The Best NAS (Network Attached Storage) Devices for 2023

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In this age of high-resolution smartphone pix and near-constant video shooting, the storage space in your PCs and mobile devices fills up in a flash. While you can certainly use an external hard drive for offloading and backing up files from your PC (and by extension, from your phone), if you disconnect the hard drive and leave it in your office, you won't be able to get to those files from another location, and neither will anyone else. There are ways to allow other users to share and access the files on your hard drive, but they can be challenging to set up and carry security risks.

Instead, consider a good network-attached storage (NAS) device. As its name implies, a NAS is high-capacity storage that connects to your home or office network so that you and other users you designate can access your files from mobile devices and PCs without plugging in to the drive. Read on for a breakdown of the top NAS devices we've tested, followed by a detailed buying guide that will walk you through how to find the best one for your needs.

Deeper Dive: Their Top Tested Picks

Equipped with a multi-gig LAN port and boasting 4K video transcoding capabilities, the Asustor Drivestor 2 AS1102T is an affordable two-bay NAS masquerading as a more expensive model. It uses a tool-free enclosure that makes installation a breeze, and it turned in solid scores on their file transfer tests. A secondary LAN port would be welcome, but given the Drivestor’s low price, it’s hard to complain.

This is a solid pick for home users. Whether you’re looking to set up your own personal cloud server or simply need a place to store music, photos, and other home-related files, put the AS1102T at the top of your wish list. A 2.5Gbps port allows for high-speed connectivity, and Asustor's app library offers a huge catalog of Asustor and third-party apps that let you use the AS1102T as a media server, a cloud server, a backup repository, and more.

The TS-233 packs some nice features into its stylish white enclosure, including two hot-swappable drive bays, a quad-core CPU, and a pair of USB ports for connecting external drives. Installation was easy, and the NAS turned in very respectable file transfer scores in testing. Moreover, it offers a nice selection of QNAP-branded and third-party apps that turn the TS-233 into a multifunction server.

The QNAP TS-233 is an affordable two-bay NAS designed for budget-conscious home users who’d rather store data in their own personal cloud than pay for a subscription-based cloud service. It’s easy to manage using the Windows-like QTS operating system and offers one-touch backups, but it lacks the multi-gig LAN and HDMI video ports that you get with more expensive NAS devices.

Low-cost NAS devices are great for home use, but if you’re a small-business owner, you’ll want a NAS that offers speedy performance, multi-gig LAN connectivity, and high-speed expansion options. With the Asustor Lockerstor 2 Gen2, you get all that and more. A top performer, this two-bay NAS is equipped with four M.2 slots for speedy caching (using M.2 solid-state drives), two 2.5Gbps LAN ports, and two high-speed USB ports for device sharing.

Small-business owners and home enthusiasts who require a robust two-bay NAS with high-speed connectivity options should put the AS6702T at the top of their shopping lists. It’s easy to install, and the Asustor Data Manager software makes it easy to create storage volumes, share folders, and get more than 340 apps for office productivity, data backup, security, home entertainment, and other functions.

You don’t get many I/O ports with the DiskStation DS220j, but you do get speedy file transfer performance, multiple RAID options, and quad-core processing power for just under $170. This two-bay NAS uses a sleek, glossy white enclosure and is equipped with a single 1Gbps LAN port and two USB 3.0 ports. You’ll have to remove a couple of screws to install the drives, which you’ll have to supply yourself as they are not included.

If you’re tired of paying someone else to store your photos, video, and music in the cloud, the DS220j makes it easy to configure your own personal cloud without spending a bundle. Synology’s intuitive software makes it easy to configure a RAID solution, create volumes, assign user rights, and get office productivity, backup, media server, and network security utilities from an extensive app catalog.

When it comes to ports and performance, the QNAP TS-464 is a class leader, delivering blistering file transfer speeds alongside an excellent assortment of I/O ports—including a pair of multi-gig Ethernet ports, four USB ports, and an HDMI video output. It also offers multiple RAID configurations and uses tool-free drive sleds that make it easy to install and hot-swap drives. You’ll have to supply your own hard drives, but that’s the case with nearly every NAS device that they test.

