Sep
11
2011

Benefits of a Home NAS

An article by Mark

Thinking about sharing your data at home with other home users? Worried a about losing years of photos, documents and data? Need a centralized location for all your files? Perhaps it’s time you considered a NAS (network attached storage) device.

What Are The Advantages of NAS?

Some advantages of NAS are:

Users running different types of machines (PC, Apple iMac, etc.) and running different types of operating systems (Windows, Unix, Mac OS, etc.) can share files.
NAS appliances are “plug-and-play” meaning that very little installation and configuration is required beyond connecting them to your home network.
Less administration overhead than that required for a Unix or NT file server.
Centralized storage, which makes it easier and cheaper to maintain, backup, and administer. Incidentally, centralized storage is more expensive than local disks on byte cost basis, but users have to do tasks such as backups and restores on their own.
Separates purchase of storage from the purchase of application servers.
Fast response times for users since NAS are on local networks, close to the home user, but slower than a local hard disk.

What Are Some Disadvantages Of A NAS?

NAS has the following disadvantages:

Heavy use of NAS will clog up the shared LAN negatively affecting the users on the LAN. Therefore NAS is not suitable for data transfer intensive applications.
Somewhat inefficient since data transfer rides on top of standard TCP/IP protocol.
Cannot offer any storage service guarantees for mission critical operations since NAS operates in a shared environment. Only local disks can be used to provide some service guarantees.
NAS is shared storage. As with other shared storage, system administrators must enforce quotas without which a few users may hog all the storage at the expense of other users.

I will be expanding more on this topic in the next few weeks as my schedule allows. Here are the Top 5 NAS Storage Devices for home use courtesy of CNET.