Home NAS
Home NAS devices are very difficult for most consumers to buy without making a big mistake. This is understandable since there is much complexity to the network attached storage topic that few people have more than limited exposure to.
Vendors of these home network storage products often do the buying public a disservice with the way they advertise these products and design the boxes.
Why, for instance, would you not typically want to buy the largest storage device for the least amount of money? Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?
With home NAS devices it is more complicated than that. Let me start by mentioning a few kinds of machines that you probably do NOT want to buy for home media or file storage needs.
1.) A single drive product. To keep prices down, many vendors offer their NAS devices with just one hard drive. But a wise consumer wants RAID NAS, which protects your data from loss if a single hard drive fails. You simply need to have more than one hard drive to do that.
2.) The largest capacity for the lowest cost. There are a couple of problems with this. First is that you may be getting a low quality, slow hard drive. Second is that you may get very little warranty, like maybe only one year when others offer three or even five year warranty.
In addition, a low cost unit may be missing key features that you do not realize you are missing until you learn more about home NAS devices in general; something you often do AFTER you buy one.
3.) A USB “challenged” disk storage unit. By USB challenged I mean a unit with only one USB port, or one that does not support both USB printer sharing and external USB hard drive attachment for backup and sharing.
Some people buy a home network storage device just to backup their individual computers to, but I suspect that is a small percentage of this market.