Two-bay NAS devices typically offer more than enough storage capacity for those who want to create their own personal cloud server, but if you plan on backing up and sharing large chunks of data for a small business, a multi-bay NAS like the TS-464 is a better option. It's their Editors’ Choice pick for four-bay NAS devices.

The DS923+ earns High Score for its speedy file transfer performance, easy installation, and expandability options. With four tool-free drive bays, it can accommodate up to 72TB of internal storage and support multiple RAID configurations, including Synology’s Hybrid RAID (SHR). Connect it to a Synology DX517 expansion unit, and you’ll have the potential to add another 80TB of storage. The only thing missing here is value; you'll get slightly faster performance, multi-gig connectivity, and HDMI video output with their Editors' Choice award pick, the QNAP TS-464 listed above, for $50 less.

Whether you’re a small-business owner looking for a RAID-protected backup solution, or a multimedia enthusiast looking to store and share your work in your own personal cloud, the DiskStation DS923+ has you covered. With more than 100 apps available, you can use it in any number of ways, including as a media server, a cloud server, an email server, and a backup repository.

Whether you’re a home user looking to store multimedia files and share them in the cloud, or a small business that requires a scalable storage solution with multiple RAID options, the Synology DiskStation DS1522+ NAS is an excellent choice thanks to its 5 drive bays. That's more than many other small business NAS devices offer. Plus, you get two embedded M.2 NVMe SSD cache slots, and the ability to add 10 more drives via an expansion unit.

For many businesses, scalability is the name of the game when it comes to network storage. The DS1522+ delivers scalability in spades. It's also a great choice for homes and businesses with cutting-edge networking components, since you can outfit it with a 10Gbps LAN adapter for high-speed network connectivity.

The F5-422 is a well appointed five-bay NAS device that delivered relatively fast file transfer scores in testing. It comes with a 10Gbps LAN port that lets you reap the full benefits of a high-speed network, and has two 1Gbps LAN ports that provide failover support and can be linked for 2Gbps connectivity. The chassis is not tool-free, but the drive sleds are easily removed by hand for quick hot-swapping.

The F5-422 is best for owners of small to medium businesses (or home power users) that require lots of storage and a reliable RAID configuration. It offers a user-friendly, web-based management console and a decent catalog of apps for tasks like creating and synchronizing cloud drives, building a web server, transcoding 4K video, serving multimedia content, creating VPN and proxy servers, and backing up large blocks of data.

The Drivestor AS3302T is a moderately priced two-bay NAS that is equipped with a 2.5Gbps LAN port, three high-speed USB ports, and a quad-core CPU. It’s a solid performer that is easy to install and manage using the Microsoft Windows-like operating system, but it lacks the HDMI port and M.2 slots that you get with its more expensive sibling, the Lockerstor 2 Gen2 (AS6702T).

Asustor designed the Drivestor AS3302T for use as a personal cloud server, but it can also be pressed into service as a web server, a media server, a backup repository, and more by downloading apps from Asustor’s App Central. Its tool-free chassis, magnetic cover, and easy-to-remove drive sleds make installing and replacing drives a snap.

Buying Guide: The Best NAS (Network Attached Storage) Devices for 2023

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.

For 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. All of that is relatively simple for a NAS. 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.

Home users may not need to worry about large numbers of users; these days it's the number of simultaneous devices that makes the difference. If you're using the NAS to back up your laptops overnight, that's pretty straightforward. 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. 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.

(Credit: Asustor)

Since a NAS device is, at the simplest level, just a container for a hard drive or drives (with some added intelligence), the number-one spec for any NAS unit is its maximum potential storage capacity. That's determined by the number of drive bays it includes and to a lesser extent what kinds of drives it can carry. Most consumer-grade and home-office NAS units have one or two bays, while models designed for the office have four or more. But that's not an absolute guideline, especially now that newer NAS devices are showing up with support for 2.5-inch laptop-style drives, both platter-based and solid state. These drives will allow NAS makers to fit more drives into their chassis, which means more long-term storage capacity.

