Like any computer peripheral, the features offered by the various NAS units vary greatly to meet these different demands. You'll also need a more powerful NAS if you want to store big media libraries, like a collection of 100,000 stock photos, for your graphic arts studio, for example. But if you're serving HD videos over your home network to two tablets, a laptop, and your smart TV, all at the same time, you'll want a NAS with higher specifications for memory, processor, and network capabilities. If you're using the NAS to back up your laptops overnight, that's pretty straightforward. Home users may not need to worry about large numbers of users, these days it's the number of simultaneous devices that make a difference. Additional layers of data security and serving files to a relatively large number of users is typically where businesses need to be careful about NAS storage. All of that is relatively simple for a NAS. Once you decide that you need to store files on a network drive, you then need to figure out what you mean to do with them, in order to determine what kind of NAS you need.įor example, a typical business scenario might be sharing access to Office files, like spreadsheets and Word documents, with your coworkers and perhaps backing up select office devices on a regular basis.
