Some thoughts to help you work out if you want a NAS.

What’s a NAS?

NAS stands for Network Attached Storage, which means you can connect to storage on another computer in your network.

It’s like Dropbox, Google Drive or iCloud except it’s your computer and not theirs.

When you buy “a NAS” you’re buying the computer that makes storage available over the network. They usually don’t come with any actual storage, you have to buy that separately.

You can also build it yourself, at the end of the day it’s just a computer.

Why would I want Network Attached Storage?

When you have a single computer managing the storage for it is pretty easy. You run out of room, you buy a USB stick, or an external hard drive, plug it in, and get more storage.

It’s when you fill up that extra storage or have multiple computers in the same household that you start looking for a better solution.

Instead of buying and managing more external drives you designate a computer to act as storage and plug in all your drives to that one and make it available over the network.

You might not even need to buy anything at all, most modern routers allow you to plug in an external drive and make it available over your network, and that might be all you need.

Benefits

Having storage available over the network means you’re able to do a few things:

Centralise your storage

You can store all your files in one place and access them from all your devices.

When you treat your storage like one giant drive then adding new disks increases the total storage you have, not just giving you another smaller disk to manage.

No more juggling USB sticks and label makers or emailing files to yourself.

And if you install media software like Jellyfin or Plex then you can watch your media content on your TV without plugging in your laptop every time.

Backups and redundancy

NAS software allows you to set up redundancy for your data, so you always have an extra copy available. Some will allow you to configure your drives into a RAID array which means you can survive one or two of them failing. RAID is not a backup, but it does give you an extra layer of redundancy.

For a better backup solution you should store a copy of your data in an external location. The benefit of having a NAS is that you can set it up to do this for you, so now all you need to do is get that data onto your NAS and then it’s automatically backed up.

Avoid the Apple Tax

I like Apple, you might as well, but I do think their storage upgrades are expensive.

Take the cheapest Mac mini they have right now, which is £599 for 256GB of storage. Upgrading it to 512GB is an extra £200. 1TB is an extra £400.

You can buy a Raspberry Pi 5 starter kit, an NVME adapter, and a 1TB NVME drive for £200.

For just over £400 you could upgrade the 1TB drive to 4TB.

It’d be slower, I admit that, but if it suits your needs then it means you get 4 times the storage for the same price.

Bonus: Homeserver

A NAS can also double up as a capable server where you self-host your own apps and services.

You could:

  • host your own Netflix with Jellyfin
  • share your photos with family and friends using Immich
  • block adverts with Pi-hole

and plenty more.

Convinced yet?

Maybe that helped you work out if you wanted a NAS or not.

I’ll be writing more under the #homelab tag, including which NAS is right for you as well as self-hosting your own apps and services on a home server.