We don't generally recommend NAS drives with just a single bay, unless they are to be used strictly for backing up data that will also reside on computers on the network. That's because of the lack of redundancy out-of-the-box. (Some single-bay NAS drives will allow you to attach a second NAS device or an external hard drive, to that end.) You don't want the only copy of your data residing on just one drive on the network.

The beauty of a NAS device is that it can use some version of a technology called Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID). This tech allows the software that manages the NAS devices to distribute and duplicate the data it stores across multiple hard disks. That means even if one of the drives fails completely, the RAID system can simply take in a new, completely empty drive and repopulate it with the data the failed drive was carrying. There are different levels of RAID that perform this function in different ways depending on exactly what users need. Check out their RAID explainer for more information.

Still, for most home users who aren't rabid video-file hoarders, a two-bay NAS should be sufficient, provided that you buy big enough drives from the outset if you'll be mirroring them, meaning simply making one drive an exact duplicate of the other. Err on the high side of capacity, though; it'll cost more now, but you don't want to have to rebuy two hard drives for your NAS to get a higher effective mirrored capacity. Remember: Mirroring takes two physical drives. More on redundancy below.

Some NAS drives are sold pre-populated with disks, oftentimes already formatted for use in a particular RAID configuration. Many others are purchased empty of drives, or "diskless." This was an important consideration some years ago because it used to be that the NAS vendors who also manufacture hard drives would ship their NAS units as sealed devices pre-filled with their own drives. Today, the vast majority of current NAS devices are hard disk-neutral as far as disk brand is concerned. Because most of these devices at least have a diskless option, you're really only concerned with overall drive capacity, their interface technology, and how much buying them will add to the overall cost of your NAS.

(Credit: Synology)

If a given NAS is offered in both pre-populated and diskless form, they suggest checking out the cost difference and making sure that the drives that are provided in the populated model work out to a good value. With pre-populated-only NAS drives, the cost of the internal drives tends to be harder to distinguish from the overall cost of the NAS unit.

NAS makers that sell diskless NAS drives recommend certain drive models or families that have been tested for use with their NAS drives. Take a look at these drive-compatibility lists before you buy. If you already own a bank of hard drives you intend to install, you'll want to look for such validation. If yours are not on the list, it doesn't mean they won't work, but if you are buying drives new, it's best to stick with the NAS maker's recommendations.

Some drives from Seagate, Toshiba, and WD are tagged as specially designed for NAS use. Most of these "NAS certified" hard drives have been tested to run 24/7/365, which is a bit much for regular, consumer-level drives.

(Credit: Seagate)

If you are looking at Seagate drives, for example, the NAS-class drives are called the IronWolf, IronWolf Pro, IronWolf SSD, and IronWolf SSD and HDD lines. Straight IronWolf drives are what you're after for outfitting a NAS drive in a home. IronWolf Pro are designed for somewhat heavier business use, while IronWolf SSD is meant for NAS units that need solid state speed to serve up data quickly for high-performance applications. The last, the IronWolf SSD and HDD drives, combine both technologies in a single drive that then has its own firmware logic to distribute data for optimal performance beyond what SSD delivers on its own.

Other drive makers will have similar products available, as far as storage and interface technologies are concerned, though they'll differ somewhat in terms of capacity and pricing. WD's NAS-oriented equivalents to the IronWolfs, for example, are dubbed WD Red.

As they mentioned earlier, a key benefit of most NAS units is the redundancy option, so in two- and four-drive configurations the extra disks can simply "mirror" the contents of the other drive. Depending on which RAID level you choose, this will impact the overall capacity of the NAS device versus the hard disks it has installed. Example: A two-bay unit with two 4TB drives that mirrors one drive onto the other would offer only 4TB of usable storage. The other drive is, in a practical sense, invisible, because it's used to make a second copy of all the files from the other drive in the background.

