Tweet Share Whatsapp Email What are the Top 10 NAS devices of 2016? That cannot be much of a surprise.
We have seen it all this fruitful year of 2016., becoming mainstream, 4K becoming more and more popular, the range and more. However, when it comes down to it, we love NAS and all NAS servers above all else.
Check out the variety of personal cloud storage or network attached storage (NAS) options available at Best Buy. Looking NAS for Mac? See our 3 recommendations for Best Value, Budget Buyer and Best Overall NAS for Mac and find one which fits to your needs.
It is with this in mind that (as requested about a million times) we have made our top 10 NAS devices of 2016. We are covering everything from the most powerful NAS for those who want the best or the best, the most cost effective NAS for those that want value for money, most innovative NAS for those that think outside the box and more. All the NAS mentioned are available to buy NAS from SPAN.COM – The NAS Experts. Where to Buy the Top 10 NAS Worldwide The Synology DS916+ NAS £415 ex.VAT BEST All Round NAS of 2016 This NAS really came out of the blue and surprised everyone.
Synology have a long running reputation with NAS but the DS916+ is fast becoming the best Synology NAS of 2016 If you are looking for the most powerful NAS of the year, then look no further. The TVS-1282T features upto 64GB of DDR4 RAM, a Quad-Core i7 CPU, SSD and m.2 SSD support, PCIe card support. Plus Thunderbolt 2 DAS! There is NO more powerful NAS currently available in the world to buy. If your money is tight and you are looking for a cheap NAS that cannot do better than the WD My Cloud EX2. Available with or Without HDDs, this NAS is the small and simple NAS that will do all the day to day tasks that you need, without hitting your budget hard.
The QNAP TS-253A NAS £270 ex.VAT Most INNOVATIVE NAS of 2016 If you want a NAS that will grow and evolve alongside your needs, the TS253A is the NAS for you. Featuring Dual HDMI, Quad-Core CPU, Plex Support, Virtualisation and VMWare ready, Surveillance NAS support and even a remote control, THIS is the NAS you need to buy. The Synology DS716+II NAS £330 EX.vat Most POPULAR NAS of 2016 Easily the most popular NAS of this year is the Synology DS716+II. With a high powered Quad-Core Intel CPU, Fluid and seemless Mac and Windows support as well as the ever growing Synology DSM Software, the DS716+II NAS is a unit that is fast becoming the best NAS ever released by Synology. The TVS-682 NAS £900 ex.VAT Most Flexible NAS of 2016 Featuring the features like 3x HDMI ports, 4K Support over the network and via the HDMI 2.0 port, this NAS covers everything you are ever likely to need to expand your NAS server today, tomorrow and in 5 years time. Don;t forget the 3 tiered storage option across 4 HDD bays, 2 SSD Bays and 2 m.2 SSD Bays. This is the NAS you buy if you want to expand The QNAP TS-451A NAS £310 ex.VAT Most SURPRISING NAS of 2016 QNAP NAS has always been one to push the boundaries of NAS and they did just that with the NAS and DAS combined TS-451A.
This Dual Core, 4-Bay NAS not only gives you the NAS server abilities of any QNAP, but (along with SD Card Slot and Remote control) the ability to connect the device to your host Windows or Mac via USB 3.0. No longer are you restricted by Network-only access.
A real change of scene and massive innovation from QNAP NAS. The Synology DS216J NAS £126 ex.VAT Best COST-EFFECTIVE NAS of 2016 At just over £100, It is easy to image this NAS Server beingwell. But this is one of the best home NAS devices from Synology this year and with a pretty decent Dual Core, fantastic and comprehensive software support and USB 3.0 throughout, this 2-Bay RAID enabled NAS device is a real breath of fresh air and the best cheap NAS on the market. The Thecus N2810 PRO NAS £340 ex.VAT STRONGEST NAS of 2016 Thecus NAS have been around in NAS since the beginning of Network Attached Storage as a device for home and business. Their latest offering has really changed the game and challenged the big guys at Synology and QNAP.
This Quad Core, Intel Braswell CPU has all the functionality of the Synology DS716+II and all the features and Hardware of the QNAP TS-253A. This and 4K transcoding support and more Apps than both the other two NAS companies combined means that this is a diamond in the rough and powerful home NAS to consider buying. The Synology DS1815+ NAS £650 ex.VAT Best BUSINESS NAS of 2016 It may seem a little old and technically the DS1815+ from Synology NAS was released in 2015, but this hard-core (and indeed Quad Core) Business NAS is still very much in demand.
It will handle pretty much whatever you can throw at it and then some. Alongside this you can expand the 8-Bay Synology NAS with another 10 HDD bays with two of the DX513 unitsas well as being a real powerhouse fo a Plex Media Server NAS for transcoding! Still a NAS to contend with! How and where do I sign up for Plex? How much does Plex Cost?
The Plex Application for your NAS, Mac, PC, Android device is free and available in the NAS App store, iTunes and Google Playstore at no additional cost, though the free apps, though serving as an excellent introduction, will soon feel limited and we advise that if you upgrade to the Plex Pass subscription service for vastly improved options and add-ons. To begin setting up your Plex Media Server, you will need to head over to Plex and set up your account (use the below link) so you can have all your movie, TV show, music, and photo collections at your fingertips. Anywhere you go, on the devices you love. If however you wish to skip straight to the good stuff and set up your Plex Pass Membership immediately so you can get your Plex Media Server at 100%, use the link below to take walk you through setting up your Plex Pass today!
Synology DiskStation The Synology DSM software has built-in support for Macs including Apple Fileshare Protocol (afp) and Time Machine support. It has an iTunes server in addition to a regular DLNA Media server. As it is Linux based it is easy to configure the NAS to do rsync backups (ssh login). It has a great web-based desktop-style interface that is very easy to understand and use. The DSM software is constantly being updated and improved.
