Considering a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive? Here’s everything you need to know

Almost everyone has heard of external storage drives at one point, whether that encompassed a USB flash drive, an external USB hard drive, or an external USB solid state drive – these are also known as direct-attached storage (DAS). But a less commonly referred to item is a Network-attached storage (NAS) drive, which as you can infer from the name, is a storage drive that is connected to your network.

NAS drives are available for both enterprise and personal use cases, and they can vary widely in speed and capabilities. Since external drive options are already available with USB and even Thunderbolt connectivity for personal computers, you might be wondering, why would someone ever want to bother with a NAS drive? That’s a good question that we hope to answer in today’s piece.

Why use a NAS drive?

The primary benefit of a NAS drive is that anyone connected to the network it’s attached to can view it from their machine. This eliminates the need to disconnect the drive from one machine and reattach it to another. Moreover, multiple people can access the NAS drive at the same time, which isn’t possible with a USB-attached external drive that you might connect to an individual computer.

In an enterprise environment, a NAS drive allows teams to collaborate and share data more effectively, while in a personal environment, a NAS drive enables multi-user convenience relative to whatever you may have stored in the NAS drive storage.

I have a NAS drive connected to the wireless router in my home, and I use it to host documents, photos, and videos that anyone connected to my network might want to access. For obvious reasons, I don’t store sensitive documents on a NAS drive, as providing multi-person access to sensitive documents on a NAS drive would implicate the security of those documents, so sensitive documents remain locally stored on my machine

One of my favorite use cases for a NAS drive is to store movies that I can then play via VLC media player on any other device in my home. For example, movies that I’ve saved to the NAS drive can be accessed from any Apple TV, computer, smartphone, or tablet in my household without the need to transfer any files. This makes it ridiculously easy to set up movie night without moving files around or unpacking DVD/Blu-Ray discs.

Interestingly enough, you can associate your NAS drive with a dynamic DNS service and access it from anywhere in the world without having to be connected to your home network. This means that even if you go somewhere away from home, perhaps on vacation, you can remotely log into your NAS drive and watch the videos or access any files you’ve saved there.

You can also use a NAS drive as backup target if you plan to use it to back up your computer(s) without attaching USB-based external drives. Depending on your network and drive speed, this may even be faster than a traditional USB external storage drive.

Types of NAS drives

Just as there are multiple kinds of external storage drives that you can connect to your computer over USB, there are also different kinds of NAS drives.

In most cases, you will have an NAS enclosure that allows you to install as many drives as you need. Each place that you can install a drive is called a bay, so you might see NAS enclosures being advertised as 4-bay, 6-bay, and so on. This simply lets you know that you can install 4 drives, 6 drives, and so on.

The most common type of NAS device is one that allows you install traditional SATA-powered spinning hard drives or solid-state drives. These can be of the larger 3.5-inch desktop form factor, or of the smaller 2.5-inch laptop form factor. The larger 3.5-inch desktop hard drives are some of the most popular because they can be easily acquired in storage capacities of up to 24TB each, and relatively inexpensively.

While less common, another type of NAS device is one that allows for the installation of SAS drives. SAS drives are less commonly used by consumers, and instead more commonly adopted in enterprise environments for their enhanced reliability and speeds (and higher expense). SAS drives shine in RAID environments, but the general consumer doesn’t really need these kinds of drives.

Another type of NAS device that’s increasing in popularity is one that allows you to install faster NVMe drives. These are small storage drives that are often used in ultra-thin laptops, but they’re becoming increasingly popular even in desktop PCs given the crazy speeds that their PCIe Gen4 and PCIe Gen5 interfaces can support. These drives are more expensive, and it’s easy to find them in storage capacities of up to 8TB each.

NAS devices that are made to store the 3.5-inch desktop hard drive form factor are the largest in size, while those that are made to store the compact NVMe drive form factor are the smallest and easiest to store.

