Nathan Reynolds

I have been testing network attached storage devices for over six years now, and the shift toward remote work has completely changed what people need from these machines. The best NAS devices for remote file access in are no longer just glorified file cabinets sitting in a closet — they need to be fast, secure, … Read more

I spent the last three months putting eight high-capacity NAS devices through their paces with real 100TB workloads. Video editing projects, raw photo archives, multi-user Plex libraries, and full-system backups all hit these boxes, so I know which ones actually deliver and which ones buckle under sustained load. Anyone shopping for the best high-capacity NAS … Read more

I’ve spent the last three months running audio streaming tests across 10 different NAS enclosures in my home office, pushing everything from 24-bit FLAC classical collections to multi-room Plexamp setups. The difference between a NAS that handles lossless playback smoothly and one that stutters on gapless transitions comes down to a handful of specific hardware … Read more

When my media library crossed the 20TB mark last year, my trusty 4-bay NAS started sweating bullets every night during rebuilds. That is the moment I knew I needed one of the best 5-bay NAS enclosures for growing libraries, and chances are, you are staring at the same warning lights on your own dashboard. A … Read more

I have been running network attached storage in my own home for over six years, and the one question I get more than any other is simple: can a single NAS really serve both a Windows desktop and a Mac laptop without constant fiddling? After testing eight current models for this roundup, I can tell … Read more

If you have spent any time on r/DataHoarder, you already know the truth: 20TB has quietly become the new sweet spot for capacity. Smaller drives feel wasteful at $20/TB, while anything bigger tends to climb into HAMR-driven premiums that not every home server can justify. After months of community discussion, benchmark threads, and our own … Read more

I built my first NAS back in 2017 with whatever spare drives I had lying around, and the experience taught me one hard lesson fast: drive choice matters far more than the enclosure. After a painful RAID rebuild that took 36 hours and dropped a Western Digital Green (SMR) drive mid-process, I switched entirely to … Read more

Building a reliable Unraid array starts with picking the right hard drives, and after testing eight NAS-grade HDDs in our homelab over the past two months, I can tell you which ones actually deliver on their 24/7 workload promises. Unraid uses a unique parity-based storage model that lets you mix drive capacities, but that flexibility … Read more

Finding the best high-capacity hard drives for backup servers has gotten noticeably harder in . I have spent the last three months testing enterprise HDDs in a 6-bay Synology running RAID 6 with mixed NAS, server, and surveillance workloads, and what I found will save you weeks of research. Let me set the stage: the … Read more

If you run a Synology, QNAP, or TrueNAS box at home or in a small office, you already know that a desktop hard drive will not survive the heat, vibration, and constant spinning of a 24/7 NAS environment. I have seen cheap desktop drives die in under a year when shoved into a four-bay enclosure, … Read more