9 Best Network Attached Storage (NAS) Solutions for Personal and Official Use

There has been an exponential growth in digital data generated by homes and businesses over the last decade. From personal photo collections, home surveillance recordings to critical company files and databases, storage needs are ever increasing.

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Simply purchasing external USB hard drives as storage expansions comes with massive risks of data loss due to drive failures, accidents or ransomware attacks. Backing up to public cloud services may mitigate some risks but brings privacy concerns due to lack of control over your data.

This is where dedicated Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices come in as robust local storage solutions for reliably securing your data onsite while ensuring 24×7 availability and wire-speed access. NAS solutions offer abundant disk capacities tailored to data growth needs along with useful data protection technologies like RAID, snapshots and backups.

In this expert guide, we explore the best NAS options for secure data storage and access whether at home or for your business based on actual usage requirements and budgets.

Why Networked Storage Beats External Drives

While external USB drives up to 16TB may seem as quick storage expansions for ever growing data, they come with severe availability, security and management limitations:

Single Point of Failure – Data loss from drive corruption or failure. No redundancy or backups.
Limited Connectivity – Can be accessed only from one computer via direct USB cable. No networking.
Manual Maintenance – Time consuming connects/disconnects for transfers and backups.
Vulnerable to Theft – Easily misplaced or stolen destroying all stored data.
Restrictive Access – Cannot be easily accessed remotely when away from home or office.

In comparison purpose built NAS devices are robust networked data hubs designed with high reliability and security safeguards:

Robust Protection – RAID technology prevents data loss from drive failures along with other common features like snapshots and cloning.
Non-Stop Availability – Hot swappable drives enable expanding storage capacities without halting operations.
Network Accessible – Wire speed access to data from anywhere over LAN and WAN (VPN) links. Common protocols like SMB, AFP and NFS allow simultaneous connections from multiple devices with proper file locking mechanisms.
Remote Administration – Web based management consoles for convenient maintenance avoiding direct hardware access. Proactively identify risks like failed drives and remedy issues.
Better Physical Security – Rack mounted form factors with Kensington locks for securing disk investments and preventing thefts in offices. Robust steel body constructions on desktop NAS models as well.
Lower Costs – Obtain 2X capacities for only 20-30% more versus buying external USB disks due to RAID savings. And centralized disks eliminate replicating the same data locally on multiple systems.

Typical NAS Storage Needs

Private Home Users Primary Storage Needs Include:

Photo & Video Collections – ~500 GB per Person
Music Libraries – ~100 GB per Person
Surveillance Footage – ~2TB per 4 Cameras
Personal Documents – ~100 GB

Business Storage Needs Depending on Industry:

Office Documents – ~100s GB (depends on no. of employees. ~30GB per Employee)
Accounting, ERP Databases – ~500 GB (depends on years of historical data retention needed)
Design Files (CAD/CAM/Multimedia Projects) – ~TBs (depends on project sizes and lengths)
Surveillance Recording Data – ~3-4TB per 8 Cameras
Industry Specific Files – Telemetry, Sensing Data, Simulation Outputs etc.

So typical storage needs can vary from 4-8 TB for personal NAS to 10s of TB for SMBs based on number of people and use cases. Planning capacities as per current needs along with 50-100% projected growth is recommended.

Now let us explore key NAS hardware capabilities to look for.

NAS Hardware Capabilities

Processor

The processor (CPU) handles all the data transfer workloads in a NAS device. For home media centric usage, even entry level CPUs like ARM cores and Intel Atom suffice given the light workloads. Although Intel Celeron and Core series are popular choices providing snappier response times. Businesses running intensive database apps, media transcoding, backups and other storage tasks require quad core or higher Xeon class processors in their NAS for adequate performance.

Memory

The buffer memory (DRAM) on a NAS has similar performance benefits as in PCs when handling simultaneous traffic from multiple users and applications. Bumping up default capacities with additional memory modules helps here. For 32-bit devices the maximum RAM support is often limited to 2-6 GB due to address limitations. But newer 64-bit based devices support upto 128GB RAM allowing large filesystem caches for faster local response times. ECC RAMs are also used for superior error correction essential in enterprise class NAS hardware.

Storage Media

Hard Disk Drives:

Cost effective and high capacity, Hard Disk Drives (HDD) are the most common NAS storage media for large archived data. Enterprises utilize higher RPM 15K drives for better performance while 7200rpm and 5900rpm drives store mid to low priority data. Typical NAS provide hot swappable bays for easily adding more storage on demand by inserting additional HDDs.

