Looking for in-home NAS

Oct 2, 2018
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My family has a few laptops between us and we tend to be throwing USB drives at each other when we are looking to transfer something or other situations. Anyways, I am not entirely sure what would suit me the best but I am looking for something that will be a Network Accessible Storage (NAS) from any device and people can put up or take from at any time. From GoPro videos to simple pdfs. I am newish to networking and am looking for advice.
 
Solution
If you are using a NAS strictly has storage then it doesn't need to be powerful
If you are using it to stream video to TV's using PLEX and things like that, then you need a powerful system to decode/encode video streaming.

But for just file sharing you can get away with very little power and RAM isn't that important for this application.
https://www.synology.com - just need one that has as many disks as you think you need. 2 maybe enough for you so a DS216/DS218 would be more than enough.

Since I don't use anything else, i cannot recommend them. All I can say that I owned a Western Digital one, and I found it was useless.
If you are all on the same network, why don't you just copy things over from computer to computer over the network?
https://www.dummies.com/computers/operating-systems/windows-10/how-to-enable-network-discovery-and-configure-sharing-options-in-windows-10/
That will show you basics, then you just copy from computer to computer, no need NAS unless you want to do things while other people aren't "on".

Synology always gets my recommendation for network, I use 3 of them. Not cheap though!
 
Oct 2, 2018
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These are through different versions of Windows and I want to be able to access them from phones too
 
Oct 2, 2018
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Not sure of a budget, this is more so I can understand what a NAS would need to perform well. I was considering some sort of pentium and I am questioning how much RAM. I was going to use FreeNas and two 2TB HDDs

 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator


Unless you want the learning experience, a dedicated PC with freenas is not really needed.
Or, if you already have a spare PC.

There are a number of dedicated small NAS boxes that will do exactly what you need.
Qnap and Synology both make a wide range of these.
 
If you are using a NAS strictly has storage then it doesn't need to be powerful
If you are using it to stream video to TV's using PLEX and things like that, then you need a powerful system to decode/encode video streaming.

But for just file sharing you can get away with very little power and RAM isn't that important for this application.
https://www.synology.com - just need one that has as many disks as you think you need. 2 maybe enough for you so a DS216/DS218 would be more than enough.

Since I don't use anything else, i cannot recommend them. All I can say that I owned a Western Digital one, and I found it was useless.
 
Solution