with the data the failed drive was carrying. There are different levels of RAID that perform this function in different ways depending on exactly what users need. The F5-422 is a well appointed five-bay NAS device that delivered relatively fast file transfer scores in testing.
We don't generally recommend NAS drives with just a single bay, unless they are to be used strictly for backing up data that willalsoreside on computers on the network. (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. For example, a typical business scenario might be sharing access to Office files, like spreadsheets and Word documents, with your coworkers and perhaps backing up select office devices on a regular basis. Additional layers of data security and serving files to a relatively large number of users is typically where businesses need to be careful about NAS storage.
This server software by Microsoft makes accessing your files and media from any computer in your home, whether you’re there or away. The most obvious difference between the Server and Home editions of this software is that it's designed for Windows. While you can install it on Macs, it doesn't work out-of-the-box with OS X because it doesn't support the latest version of its operating system. The Windows Server edition is the only one that works on OS X and can be used to connect a variety of devices like your printer and scanner. Storing gigabytes of media data on your working laptop, which you take with you whenever you go, seems to be a bad decision, because you can simply lose it or break and then your data will be lost forever.
If you fear the unthinkable event of a fire and losing precious photos or replaceable or sensitive data stored on computers or external drives, the IoSafe Bay NAS eases those fears. Despite being a secondary feature, video streaming works fairly well on Subsonic, and thanks to the huge quantity of transcoding plugins available, you can play just about every codec. Subsonic Premium also allows you to watch videos from devices like a Chromecast, Sonos system, or an Android/iOS/Windows smartphone like the Pixel 4 . One of the first things you’ll notice about Plex is that its menus are beautiful on every platform. The menus are fast and easy to navigate, though I do run into some hiccups trying to browse my stupidly large music collection.
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