Solid State Drives:

For applications needing blazing fast access speeds like databases and metadata caches, NAS increasingly provide dedicated Solid State Drive slots – typically M.2 NVME PCIe interfaces seen on laptops and desktops. Although capacities max out at 4TB currently for SSDs, their 300K IOPS (100x speedier than HDDs) make for an excellent storage tier 0. And SSD costs keep reducing yearly, making all flash storage more affordable.

Storage Protection

To protect against irreversible data loss from drive failures, NAS provide RAID storage protection schemes to keep operations running 24×7 by tolerating certain disk failures based on configurations:

RAID Type	Description	Drive Fault Tolerance	Capacity Utilization
RAID 0	Block level striping	Zero	100%
RAID 1	Block level mirroring	1 Disk	50%
RAID 5	Striping + Distributed Parity	1 Disk	67-94%
RAID 6	Striping + Double Parity	2 Disks	50-88%
RAID 10	Striping + Mirroring	1 Disk Per Mirrored Pair	50%

Notes:

Rebuilding Failed RAID Drives: After replacing dead drives, a RAID rebuild operation restored lost data parity or mirrors from surviving disks. Rebuild times depend on number of disks in the set. RAID 5/6 rebuilds are longer than RAID 1 mirrors typically.
RAID Strip Chunk Size: Typical values range between 64KB to 1MB. Match stripe size to typical IO workload patterns for optimal performance. Large 1MB stripes benefit sequential traffic while smaller stripes help randon IOs .

Modern NAS also strengthen protection via:

Snapshots: Lightweight point-in-time copies of data volumes captured frozen in an instant without halting ongoing operations. Help recover older consistent versions after unwanted changes.
Clones: Full bit-for-bit volume copies containing independent duplicate data pools used for multiple purposes from backups to dev/test pools.
Bit Rot Protection: Data self-healing from inevitable decay over time during storage. ECC RAM plus scrub patrols proactively detect errors. Some advanced file systems like ZFS use stronger checksums to prevent bit rot.
Remote Replication: HA configurations maintain a secondary warm disaster recovery NAS at a remote site in sync via incremental WAN replication. Failing over to secondary system allows restoring business services quickly after outages.

Connectivity & Access Protocols

compatible with all popular desktop and mobile platforms for convenient ubiquitous access. Common NAS access protocols include:

SMB – Windows File Sharing

AFP – Apple Filing Protocol

NFS – Network File System for Linux/UNIX

Above network protocols handle multi-user concurrency, caching and synchronization essential for high performance enterprise access needs. In networking parlance, NAS are file level storage (file IO) while block level storage protocols like iSCSI are meant for directly exporting storage blocks to virtual machines. Now onto practical product recommendations tailored for home users and businesses.

Best Personal NAS Devices

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Refer to earlier section for home user recommendations.

Best Business NAS Solutions

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Refer to earlier section for SMB recommendations.

Key Considerations for NAS Deployments

Here are some closing best practices around storage capacity planning, hardware sizing, network considerations and cost-benefit analysis for getting the most from NAS deployments:

Storage Capacity Planning

Audit current storage utilization levels broken down by usage – databases, shares, backups etc.
Project near term 50-100% growth for additional capacity headroom.
Compare equivalent NAS solution costs with scaling using public cloud subscriptions alone before decide build vs buy economics.

Hardware Sizing & Selection

Storage workload types dictate CPU cores (parallelism), memory sizes (cache) and drive speeds (low latency HDD vs SSD) needed.
Prioritize reliability with enterprise grade components (ECC RAM) and fault tolerance (redundant disks, NICs, PSUs).
Check warranty support durations and software update committments before purchase.

Network Considerations

Bond multiple Ethernet ports for additional throughput exceeding 1Gbps individual link speeds.
Configure VLANs for storage traffic isolation from corporate networks.
Enable jumbo frame support on network switches for larger IO sizes and throughput.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Consider savings from consolidating existing external drives to a centralized NAS avoiding standalone storage duplications.
Factor benefits from enhanced workforce productivity given anytime anywhere data access.
Account for various direct and intangible savings against server outages and data restores earlier.

Weighing available solution capabilities versus current and future requirements helps pick the ideal NAS enhancing data protection while unlocking productivity for homes and businesses alike. Reach out in comments below if any specific guidance needed.