The way to pick which will be based on features and price. One last word of advice: although it's usually an offered feature I do not recommend you allow access to your NAS from outside of your home network (sometimes called something like 'personal cloud' or similar). Other features like faster processors (CPU), more memory/RAM, cache RAM, are all things where 'more is better' up to the point of your budget. More than 1 parity drive is probably unusual in a home NAS, so, have a separate backup copy of everything on your NAS, imo.Īnother nice feature is 'hot-pluggable' which means you can swap out a bad drive easily if that ever happens.

In RAID5 losing more than 1 drive means you lose your data, unless you have the ability to have more than one parity drive. In terms of storage efficiency, RAID5 is more efficient than RAID1, cause in RAID1 you always lose half your capacity, where-as in RAID5 you lose just the one drive worth. So if you have 3, you give up 1 and have 2/3 total 'usable' capacity. I won't bore you with the details of how to calculate that, but think of it as giving up the capacity of one of the drives (called the 'parity drive'). With RAID5 you give up a little storage capacity to have the benefit of that protection. If you get a NAS with 3 or more drives you may be able to use something called 'RAID 5' which also provides you the ability to have any one of the drives go wrong, and still have all your files from the 2 (or more) remaining drives. This makes the 2nd hard drive an exact copy of the first, so if something went wrong with the first, you still have a copy of all your files. You want one with 2 minimum (of the same exact type and size), which you will 'mirror' or set up as 'RAID 1'. Once you know how much space you need, look then for features like how many drives are on the NAS. If you stick to the two mentioned brands, start with your budget and your space needs (in TB).īoth manufacturers offer 'find the right NAS' things on their websites.

The way to pick will be based on features and price. I do run Minimserver on the NAS that allows streamers to use the NAS/Minimserver as your music library, but I primarily use a proprietary NAS-like storage device to serve my music. I use it to back up all my important files, including my music collection. I currently have two NAS (in the process of replacing an older Synology with a QNAP). In general I find NAS to be a pain in the butt, just a semi-necessary one. Having a safe(r) copy of your music files in a centrally accessible location (for access from any device - eg computer or streamer - on your network) among them. Not sure a NAS is going to improve the sound quality but there are other benefits in any case.

Nas minimserver