Nas Solution For Mac
Network Attached Storage, or NAS, devices are very handy for a variety of reasons. Beyond just acting as shared file storage for multiple users locally, most can be configured to provide that access to you while on-the-go. Additionally, hosting some form of media server, storing images, mirroring to another unit, and more are all other reasons to get one. Many also natively support Apple's Time Machine backup tool for Macs. Using, if a file is ever deleted, you can browse back through different states of your computer through time to recover the file, or even grab a previous version. If a Mac starts acting up, you can completely restore from any point in the past as well. Apple's Time Capsule was a great option as both a destination for Time Machine backups and as a wireless router.
Now that, many are on the market for a new NAS device, so we rounded up the best consumer-grade options for anyone with a Mac or iOS device. There are a variety of My Cloud variants out there, but the most basic and widely appealing option is the model. Time Machine support is included as well as media streaming with DLNA, remote file access, and even an iTunes server. We particularly liked the ability to right-click a folder on our Mac and choose sync to copy all the files to the My Cloud.
Mobile apps for iOS and Android make it easy to access on the go, though they aren't the best-designed ones out there. There is also a web interface available if you don't happen to have one of your devices around. Using the USB port on the back, you can attach USB flash drives or hard drives to import files easily.
Aside from the My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo ups the storage capacity up to 16TB in total. If you need additional RAID options, the My Cloud Expert or My Cloud Pro models are a better bet. You can pick up the basic My Cloud Home 2TB model on or at for $139.00. B&H will not collect sales tax on orders shipped outside New York and New Jersey (Colorado and Vermont residents, ).
Seagate Personal Cloud. Alongside Western Digital, Seagate is another common brand when it comes to storage solutions. Is an excellent NAS device with 4 TB of storage.
It has a modern design, with a sleek black body and a horizontal layout, compared to the vertical orientation of the My Cloud. Family and friends can be invited to join with secure file sharing through private emails.
It also supports Time Machine, with it working as a local drive when connected through USB or across the network with Ethernet. Using the Seagate Media app, files can be accessed remotely on an iOS or Android device.
Alternatively, media can be streamed to a variety of devices, including Apple TV, Chromecast, and Roku. Many TVs from LG and Samsung also work via DLNA. Not to mention Playstation and Xbox. The Seagate Personal Cloud with 4TB of storage can be found on Amazon. Promise Apollo Cloud 2. The has one of the easiest setups around, all of which can be done from your iPhone.
As a bonus, the device supports Apple's Files app on the iPhone and iPad directly, allowing for easy file migration to and from your mobile device. Connectivity wise, this NAS device has a USB 3.0 port for backups and file transfers, and an Ethernet port for connecting to the router. The unit is powered by a dual-core processor and dual 4TB 'surveillance-class' drives which can be configured as RAID 0 or 1. We took a look at it, and found it to be a great 'set and forget' device with Time Machine compatibility, but lacking niceties found in other devices like media library streaming. The Promise Apollo Cloud 2 is available on and for $379.00.
Nas Solution For Mac Free
Synology Diskstation DS218j. Is known for their high-end network storage solutions. The DS218j is an upgraded version of their popular DS216 model from a couple years ago. Unlike some of the others, the DS218j is sold diskless, and it is up to you insert your own pair of drives. Those drives can be set up in Synology Hybrid RAID, Basic, JBOD, RAID 0, and RAID 1 configurations. Synology offers myriad applications to add capabilities to the unit.
Apps like DS File, DS Photo, DS Video, DS Cloud, and others really offer a ton of features for the Diskstation. Like the others, it supports Time Machine, but so much more. To connect, there is an Ethernet port along the back, with three USB ports available for one-time transfers or expanding the unit with external drives. Given the app-centric nature of the device, streaming options are effectively endless with the Diskstation. After software expansion, the device is able to send audio and video to Samsung TVs, Roku players, Apple TV, Google Chromecast, DLNA devices, and more. You can find the Synology DS218j Diskstation on or for $169.99. TerraMaster F2-220.
Makes some great devices, and the aptly named F2-220 is no different. It has an aluminum alloy body with easily swappable drives. Like others, it comes empty, relying on the user to install any set of drives they'd like. This device also has an Intel Celeron 2.41GHz dual-core CPU and 2GB of RAM inside to help power it, which is great if you have many users or using it as a streaming media server. There is also support out-of-the-box for Time Machine, plus a wide array of apps including a file server, mail server, web server, media server, Rsync remote server, FTP server, MySQL server and others It also supports DLNA streaming, and can act as an iTunes media server.
The TerraMaster F2-220, without drives, can be found on and for $199.99. Buffalo TeraStation 1200D.
Makes one of the best looking NAS devices on our list, fitting well within any home or office. It has two internal drive bays, with configurations ranging from 2TB to 8TB of storage.
