Most NAS enclosures come with no hard drives pre-installed. This is where the cost of the NAS as a whole can almost double. While you could throw in some old desktop drives you no longer use, this isn't recommended. NAS hard drives are specifically designed for continuous operation and come with some advanced features not found in desktop-class drives. The NAS devices we cover in this article will come with enough storage to fit the needs of most people, but you still want to look ahead and consider how much storage you will need not just now, but also in the future.

Included in File Station are advanced search and filtering tools that make organizing and sharing your home media incredibly easy. The RS819 supports the following protocols for fantastic compatibility: AFP, FTP, iSCSI, NFS, SMB and WebDAV.

Overview

Easy-to-use software: Some NAS operating systems, like those from QNAP and Synology, are better than others. Surveillance Station includes 2 free licenses. Connecting more cameras and devices requires additional licenses. Something else to consider when shopping for your next NAS is the connections and controls they have available. My thoughts: Synology DiskStation DS3622xs+ gets far more right than it does wrong. There are 12 drive bays that can be expanded, so too can the 16GB of DDR4 RAM. The dual 10Gb LAN ports are also impressive. All NAS systems in this guide are compatible with (and can be accessed by) Windows, Mac, Android and Linux operating systems

Synology's DS419slim is an interesting little enclosure. It's super-compact, coming in at just 120mm x 105mm x 142mm, and weighs just 0.66kg. Because it's so small and only takes 2.5-inch drives, Synology needed only to add a single 60mm fan to keep it running cool. The most modern and regularly updated NAS systems will support the very latest 20TB NAS hard drives (such as the Seagate Ironwofl 20TB and WD Red 20TB) There are many different RAID configurations you can set up on a NAS, but which ones are available to you depends on how many hard drive bays you have, and how many hard drives you have to fill them. Synology uses a custom RAID setup called Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR)---seen as the selected option in the screenshot above---designed to keep your drives redundant. That means you'll need more drives, but if one fails, you won't lose any data, because it'll be mirrored on another drive. You can read more about RAID here, if you aren't familiar with it. Redundancy allows you to mirror the data stored on one hard drive to another, so should one fail, the data is still kept safe on the mirrored drive.

Btrfs: advanced file system for data protection

Then there’s the included support for expansion units to add a further 9 drive bays to the mix. This enclosure is future-proof and would make for a solid investment for those looking for a server to last them for years before needing to find a replacement. Bays, 2x PCIe Gen 3 M.2 NVMe 2280, Dual Core AMD Emb.Ryzen R1600 CPU, 4-32GB DDR4 ECC Memory, 2x 1Gbe Port, 10GbE Optional Upgrade Slot, 3-5yr Warranty All NAS drives can be accessed locally over the network, as well as secure remote access is possible with brand-supported services (at no additional cost)

My thoughts: If you’re looking at the DS220+ as the perfect NAS but find the two drive bays a little too limiting for storage capacity, the DS420+ may be a better option. It has four drive bays and even SSD caching support. It features a quad-core 2.0 GHz CPU, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, two Gigabit Ethernet ports and an HDMI port for an external video and audio connection. The RAM is even upgradeable with a maximum of 8GB being accepted should you want that extra bit of performance. CPU: Intel Celeron J4025 | Drive bays: 4 | RAM: 2GB DDR4 (max 6GB) | Features: 2x 1Gb LAN, 2x USB 3.0, upgradable RAM Whilst on the topic of the included drives, with a total capacity of 8TB, each drive has a capacity of 2TB and they ship in a RAID 5 configuration. This provides you with 6TB of usable storage whilst still having redundancy in place.The Surveillance Station tool provides intelligent monitoring and video management tools such as the ability to manage multiple IP cameras with live streaming to help safeguard the most important areas of your home. The PCIe Slot is PCIe 3×2 and the M.2 SSD Bays are PCIe 3×1 (likely limitations of all this H/W on a Celeron+chipset A NAS is often something that unfortunately has to be left on the shelf due to their typical boxy design, but that is certainly not the case with the Synology RS819. The F4-210 is compatible with 3.5” and 2.5” SATA hard drives and 2.5” SATA SSDs. Each bay supports up to 16TB disks with a maximum capacity of 64TB. Just bear in mind that the total storage available to you will depend on the RAID configuration you decide to use.