Nathan Reynolds

I built my first home server back in 2018 using an old desktop tower and three salvaged hard drives, and the learning curve nearly broke me. Today, the best budget NAS enclosures under $400 give you a turnkey personal cloud for the price of two months of iCloud storage, and our team has spent the … Read more

I’ve spent the last three months testing 10GbE NAS devices in my home lab, and the difference between a 1GbE setup and a proper 10 gigabit network is staggering. When you copy a 50GB folder of RAW photos to a NAS with 10GbE, the transfer completes in under a minute. The same transfer on gigabit … Read more

Most homeowners and small business owners eventually run into the same wall: their security camera system records sharp footage, but they have nowhere reliable to put it. SD cards fill up. Cloud plans charge monthly fees. A dedicated NVR feels like overkill. A NAS device for surveillance camera storage solves all three problems at once, … Read more

I built my first DIY NAS in 2019 because the prebuilt options felt overpriced for what I actually needed. Six years later, I’m still a convert. The flexibility of picking my own CPU, choosing between ZFS and Unraid, and avoiding vendor lock-in is hard to beat, and diskless NAS enclosures are the foundation that makes … Read more

If you have ever lost a phone full of photos, run out of cloud storage at the worst moment, or wanted one place where every laptop, tablet, and smart TV in your house could pull the same movies, a NAS is the answer. After helping dozens of friends set up their first home servers and … Read more

If you have ever lost a drive full of irreplaceable files, you already understand why DataHoarders treat storage the way preppers treat water. I have been running personal NAS setups for the better part of a decade, and I have watched the category go from quirky hobby gear to genuinely polished appliances. The best NAS … Read more

After 90 days of streaming movies, transcoding 4K remuxes, and pushing 8 UGREEN NASync models through their paces, I can tell you which ones actually deliver a smooth home media experience in . UGREEN went from a brand most home users had never heard of to a serious challenger to Synology and QNAP, and the … Read more

I have been running Synology NAS units for the better part of a decade, and so have many of the readers who write in asking the same question: is it finally time to switch? The Synology alternatives conversation has shifted from theoretical to urgent since April 2025, when Synology locked down drive compatibility on its … Read more

I built my first TrueNAS server five years ago and have been hooked on ZFS ever since. The challenge with the best NAS devices for TrueNAS enthusiasts is that the hardware requirements differ from what most consumer NAS marketing tries to sell you. TrueNAS expects 8GB RAM minimum, real ECC support where possible, and enough … Read more

If your household runs on more than one laptop, a stack of iPhones, and a few smart TVs fighting over the same Wi-Fi, you already know the pain of scattered files. A network attached storage (NAS) device fixes all of that in one box. Our team spent eight weeks testing eight different NAS devices for … Read more