Time Machine is supported, as well as multiple user access with remote support. It is DLNA-certified in addition to iTunes support for media server duties, although reviews suggest it may not be as robust from a file format support standpoint as some of the others. The Buffalo TeraStation 1200D starts at $227.99 at both. Happens to be the most expensive on the list, running nearly $500 without the drives. It is, however, one of the most lauded NAS devices out there, perfect for offices as well as personal use. This is capable of handling up to 64TB of storage when the drives are installed —which is a fairly easy task. It has enough internal slots for five 3.5-inch drives.
One of the best features is the internal battery. Should power ever fail, the internal battery will keep your data safe until you can get it going again. Dual Ethernet ports also make it easy to connect. One can connect to the router, the other to your Mac or the rest of the network, possibly offering increased performance, depending on network architecture. Beyond file sharing, and Time Machine support, a variety of apps are available that work with Drobo, similar to the Synology NAS. Some allow the setup of a Plex media server, others enable remote access or cloud backup, and one is even available to automatically and securely backup all photos from your iOS device.
You can find the Drobo 5N2 on or for $499.99. A deep rabbit hole Some of these devices are extremely easy to set up, like the Promise Apollo Cloud 2.
Others need a bit more configuration and maintenance. It's also very easy for a network attached storage project to get very expensive, very fast. Our list is just of the ones we've used and like, with a limitation we've applied on initial setup ease and a reasonable budget.
Many of them have super in-depth options, with large app stores hosting services that can be added that we've only alluded to. Many more can take a pile of drives for truly epic amounts of storage and a similarly profound cost —but for this, we've eliminated those as well. Take a look at the tech specs of each unit before you buy. And, don't be caught without a backup We've said it before, and we'll say it again: backups are key. While a single NAS in your own home isn't the only source of backup you should rely on, it is a crucial start to a good backup regimen. Instead of relying on yourself to consistently connect a wired hard drive and manually backup, a NAS can offer convenience and automation, as well as a variety of other features. You can extend this with off-site backup options, which is basically installing a compatible NAS in another location such as a trusted friend's house, and automatically syncing the two —but this is a topic for another day.
Vich tr ho se tao ra tac ng g i vi cng ty? Nhu cu naocha c thoa man? Lng nghe vaap ng nhu cu cua nhn vin se giup cng ty phat trin catrong ngn han va dai han.V SAO HO THANH CNG -18NIRANJAN AJWANITNG GIAM C TP OAN AJWANIVT QUA MU THUNBNG S HP TAC,TM GIAI PHAP QUA KHOKHN, BIN THACHTHC THANH C HINiranjan Ajwani, Tng giam c Tp oan Ajwani bcbach: Ti lun c gng duy tr ky nng lanh ao cua mnhmt cach t nhin. Xem li bi tp ca hc vin trong onenote for mac. Ban co th giup ho nh th nao?
Be sure to check out for alternatives to Apple's discontinued AirPort routers.
John Burek The Best NAS (Network Attached Storage) Devices of 2018 Why buy a network-attached storage (NAS) device? To give a pool of users you choose remote access to large amounts of your data. We've tested the top models to tell you which one will work best for your home or small business. 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 ), 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, a, 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 obvious reasons—they lock in a sale of their own hard drives when they sell a NAS.
(Not an insidious motive, mind you, just good business.) The 'indie' NAS makers that aren't drive manufacturers, such as Synology and QNAP, are more likely to sell their NAS devices diskless, though they (or more accurately, their resellers) may also offer units pre-populated and configured with drives for shoppers' convenience. If a given NAS is offered in both pre-populated and diskless form, we suggest checking out the cost difference and making sure that the drives that are provided in the populated model work out to a good value. With pre-populated-only NAS drives from Seagate and WD, the cost of the internal drives tends to be harder to distinguish from the cost of the NAS unit. Which Drives to Use Inside Your NAS? NAS makers that sell diskless NAS drives recommend certain drive models or families that have been tested for use with their NAS drives. This might coincide with the hard drives they actually manufacture, or not.
Take a look at these drive-compatibility lists before you buy. If you already own a bank of hard drives you intend to install, you'll want to look for such validation. If yours are not on the list, it doesn't mean they won't work, but if you are buying drives new, it's best to stick with the NAS maker's recommendations. Some drives from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and WD are tagged as specially designed for NAS use. Most of these 'NAS certified' hard drives have been tested to run 24/7/365, which is a bit much for regular, consumer-level drives. If you are looking at Seagate drives, the NAS-class drives are called the 'IronWolf' and 'IronWolf Pro' lines. Straight IronWolf drives are what you're after for outfitting a NAS drive in a home; they come in 1TB to 14TB capacities, at this writing.
