Have you ever heard about Network Attached Storage or NAS for short? If you’re the type of person who has to access data from several machines situated on the same network, then NAS is something you should learn about as soon as possible.
Furthermore, NAS is perfect for folks who are constantly swapping out hard drives in order to access their important data. Network Attached Storage will make life a lot easier than before.
What is Network Attached Storage (NAS)?
NAS acts as a centralized network that shares data for use over a local computer network. Other machines located on the network can connect to a NAS in order to read and write data. This is done in a way similar to a drive that is directly connected to the computer.
What is Network Attached Storage used for?
In terms of sharing, Network Attached Storage devices are capable of sharing a pool of storage between the whole network of connected computers and devices. Not only that, but network NAS devices are designed to be scalable with quite a few solutions that will allow the user to easily replace o add drives whenever space is needed.
From what we’ve gathered, a lot of these systems tend to use several drives in RAID for the purpose of speed and redundancy. For much smaller operations, however, others must rely on a small drive bay.
Should you purchase or create your own Network Attached Storage?
If you have the money to spend, you can go out and buy dedicated NAS devices. They are not expensive at all, and can plug directly into your router without headaches. You can get these products with terabytes of hard drive space if you so wish.
Alternatively, you could create your own NAS system from old computers or that Raspberry Pi you have lying around. You can use TrueNAS (earlier called FreeNAS) to repurpose old computers and hard drives that are no longer in use. When it comes down to using a Raspberry Pi device, you’ll be required to make use of Raspbian.
Why is NAS important?
For starters, NAS is easy to operate, and in most cases, you will not need a dedicated IP professional. Furthermore, you won’t have to spend a lot of money to get things where you want them to be. Not only that, but backing up data is easy, and centralizing data is done safely and reliably.
Your employees should have no problem with collaborating because data is always available. No doubt this service will improve remote work, no matter where the employees are located.
So far, we can say for sure that Network Attached Storage systems are growing in popularity, and we expect this to continue for months and probably years to come.
