If you plan on using one of the bays as a secondary backup, using the automatic ‘RAID’ functionality of a Synology NAS, that means you have ~10 TB of usable storage on a 2-bay NAS, with the second bay keep a 1:1 backup for redundancy. I personally buy 8 or 10 TB NAS drives, as they strike a decent tradeoff between capacity and price. But due to their cost, you will probably want to opt for cheaper, smaller capacity, drives.

The maximum available size for a single NAS drive is about 16 TB, at the moment. For a home consumer purpose, I think the main deciding factor is how much storage you will need.Įffectively, this means picking between a model with 2- or 4- drive bays.

I like Synology because I find their web UI simple and they have a large package ecosystem that makes many tasks literally one-click installs more on that later. This means ideally, you store the NAS in your home somewhere out of the way, out of sight, and let it do its job all day long without intervention. When you plug it in, you configure and control it through a web interface that apes a desktop UI. On the back, you have some Ethernet and expansion ports. So, the Synology DS920+ that I have is a compact black box that packs in a low-powered CPU, some RAM, and four drive bays for hard drives to slot into. These days, a consumer NAS is quite simply a small PC-like box that integrates drive bays directly into it. NAS stands for network-attached-storage, dating back to the days when a server mainframe would take up a whole room. Part of the apprehension I see when people mention this stuff is that the acronym itself, NAS, immediately makes the technology sound a lot more complicated than it really is. Hopefully, in this post, I can highlight how a NAS can dramatically enhance your Apple experience, and that the whole venture is a relatively straightforward thing to integrate in your life, and get ongoing value … What is a NAS? Upgrading from a 2-bay to a 4-bay model has unlocked even more use cases for me, but I still get the impression that to most people, a NAS is a scary and uninviting concept. At the end of the last year upgraded to a 4-bay DS920+. I’ve been a long time user of Synology NAS products, having first reviewed them on 9to5Mac in 2016.

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