Now, port forwarding and remote access come with some security concerns. If you’re a musician, for example, you can use a NAS to quickly share or collaborate on projects with others (and enjoy relatively fast upload and download speeds). This allows you and other authorized users to access its contents from anywhere in the world.

If you want to take things a step further, you can even enable remote access on your NAS.

And when you want to keep things private, you can apply password protection or a firewall to your NAS device (or password-protect specific folders). Other devices, such as smartphones or security cameras, can also access these files. (That said, I will shout out some alternatives throughout this article.) Purpose-made NAS devices are energy-efficient, compact, and quiet-three things that you can’t say about a repurposed PC. Not only is setup easier with a “real” NAS, but you’ll end up using a lot less electricity. And if you have an old computer, Raspberry Pi, or NVIDIA Shield lying around, you can turn it into a NAS device.īut I usually suggest buying a purpose-made NAS from a brand like Synology or QNAP. You can enable network file sharing on any PC or Mac, for example. To be clear, the features listed throughout this article do not require a purpose-made NAS device. These dedicated NAS devices are easy to set up and easy to use. Except a NAS device can go much further than Dropbox-you can use NAS to create your own streaming service, experiment with VMs (awesome for hosting a Minecraft server), backup the entirety of your computer (including settings and preferences), or automatically send copies of backup data to other storage solutions.Ĭompanies like Synology, TerraMaster, QNAP, and ioSafe sell purpose-made NAS devices, which are small and energy-efficient computers with huge slots for hard drives or SSDs. It’s sort of like having a super-fast Dropbox server in your home.

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