Usually, the user has the option to reconfigure the drives to gain the capacity of the second drive, if desired. One way you can do this is via "striping," in which the data will span both drives. Striping by itself is chancy; under some circumstances, it enhances the speed of reads and writes, since you're accessing two drives at once. But if either disk fails, it's possible that all your data will be lost, so they don't recommend this approach. With two drives, you have two points of failure.

Many NAS units also support a JBOD mode ("Just a Bunch of Disks"), which lets you address each drive as a separate drive letter and save data to discrete drives within the NAS box. This is no safer than just basic striping; any data you save to a given drive is still vulnerable to the failure of that specific mechanism. To mitigate this, some JBOD NAS management software allows users to combine disks into one or more logical volumes and even apply redundancy measures across volumes. This is usually entirely dependent upon the software used to manage the NAS, however, so be sure to understand your NAS drive's software capabilities before purchase, particularly if you're a small-business buyer.

If you think a NAS drive will let you stream any type of media you have to any device or TV, keep in mind certain devices will only play certain types of files, and you'll need to get software and hardware to work together to make this happen.

For example, that, ahem, sweet DVD rip you have of James Cameron's Titanic in AVI format will not open on an iPhone without some jiggering. (It needs to be in MP4 format to be recognized.) Software can get around that problem, such as the ever-useful VLC Media Player utility, and some NAS units work with Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, Android phones/tablets, and other types of hardware. It can be complicated, though, to ensure that a specific file or file type will play on a given device, so look at the specs of the NAS closely to determine its capabilities.

(Credit: Synology)

A late development in NAS circles is special kinds of support for streaming 4K video, and the spec sheet is your friend in these cases. Some NAS units with 4K acceleration will convert this high-resolution video on the fly to formats better suited to the bit rates of devices, such as smartphones, that are requesting it. This is an esoteric need at the moment, but know that some NAS makers will charge a premium for some of these features. It's also possible to get such on-the-fly transcoding for other, lesser resolutions. This is where the CPU that powers a NAS comes into play: a low-end Intel Atom versus a much more robust Core i3, for example.

Most NAS drives have one or two USB ports that you can use to connect a printer or external storage drives, letting you add those to your network via the NAS itself. Once they are plugged in, just like everything else on the NAS, they can be shared with all connected users. An example of a common arrangement: A NAS drive will have one USB 2.0 port that is usually used for printer sharing, and a USB 3.0 port that can be used for external storage. (USB 2.0 is much, much slower than USB 3.0, but a printer doesn't need the fast pipe, so a USB 2.0 port is just fine.)

Some NAS units also have a "copy" button on the front panel designed to make copying the contents of an external drive, such as a flash drive, to the NAS a one-button-press affair. You just connect the drive and tap the button, and everything on the external drive is safely copied to the NAS to a predesignated location.

(Credit: Synology)

NAS drives, by definition, will come with at least one Ethernet port, often two for redundancy or channel-bonding (essentially, combining two smaller Ethernet pipes into one logical, large pipe). NAS drives tend to avoid wireless connectivity because only wired connections give them the smooth traffic flow they need to serve up data, especially streaming data, to multiple recipients at an optimal rate. accurate high-end models go so far as to offer 10-gigabit Ethernet, for screaming data transfer rates. However, this only makes a difference if the rest of the network is running at 10Gbps (or at least the primary traffic target is). Additionally, the throughput of platter hard drives makes this moot for most consumer and SOHO use cases. That said, a few models come with a PCI slot that may let you install an enhanced network card, and others support using SSDs instead of hard drives for faster throughput.

A few models will also come with an HDMI port; this would let you use the NAS as a media server with a direct connection to your HDMI-equipped HDTV.

In addition to the above sharing features, most NAS drives let you send web links to people to allow them to access remotely certain files or folders located on your NAS. Your NAS can thus serve like your own private Dropbox or Google Drive, but with way more storage capacity—and no monthly bill. Many NAS makers tout this. (Look for the much-bandied term "personal cloud" around this kind of feature.)

