My new NAS

SynologyI’m a huge fan of NAS drives. For those not so geeky people, a NAS is a networked attached storage device. It’s basically a hard drive attached to your network that any computer can access. Some are just basic drives, and others add a lot of other features.

I use to have two NAS drives on my network. I had an old one that I bought probably eight years ago. It was a cheapy that was basically just a drive that I used to back all my computers up. It has since died. My other NAS was a FreeNAS server I built from an old P3 computer. FreeNAS is great open source NAS software, that adds a lot more features than my cheap one had. It supports almost any protocol a person would want. I backed up my Mom’s computer, and was able to access a lot of my files over FTP. I shared music on my network with the iTunes server, and dabbled around with other features. It was great.

Once my cheapy NAS died I needed to upgrade the storage in my FreeNAS, and since it was an old computer with no SATA ports, instead of messing with a SATA card, I thought it was time to upgrade to a different NAS, so I bought a Synology NAS.

I bought the DS211 which supports two drives, and am loving it so far. It it loaded with features that I am just starting to explore. I love that it has iOS apps. I can now stream my music, view my photos, or any of my files right from my phone or iPad. I know the Drobo is a popular backup device, but for the price and features, I think Synology has them beat.

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