Nathan Reynolds

Your growing team just hit 12 employees, the shared Dropbox folder is bursting at the seams, and that external USB drive your “IT guy” brought in last year is making clicking noises. We’ve been there. After spending the last three months testing eight NAS devices in our own office environment with real workloads (think 40 … Read more

I built my first home lab in a closet with a $300 mini-PC and a stack of external drives. It worked until I tried running Plex, Home Assistant, and a development database at the same time. The whole setup buckled under container load, and I spent an entire weekend chasing down kernel panics. That frustration … Read more

I switched my family off Google Photos two years ago and never looked back. After testing eight models across our home network and helping readers set up self-hosted photo servers, I learned that the right NAS makes Immich feel as smooth as any cloud service, while the wrong one turns thumbnails into a slideshow. This … Read more

I built my first home lab in a closet six years ago, and I’ve been chasing the perfect rackmount NAS ever since. The challenge is real: enterprise NAS gear is loud, power-hungry, and usually overkill, while desktop NAS units lack the drive bays and network throughput serious home labs need. After testing dozens of units … Read more

I lost a client project to a dead laptop drive in 2019, and that single failure is what pushed me to take home office backup seriously. After testing more than a dozen NAS units over the past three years for my own freelance business and consulting with several small studio owners, I’ve put together this … Read more

Upgrading your laptop’s storage is hands-down the single biggest performance jump you can make for the money. After swapping the original drive in our test laptops with the best SSDs for laptop upgrades, boot times dropped from 45 seconds to under 10, file transfers finished 8x faster, and an aging five-year-old machine felt close to … Read more

If you own a Mac with limited internal storage, an external SSD for Mac backups is no longer optional. I have spent the last three months moving terabytes of footage, photos, and Time Machine snapshots across 12 different portable SSDs, and the gap between the best and worst performers is wider than I expected. After … Read more

Your desktop hard drive is dying in your NVR right now. I have seen it happen dozens of times in home and business surveillance setups. The constant write cycles chew through regular HDDs in 12 to 18 months, and that is a real problem when you depend on those drives to capture every moment. A … Read more

I spent the last three months testing eight cold storage hard drives for archival backups, and what I found surprised me. The cheapest enterprise drive outperformed a drive that cost twice as much. And two of the most popular consumer models failed my heat and vibration tests within days. If you are building a long-term … Read more

Last year, I rewired our family’s home with eight IP cameras across two buildings, and the single biggest decision was the switch. Get the wrong one and you spend weekends rebooting dead cameras; get the right one and you forget it exists. Power over Ethernet (PoE) switches deliver both data and power through a single … Read more