How each vendor offers this capability, however, can vary. Some may do as little as offer a simple File Transfer Protocol (FTP) manager as an app or simply a command line feature. This will certainly work, but you'll need to know something about configuring a secure FTP server to make sure your files aren't suddenly open to the whole internet. The better NAS devices offer an app that handles remote internet access. These come with easy-to-learn user interfaces and more advanced security options, including the ability to encrypt whatever files you're opening up to the cloud.

With this functionality, you can also access the NAS itself from any internet connection, not just via your local network. As a result, you can get files you need on the road, or stream a movie or music files resident on your home NAS to your laptop in a hotel across the country or the world, network bandwidth permitting. Most, but not all, NAS drives offer this kind of feature, so be sure to do your research before you pull the trigger if it's a must-have. (Ourselves? They wouldn't get a NAS without it.)

We've outlined the NAS picks they presented above in a handy spec breakout below. And is a NAS not quite right for what you want, you realize now? For more storage options, take a look at their lists of the best external hard drives and the top external SSDs, as well as their top-rated cloud storage services.

50 Quotes All Book Lovers Can Relate To

Books are truly some of the best joys in life. They allow us to escape reality and get lost in fantastic tales, even if only for a little while. Book lovers know the power of a good book—you can’t put it down, recommend it to everyone you know, and put in on your personal list of books everyone should read in their lifetime. There are plenty of uplifting quotes that come from books, and you may even have your favorite quotes from books memorized. These quotes would also be great to accompany any of these gifts for book lovers (that aren’t books). There’s power behind these quotes, especially quotes that pertain to a love of books and reading. Here are some of the best book lover quotes for all the proud bookworms out there.

1. “We live for books.”―Umberto Eco

2. “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”—Ernest Hemingway

3. “That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.”—Anthony Trollope

4. “I look at books as being a form of activism. Sometimes they’ll show us a side of the world that they might not have known about.”—Angie Thomas

5. “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”—Joseph Addison

6. “There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.”—Mary Ellen Chase

7. “The studying of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.”—Rene Descartes

8. “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not studying them.”–Ray Bradbury 

9. “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”—Jorge Luis Borges

10. “The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading.”—David Bailey

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11. “There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place.”—J.K. Rowling

12. “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”—Saul Bellow

13. “I am a part of everything I have read.”—Theodore Roosevelt

14. “What a blessing it is to love books.”—Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer

15. “Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.”—Malorie Blackman

16. “Some like to believe it’s the book that chooses the person.”—Carlos Ruiz Zafón

17. “I have never known any distress that an hour’s studying did not relieve.”—Montesquieu

18. “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”—Oscar Wilde 

19. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”—Toni Morrison

20. “… a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”—George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

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21. “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”—Mark Twain

22. “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”—Barbara W. Tuchman

23. “Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different styles.”—R.L. Stein

24. “We shouldn’t teach great books; they should teach a love of reading.”—B.F. Skinner

25. “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”—Stephen King

26. “But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”—Jane Austen

27. “Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.”—Mark Haddon

28. “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.”—Mortimer Adler

29. “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.”—Walt Disney

30. “A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”—Madeleine L’Engle

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31. “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero

32. “I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”—H.L. Mencken

33. “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.”—Abraham Lincoln

34. “A love of studying shows empathy, the desire to understand how others live or act or might act—and why.”—Celeste Ng

35. “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”—Logan Pearsall Smith

36. “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”—Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

37. “The world was hers for the reading.”—Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

38. “Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.”—Jim Bishop

39. “She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”—Annie Dillard, The Living

40. “If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”—Francois Mauriac

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41. “Books may well be the only true magic.”—Alice Hoffman

42. “When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”—Hilaire Belloc 

43. “A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late studying them.”—Lemony Snicket, Horseradish

44. “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

45. “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while studying it.”—William Styron

46. “There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”—Christopher Morley, Pipefuls

47. “There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.”—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

48. “There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.”—Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense

49. “So many books, so little time.”—Frank Zappa

50. “Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.”—Joseph Addison

Itching for a new book after studying these quotes? Learn the best places to find used books online—you’ll save money while expanding your library.