IronWolf Pro drives are rated for service in enterprise or commercial situations. HGST's drives are the Deskstar NAS line, and Toshiba's are in the 'N' series. On the Western Digital side, the NAS-specific drives are the 'WD Red,' in capacities from 1TB to 10TB, with the 'WD Red Pro' series meant for enterprise use. Safe (Storage) Space: Let's Talk Redundancy As we mentioned earlier, NAS units that have more than one drive are built to offer the option for redundancy, so in two- and four-drive configurations the extra disks can simply 'mirror' the contents of the other drive. Example: A two-bay unit with two 4TB drives would offer only 4TB of usable storage if you leave it in mirror mode. The other drive is in a sense invisible, as it's used to make a second copy of all the files from the other drive in the background.
Usually, the user has the option to reconfigure the drives to gain the capacity of the second drive, if desired. One way you can do this is via 'striping,' in which the data will span both drives. Striping by itself is chancy; under some circumstances, it enhances the speed of reads and writes, since you're accessing two drives at once.
But if either disk fails, it's possible that all your data will be lost, so we don't recommend this approach. It essentially doubles the failure risk. Many NAS units also support a JBOD mode ('Just a Bunch of Disks'), which lets you address each drive as a separate drive letter and save data to discrete drives within the NAS box. This is marginally safer than just basic striping, but any data you save to a given drive is still vulnerable to the failure of that specific mechanism. It's also possible to combine striping and mirroring across three or more drives for enhanced speed and data security.
In such an arrangement, the NAS would copy the data across the drive array in such a way that the failure of one of the drives would allow the NAS to reconstruct the array (and thus save your data) if you swap in a replacement drive. This is mainly of interest to business users that need to maximize both redundancy and data transfer rates.
Media-Streaming Subtleties If you think a NAS drive will let you stream any type of media you have to any device or TV, keep in mind certain devices will only play certain types of files, and you'll need to get software and hardware to work together to make this happen. For example, that, ahem, sweet DVD rip you have of Titanic in AVI format will not open on an without some jiggering. (It needs to be in MP4 format to be recognized.) Software can get around that problem, such as the ever-useful utility, and some NAS units work with Chromecast, Android phones/tablets, and other types of hardware. It can be complicated, though, to guarantee that a specific file or file type will play on a given device, so look at the specs of the NAS closely to determine its capabilities.
A late development in NAS circles is special kinds of support for streaming 4K video, and the spec sheet is your friend in these cases. Some NAS with 4K acceleration will convert this high-resolution video on the fly to formats better suited to the bit rates of devices, such as smartphones, that are requesting it. This is an esoteric need at the moment, but know that some NAS makers will charge a premium for some of these features.
Nas Drive For Mac
It's also possible to get such on-the-fly transcoding for other, lesser resolutions. This is where the CPU that powers a NAS comes into play: a low-end Intel Atom versus a much more robust Core i3, for example.
Connectors and Controls Most NAS drives have one or two USB ports that you can use to connect a printer or external storage drives, letting you add those to your network via the NAS itself. Once they are plugged in, just like everything else on the NAS, they can be shared with all the connected users. A frequent arrangement: A NAS drive will have one USB 2.0 port that is usually used for printer sharing, and a USB 3.0 port that can be used for external storage. (USB 2.0 is much, much slower than USB 3.0, but a printer doesn't need the fast pipe, so a USB 2.0 port is just fine.) Some NAS units also have a 'copy' button on the front panel designed to make copying the contents of an external drive, such as a flash drive, to the NAS a one-button-press affair.
You just connect the drive and tap the button, and everything on the external drive is safely copied to the NAS to a predesignated location. NAS drives, by definition, will come with an Ethernet port, possibly two for redundancy or channel-bonding (essentially, using two Ethernet connections to enhance speed) with very high-end business models. Recent high-end models may also offer the option for 10-gigabit Ethernet, for screaming data transfer rates, though the throughput of platter hard drives makes this moot for most consumer and SOHO usage cases. (That said, a few models come with a PCI slot that may let you install an enhanced network card.) A few models will also come with an HDMI port; this would let you use the NAS as a media server with a direct connection to your HDMI-equipped HDTV. Remote Access: Serving Files From Here to Anywhere In addition to the above sharing features, most NAS drives let you send web links to people to allow them to access remotely certain files or folders located on your NAS. Your NAS can thus serve like your own private or, but with way more storage capacity—and no monthly bill.
Many NAS makers tout this. (Look for the much-bandied term 'personal cloud' around this kind of feature.) With this functionality, you can also access the NAS itself from any internet connection, not just via your local network. As a result, you can download files you need on the road, or stream a movie or music files resident on your home NAS to your laptop in a hotel across the country or the world, network bandwidth permitting. Most, but not all, NAS drives offer this kind of feature, so be sure to do your research before you pull the trigger if it's a must-have. We wouldn't get a NAS without it.) Below are the top NAS devices we've recently tested, ranging from simple home-oriented models to multiple-drive arrays that can serve dozens of users in an office environment. Whether you want to serve media files to the rest of the house, keep office documents in a single, accessible repository, or simply back up your digital life from your, and mobile phones, there's a drive here for you.