Reece Bithrey delves head-first into the world of network-attached-storage to help decide which one’s best for you. On this page: the MyCloud solution.
Network attached storage at its core is a simple idea: get one or several hard drives and connect them up to a local area network with the help of a slow but efficient mini PC. Within that category though, there’s a huge amount of variety, from dead basic models that look like a normal external hard drive, to more powerful units that can run other useful programs – like media, game or ad-blocking servers.
Knowing where to start with it can be quite difficult, so I’ve taken it upon myself to be your guinea pig and wade through the fiddliness to work out which type of drive is best for your needs.
This is a four page article about the world of NAS drives, and my journey of bulk storage towards the end-goal of having a functioning device for what I need it to do – without tearing my hair out.
This is the first and most important question you’re likely to ask if you’ve decided that you want to go beyond having a stack of external HDDs or SSDs for storing your data on, or for more advanced tasks such as running servers of all kinds.
A NAS can do many things, be it for use as a media server on services such as Plex or Jellyfin, for running a home surveillance system, or turning it into a Minecraft server, for instance.
Once you’ve decided what you’re going to be using the system for then determines what kind of system you can get.
My system is mostly going to be used as a Plex server for storing and having quick access to home video and photos, as well as for the large selection of local music and DVD/Blu-Ray backups I still have. Yes, I am a bit analogue, but it’s nice to have what’s essentially your own version of Netflix without the pesky subscriptions or ads, but more on that later.
