In the modern era, many people believe NAS is the Best Storage Device. At least, better than the standard Hard Disk Drives. But, some of us are not even aware of What Is a NAS Hard Drive and what’s the difference between NAS Hard Drive Vs Normal Hard Drive.
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What Does NAS Stand For?
NAS Stands for Network Attached Storage. Looking at its name, you can guess it is related to Network & Storage.
NAS Hard Drive Vs Normal Hard Disk Drive:
So, you might be storing all your data in a Hard Disk Drive. As time passes, your Hard Disk will be filled up with movies, songs, softwares, games, pictures, family videos, documents, and more. So, sooner or later, you might have to add another Hard Disk to your PC or replace the existing one with a higher storage hard disk.
But, for how long?
You cannot keep connecting multiple hard drives to your PC. First, of all, Hard Disk is not a safe storage device. Also, you may eventually run out of ports to connect more hard drives. Another disadvantage of having multiple hard drives is that it will make your PC very slow.
Moreover, Laptop users can’t even think about having multiple internal drives. And there are limited ports to connect multiple external hard drives. Even that can slow down your PC.
Furthermore, if you are a content creator, you may have all your edited & non-edited videos stored on your PC, which will fill up the hard disk faster than Home users.
So, you might be wondering about a better solution. And the solution is called NAS Hard Drive.
In this article, we are going to explain What Is a NAS Hard Drive, Why is it the Best Storage Device, and much more.
What Is a NAS Hard Drive:
In one of our articles, we have spoken about Different Types of Storage Devices in a computer. We mostly spoke about RAM, ROM, Optical Disks, Flash Memories, and Magnetic Storage Devices.
Magnetic Storage Devices include Internal Hard Disk Drives & External Hard Disk Drives.
We can say that NAS is an advanced version of the Standard Hard Disk Drive.
A NAS contains a box, in which there are two or more Hard Disks. Also called as NAS Disk Station.
The Basic NAS Disk Station has 2 Slots for 2 Hard Drives, and some even have slots for 6 and more Hard Drives.
Moreover, NAS Hard Disk has its own operating system and you can connect it to all your PCs. So, every user can operate using the same Hard Disk, rather than asking other users to share files.
That’s not it.
The Best thing about NAS is that it stores your data on the Cloud Server.
NAS is connected directly to your Router so that you can access and share the data on other devices as well.
Read more on the Difference Between Router & Modem.
Now you may think, “we can also backup our data on Cloud Storage Services like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.”
You are right, but….
These Services charge you more and more as your data increases. In the case of NAS, you can scale to as much as you can. Moreover, you will have your own server and the cloud service providers cannot oversee your personal stuff.
Instead of moving files or replacing the hard drives, you can extend NAS Storage and connect it with another NAS Disk Station so that your storage will continue to grow.
Another cool thing about NAS is that you can set up different RAID configurations. That means, all the disks in the NAS Disk Station are linked with each other. So, even if one Hard Disk fails, the data is safe in other drives.
Check out this video to understand RAID.
Best NAS Disk Stations:
Here are some of the Best NAS Disk Stations you can buy online.
QNAP TS-451D2-4G 4 Bay NAS:
- Capacity-scalable NAS with SSD Cache Acceleration Capability. Compatible Drive Type-3.5 inch SATA HDD, 2.5 inch SATA HDD, 2.5 inch SATA SSD, M.2 2280 NVMe SSD. Compatible drive type indicates drives that have been tested to be compatible with Synology products. This term does not indicate the maximum connection speed of each drive bay. Each internal volume (may consist of multiple drives) is expandable up to 108TB
- Flexibly scale up to fifteen drives to increase storage capacity as demand grows
- Built-in M.2 2280 NVMe SSD slots permit cache acceleration without occupying storage drive bays
- Back up critical data and reduce Recovery Time Objective (RTO) with Snapshot Replication
- Accelerated Application Performance Average 16% performance boost to photo indexing and other computing-intensive operations, as well as database response time
Synology NAS DiskStation DS1520 5-Bay:
- Intel Celeron J4025 dual-core 2.0 GHz processor (burst up to 2.9 GHz)
- Intel HD Graphics 600
- 4 GB SO-DIMM DDR4 RAM (Max 8GB)
- 4 x 3.5-inch SATA 6Gb/s, 3Gb/s (Diskless)
- 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Port (RJ45)
- 4 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 port
- 1 x HDMI
Conclusion:
In this entire article, I have been showing how NAS is a lot better than your regular Hard Disk. However, I am not suggesting all my readers to replace your hard disk with NAS. NAS might be better than the regular hard disk, but it is also very expensive.
My job is to make you aware of the newest developments in the world of technology. Therefore, I have explained What Is a NAS Hard Drive. So, you should go for it only if it is beneficial to you. Home users do not need to put soo much money, as they can use a couple of Internal and External Drives to store their data. NAS can be useful for offices, organizations, internet cafes, content creators, etc., who need to use multiple hard drives for multiple computers.