Network-attached storage (NAS) is just the ticket for storing and streaming your own videos, music, and digital photos around the house and even across the world. It can be just like Spotify, YouTube, or Netflix, except with your own media.
NAS is also immensely handy for backing up and synchronizing the data on your computers and mobile devices. Backing up to local storage is much faster than relying on a cloud service such as DropBox or OneDrive, and the same goes for restoring an accidentally deleted file or recovering from a crashed system.
It’s also easy to set up a NAS box to function just like those cloud services, enabling access from anywhere in the world. In fact, NAS box builders have taken to calling their products “private clouds” in an effort to make the concept more familiar to consumers.
To get the best of both worlds, most boxes will sync with cloud storage services, providing another layer of data redundancy and disaster-recovery options. If you experience a disaster at home—a flood, fire, or earthquake—you’ll at least have the peace of mind that comes with knowing your data is safely backed up at another physical location.
A word on pricing: Not all NAS box manufacturers also build hard drives, so many of them sell these boxes “unpopulated;” i.e., without any hard drives installed. When you’re comparing prices, make sure you know whether or not the drivers are included. If you’re not familiar with formatting a hard drive or setting up an array of drives, you might find it more convenient to buy a NAS box that’s populated and ready to go right out of the box.
The WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra is one of the least-expensive two-bay NAS boxes you’ll find, but it’s still very fast; in fact, it was nearly as fast as the business-oriented Netgear ReadyNAS 212, which costs twice as much. That’s a combination that’s hard to beat. We’ve picked the unpopulated version here, but you can buy one with the drives already installed and configured as RAID 1 for data redundancy (a 4TB configuration costs $349 on Amazon ).
All of the boxes in the My Cloud series feature the same easy-to-use interface, and this model comes with a healthy collection of apps, including an onboard DLNA media server. You can even plug a Z-Wave dongle into its USB port and use it as a smart-home control center. WD’s consumer-oriented My Cloud Mirror (Gen 2) is essentially the same product with fewer business-oriented features. Populated My Cloud Mirrors are slightly less expensive than populated EX2 models ( $299 for a 4TB model on Amazon ), but you can’t buy one un populated.
Synology’s DS216play is the least-expensive NAS box we’ve seen that supports hardware-assisted 4K video transcoding. Synolog sells this NAS box unpopulated, so you’ll need to provide and install your own drives, a process that’s rendered a little more difficult than most because the drives mount directly into the bays, versus on trays that slide into the bays. Relatively slow write times means client backups will take longer than with several competing boxes, including the WD My Cloud Mirror EX2, but there’s plenty else to like, including the ability to host home security cameras.
The Seagate Personal Cloud stands out from the crowd because it’s super cheap (just $139.99 with a 3TB drive at Amazon ) and highly capable. Yowser! Bang for the buck it’s got, but it’s a single-bay box, which puts your data at risk from drive failure if you don’t attach an equal-sized USB drive to back it up regularly. Seagate also offers its Personal Cloud in dual-bay configurations, but they aren’t quite the same eye-catching bargains (the populated 2-bay/4TB model STCS4000100 costs $299.
