

Most of the models we tested come with two-year warranties. Warranty and support: Lack of customer support is one of the most common complaints in Amazon reviews of NAS devices.Hot-swappable drive bays: Hot-swappable drive bays are necessary so you don’t have to shut down the NAS to replace a failed drive or increase capacity.


Third-party application support: If you want to add features or services to your NAS, you need to do that with third-party software-including media center software, web-server software, analytics, and more-so support from third parties is key.It’s also nice to have a USB port on the front of the NAS with a quick-copy function so you can copy the contents of a USB drive to or from your NAS without fussing around with software. If you plan on doing that on your own instead of with a cloud service, you’ll need your NAS to have a USB port so you can back everything up to an external drive. You should have two copies of every backup. At least two USB ports: Between backups, dongles, and other accessories, it’s nice to have at least two USB ports on a NAS.It’s better if the device can also send you an email or text message. Drive-failure notifications: A NAS should at the very least notify you with beeps and status lights if a drive fails.Music streaming should work via DLNA and iTunes without a complicated setup process.
Synology cloud station backup too slow software#
You can do this using software from the manufacturer or third-party programs like Plex. Media-streaming capabilities: Most NAS boxes can stream videos and music to various devices in your home.And a NAS should offer a Dropbox-like file-syncing service so you can sync files across computers. It should also allow you to back up easily to a cloud storage service like Amazon Glacier or Backblaze. Wide support for backups: A NAS should support computer backups via File History or system-image tools on Windows, Time Machine on Mac, and rsync for Linux.NAS software tends to take a kitchen-sink approach that often makes it confusing to use, but some operating systems, like those from QNAP and Synology, are better than others. Easy-to-use software: Each NAS manufacturer has its own operating system.A NAS that includes hardware encryption acceleration offers read and write speeds that are much faster than those of a model that relies solely on software encryption.
(It can also protect sensitive data on a NAS that’s on a larger network, or one that attackers could target.) Some NAS boxes can also encrypt data before backing it up to a cloud service, providing an extra level of protection in case the cloud service is hacked.
