For most home users, these don’t need to be especially high-2GB of RAM or less will take care of any backups you need, and putting your NAS to work as a media server will likely be fine. Hardware Specifications: A NAS is essentially a small computer, and as such, specifications like RAM and CPU are important considerations, also depending on your use case. But if,say, you want to network multiple NAS devices together or you’d like your device to serve as a cloud music server that you can reach no matter where you are, then you need to verify that the model you’re considering can do what you want, and be sure it does so without much hassle. When it comes to local backups and Plex support, for the most part you can choose whatever NAS you’d like. Interface and Features: The emphasis on this is weakening as time goes on and NAS makers’ user interfaces become more refined-and their features largely reach parity with one another-but you are going to want to do some research to make sure that a given NAS will accommodate your use case.

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.

Home video server