If you want Jellyfin to stream 4K HDR to every TV, tablet, and phone in your house, your NAS needs one specific thing: an Intel processor with Quick Sync Video. Skip that spec and your CPU will choke on real-time HEVC transcodes, leaving your family staring at a buffering wheel on movie night. Our team … Read more
I remember the day my external drive died with three years of family photos on it. That panic made me run straight to my desk, fire up Amazon, and start researching network attached storage. Six years and five NAS units later, I have spent more than 200 hours benchmarking budget 4-bay NAS systems for this … Read more
Losing a laptop full of family photos is the kind of mistake you only make once. That is exactly why we spent three months testing boxes for this guide to the best 2-bay NAS for home backup — a single shelf unit that sits on your network, swallows backups from every phone and computer in … Read more
If your media library keeps expanding and you are running out of space on your current storage, it is time to consider a 6-bay NAS. A 6-bay NAS gives you the capacity to store massive amounts of photos, videos, and documents while keeping everything protected with RAID redundancy. For families and content creators with growing … Read more
I spent three weeks running the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus and Synology DS925+ side by side in my home office, streaming 4K content, running Docker containers, and pushing backup jobs across both. The UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus vs Synology DS925+ debate has become one of the most-asked questions in home NAS circles, and for good … Read more
I started running Docker containers on my NAS three years ago, and I have not looked back since. The ability to spin up Pi-hole, Home Assistant, Jellyfin, and Nextcloud on a single low-power box has changed how I run my home lab. Finding the best NAS for running Docker containers, however, is not as simple … Read more
Running virtual machines on a NAS changed my entire approach to homelab computing. Instead of maintaining separate servers for Plex, Home Assistant, and development environments, I consolidated everything into a single, efficient box. After testing 6 NAS units over several months, I found the best NAS for hosting virtual machines in . A NAS designed … Read more
I have spent the better part of two years moving large video projects across a home network, and nothing changed my workflow faster than switching to a NAS with 10GbE. A single gigabit connection tops out around 110 MB/s in real use, which means a 200 GB card of 4K footage takes roughly 30 minutes … Read more
Struggling to pick the best diskless NAS for a TrueNAS build? The mistake I see over and over is buying a slick consumer enclosure, unboxing it, and then discovering TrueNAS will not install on it. A locked bootloader, an ARM CPU, or a Marvell SoC can end the project before it starts. A diskless NAS … Read more
Mac users have relied on Time Machine for years as the go-to backup solution. But with Apple’s discontinuation of Time Capsule and the shift from AFP to SMB3 protocol, finding reliable network-attached storage for Time Machine backups has become essential. A dedicated NAS for Time Machine gives you automatic, centralized backups that protect against drive … Read more