Formerly reserved for businesses, NAS has noticeably been making its way into homes for several years now. The acronym for Network Attached Storage, it’s quite simply storage space – consisting of one or several hard drives – relayed to a network which all users have access to like classic external drive space. The main advantage concerning the sharing of standard documents in Windows is that it’s no longer necessary to turn on a specific machine in order that files remain accessible 24 hours a day.
NAS is a peripheral which is destined to occupy an increasingly important role in households. It actually meets three essential needs which will only grow in the coming years :
-
storage an increasingly large volume of files which is regularly and copiously propagated by digital cameras, camcorders and other various downloading activities;
- assurance of a high level of
security for these same files whose safety cannot be left to the mercy of a simple hard drive break down or a fragile blank disc (or that can also be affected by aging). This security is assured by RAID technologies;
-
centralize all documents and multimedia files on a single and same unit while the number of computers in the household can increase at the same time (office, living room, bedrooms, laptops, etc.). In addition, a greater number of ‘’digital’’ devices – in the large sense of the word – are becoming more demanding on drive space and this independently of PCs: DVD/Divx players, audio players (Terratec Noxon2audio, Logitech Squeezebox, and certain Hi-fi players – notably Philips), etc.
Furthermore, for PMEs which do not necessarily have the means or capabilities to install a file server with secured data (RAID) and control user access, the NAS represents an economical turnkey solution with obvious interest.
In short, it’s a potentially large future market and manufacturers have not been wrong. For two years now, products have diversified and finally what is available in France is rather consistent. Besides the traditional presence in the computer market (Intel, LaCie, Buffalo…), new specialized companies are emerging such as Synology, Thecus, Qnap or Infrant (bought by Netgear last year) which are proving themselves with very fine products and truly refreshing improvements.
For once at Behardware.com, with this first product survey on NAS we have decided to exclusively look at the high end. And in terms of home NAS, ‘’high end’’ means a modest sized casing (whose size and look remind us of a barebones Shuttle) and a generally attractive design that houses no less than four Serial ATA hard drives !
Here are the five models in this test :
– Buffalo Terastation Live ;
– Qnap TS-409 Pro ;
– Synology CS407 ;
– Thecus N4100+ ;
– Thecus N5200BR Pro, which has a total of five hard drives.
Besides the Buffalo product, available in 1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB all of these NAS are sold as empty casings. It either up to the user to buy the drives separately or the retailer to offer preassembled configurations.