Just because you find a hard drive of 24TB doesn’t mean that your NAS device will be limited to 24TB. If you have a 4-bay NAS device then you could store four 24TB hard drives inside of it for a total of 96TB of storage. That’s because the NAS device uses a RAID controller to recognize all the installed drives as a single drive. Note, however, that if one drive fails in this configuration, some or all your data can be lost forever. This is one reason why solid-state drives with no moving parts are increasing in popularity.

Connecting NAS drives

Traditional NAS devices can be connected to your wireless (or wired) router via an Ethernet cable. This will give your NAS device its own IP address, which allows you to find it on your network from whatever device you might be using. You will use this IP address when logging into the NAS drive to view the files you’ve stored on it.

Some higher-end NAS devices have built-in wireless capabilities, allowing them to connect to your wireless router via Wi-Fi instead of over a cable. These are often more convenient, as you can put them anywhere in your home or office.

Many wireless routers today also have USB ports on them. In effect, this lets you attach traditional USB-based storage drives to your wireless router, which treats them similarly as a NAS drive. While not technically an NAS device, the router itself handles distributing access to these kinds of drives to all connected devices, so from a user’s perspective, it works in exactly the same way.

Because the NAS devices are connected directly to your router, you don’t need to connect it to your computer or other device in any way – no USB cables, no Thunderbolt cables, nada. This is handled over the network in its entirety, either wirelessly over a wireless router, or wired over a wired router connection.

Accessing NAS drives

You can configure your operating system to see NAS drives, and when this happens, they’ll appear in your file manager such as Finder in macOS or Windows Explorer in Windows just like any other drive. Depending on the operating system, you may even see a networking logo over the top of the drive, letting you know that it’s a network-attached storage device and not an internal or external storage drive.

While you can generally interface with these files directly from the file explorer, some NAS drives may require additional software. For example, some NAS devices require you to download an app from the App Store, and you can then use the app to manage files stored on drives inside the NAS device. In most cases, even on NAS devices where you use an app to configure it, you will be provided with the information to connect from another device remotely.

Choosing the right NAS device

If you’re in the market for an NAS device, then you should look for certain features, depending on your use case:

• Security – Perhaps the most important, make sure that the NAS device offers encryption and basic network security mechanisms so that the data stored on your NAS drives isn’t compromised by prying eyes.
• Capacity – You want the NAS drive to have enough capacity to install the correct number of drives you need. Don’t buy a 2-bay NAS drive if you need 96TB of storage, since you will likely want a 4-bay NAS drive with four 24TB 3.5-inch desktop hard drives.
• Connectivity – Ensure that the NAS drive you’re looking at will work with your network. If you have a wireless router that supports Ethernet connections, then you should be squared away. If you plan to use the USB port on your router, then make sure your router has a free USB port.
• Performance – Consider the speeds of the NAS device as well as the drives you plan to put inside of it. NVMe are the fastest-performing drives available at the time of this writing, followed by SAS, and then SATA. Also keep in mind that spinning hard drives are slower than solid-state drives.
• Reliability – Reliable storage is important, especially when dealing with RAID. I generally stick with solid-state drives when it comes to RAID because spinning hard drives have moving parts and are, speaking from an engineering standpoint, more prone to failure. However, I know tons of people who use spinning hard drives for RAID and have had no problems.
• Form Factor – If you don’t have a lot of space, then a multi-bay 3.5-inch desktop hard drive NAS device might not be the right choice for you. NVMe-based NAS devices are smaller and easier to find homes for. Keep this in mind if you’re going to be using this device at home.

Should you get a NAS device?

NAS drives aren’t right for everyone, but if you plan to have files stored on it that everyone on your network can use, then they can be a convenient way of ensuring multi-user access to that data without connecting and disconnecting drives all the time.

Best of all, they can be used to prevent filling up your computer’s internal storage, especially if you’re just storing files for a long period of time and want to keep your computer’s internal storage free for other projects.

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