They have solutions from 2-disk on up to 15-disk. You can find the 4-disk DS411j without drives for less than $400.
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A Mac My NAS of choice is an old Mac. In my case, I had an old MacBook that wouldn't hold a charge anymore so I to my 2TB external drive. The advantages to using an actual Mac over a true NAS system:. Uses first-party AFP on HFS for optimal compatibility. In particular, it supports Spotlight and fast file searches ( CatSearch), something that other NAS systems cannot do as well: They usually use a Linux system with netatalk and an ext3 file system which, compared to AFP with HFS, are not optimized for the ways a Mac can search. For more technical information on this, see the, What kind of disks do support 'fast search'? Further features to consider:.
Can serve as a Time Machine backup volume (some other NAS can do that as well). Works great as an iTunes master library, connected to my Apple TV and my other Macs via Home Sharing. Can run a BitTorrent client to download Linux ISOs and Stack Overflow data dumps (some other NAS can do that as well). Use built-in screen sharing to control. Drobo FS The is my new favourite NAS.
I've run a Netgear ReadyNAS and a PC-based NAS in the past and neither touch the Drobo FS for simplicity, speed and reliability. The ReadyNAS suffered from poor RAID performance, especially on reboots when volumes needed to be scanned. And the power supply in it was really lame. And the PC-based NAS was just a pain to maintain and costly to keep up. The Drobo FS is super simple to set up. Has very, very good volume build and scanning speeds on startup.
Has what has to be the best hot-swapping of any multi-disk unit I've ever seen that was in the sub-$10k range. And performs like a champ while drawing very little power. I now run an FS for home sharing and an old Drobo hangs off my iMac for audio project data. They are teh awesome. Freenas using generic hardware I love the ability to grab an old computer, fill it full of cheap hard drives, and install Freenas on a CF card or USB drive.
Software RAID is reliable. A key point, if any of the hardware dies, the RAID array can be rebuilt when the software is installed on new hardware, unlike some proprietary solutions (NAS or RAID cards) where you may be tied to a particular vendor and/or model, which, after time, may not be sold/available.
Works fine with Macs and PCs - and for this reason i use SMB shares rather than AFP. Performance is fine. I use the SMB shares to stream to all the computers in the house, and there is no problem.
Time Machine backups are a little more complex, involving creating a Sparse Bundle (which is not the official method). For this reason, i don't do this, i use Carbon Copy Cloner to run to a disk image (dmg) every night. I use MediaRover to sync iTunes libraries, and this works fine. Other iTunes support is available (an iTunes/DAAP server called Firefly), but i haven't used it. It has a BitTorrent server built in, but again, i haven't used it. Administration is very easy (web based), setup is not difficult, but there are several steps to add disks, format them, create a RAID array, create a mount point, enable the services (AFP or SMB) to access.
Documentation and community support are satisfactory. Don't want start any flamewar, but today here is only NAS solution - the ZFS based NAS. ZFS is a filesystem, what has 'copy on write' feature, so you will get a backup in every save - fully transparently.
ZFS has million really cool features like raid management, snapshots etc. Too much for one post. If you interested can duckduck for ZFS. ZFS is implemented in Solaris and in the FreeBSD. So, you can:.
use some older (but 64bit+lots of RAM) PC with a plenty of HDDs and. download and install. You will get web-managed NAS with Samba and etc.
install plain FreeBSD and config it as NAS plus some your own tweaking - IMHO this is the best way. you can also buy an preconfigured FreeBSD/ZFS NAS too You should definitely check theese:. Western Digital MyBook World Edition Yesterday I installed a Western Digital MyBook World Edition, 1 TeraByte, single disk.
Pros: very simple to install and work with, includes a Media Server and a iTunes server that can be used to share music and videos across the network. It's pre configured with the common shares and if you copy the files in the proper folders it's very, very simple to use. Quite cheap compared to a similar solution from QNap or Sinology. I did not perform any single task 'mac related' on it and it worked from start with my Mac. Cons: old firmware from 2009 and no update available, the single 1 TB disk inside obviously do not support any kind of Raid, no serviceable by changing disk if needed (unless you broke your warranty), the control panel do not give you a lot of control also if you use the so called advanced version.
Definitively a good choice for a 'first' NAS to work and experience with, if you need to go on a cheap model or if you do not have a lot of IT experience, suggested for simple home environment where no redundancy it's needed, I would avoid it if you need redundancy or if you like to fine tune and experiment with every possible option. There is also a but I've not tested any of the stuff described (yet!). UPDATE: after some time I've found more problems, all related to the time machine interface: 1) The quota option do not work with time machine 2) The Lion update completely stopped the Time Machine usage NOT RECOMMENDED ANYMORE!!!!
UPDATE: The Lion/Time Machine problem will hopefully be fixed soon. Apple changed some things and Western Digital is working on an update. This affects the MyBook Live and MyBook World Edition II.
Seagate Blackarmor NAS220 At the moment of buying, the features listed sounded great, and Mac compatible. Once in the studio, and after 4 weeks, it is just a hard drive on the network. These are some of the issues:. NOT Time Machine compatible. Very slow. Access remotely is useless, hangs everytime.
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So you cannot access it outside the studio. This was a main reason for buying, and tech support say they know about the issue and are to update. Still waiting for it. Software for mac is just a discovery tool.
The name says it all, it tries to find the NAS, which it initially did, now it no longer detects it. Only a APC brand UPS is compatible.
This was a total surprise, it is only stated in small letters in the manual inside the box, not outside or anywhere else visible before you buy, not even the product web page. Very slow, i know i already said that, but it is terribly slow. Stay away, not only mac users, but everybody who wants a NAS, this is not an option.