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Network-Attached Storage: 5 Bare Enclosures
Network-attached storage boxes are commonly sold already preconfigured with drives, but many companies offer the option for you to build your NAS up yourself. These storage manufacturers sell their NAS devices bare, so you can populate them with the capacity and types of hard drives you prefer.
All current and recent NAS enclosures use SATA. You can still find the odd plain-ATA unit, but they're increasingly rare, and we recommend avoiding them. Most NAS boxes offer USB 2.0 ports for transferring data from flash or external hard drives, or for sharing printers across the network. More-expensive units offer eSATA and dual ethernet connections to increase speed and provide access if one connection fails, as well as faster CPUs and better performance. USB 3.0 is just now starting to hit NAS enclosures; the Iomega StorCenter px6-300d was the first to offer this feature.
Software is another major differentiator among NAS boxes. NAS boxes run a version of Linux that you access and administrate via a Web browser. How much functionality is built into the software on the NAS varies dramatically from company to company. Products from manufacturers such as QNAP and Synology are closer in capability to a small-business server than to a simple storage device, with built-in memory and a dedicated CPU. They offer website hosting, HTML-based multimedia access across the Web, video surveillance, syncing with other NAS boxes across the Internet, and a number of additional advanced capabilities. Many small businesses would be far better served by a top-notch NAS box than by a full Windows PC-based server. Meanwhile, remote access is a common capability among NAS boxes for home and office, as is media streaming (including the ability to act as an iTunes server).
Whichever box you choose, don't overbuy. Units vary drastically in speed, features, hardware, and price, but all of the ones reviewed here can serve multimedia across a home network, having the software to do so. We looked at five boxes, one each from D-Link, Patriot, and QNAP, and two from Synology, as follows:
- D-Link ShareCenter DNS-325-110
- Patriot Javelin S4 Media Server
- QNAP TurboNAS TS-259 Pro+
- Synology DiskStation DS211+
- Synology DiskStation DS411slim
Network-Attached Storage: 5 Bare Enclosures
Choose your own hard drives to add to these network-attached storage boxes.
This NAS box has nice features and a clever case design, but it's pricey given its mediocre speed.
Priced more aggressively, this decent four-bay NAS enclosure might compete--as stands, it's deep in...
This pricey 2-bay NAS enclosure packs in features for home and office use, and it's fast, too.
Synology's fast but pricey 2-bay NAS box is loaded with features and useful software.
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