What is a NAS? In Plain English!

A guide to helping you pick the right NAS manufacturer for your needs https://nascompares.com/guide/synolog...

NAS Network Attached Storage (NAS) servers are fast becoming an essential piece of kit on the home. Everyone wants to have their own special piece of cloud storage, be it 3rd party cloud providers like Google Drive, Amazon S3 or DropBox, or their own private cloud in the form of a NAS Server at home. The appeal of being access all of your data from anywhere in the world, to backup all of your portable devices at the touch of a button and the ability to watch your entire movie collection from the comfort of your sun lounger is pretty tempting.

How can I access my NAS - Where can I access THE nas Then you can get a little more technical with stuff like iSCSI, Virtual Machines and SnapShots and you can have some serious yet productive fun with your NAS Server. However with so many different NAS devices available from so many companies, you can spend days looking at them all and still be no closer to choosing the right NAS server to buy. So today we will discuss the main NAS providers and their advantages and disadvantages. By the end of this blog post you should have a much better understanding about the difference between a Synology NAS and QNAP NAS, which is better for business between a Drobo and a Netgear and should you pick a Thecus over an Asustor.

What is NAS and why you need it
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Network-attached storage (NAS) is file-level computer data storage connected to a computer network providing data access to heterogeneous network clients.

A NAS unit is essentially a self-contained computer connected to a network, with the sole purpose of supplying file-based data storage services to other devices on the network. The operating system and other software on the NAS unit provide the functionality of data storage, file systems, and access to files, and the management of these functionalities. The unit is not designed to carry out general-purpose computing tasks, although it may technically be possible to run other software on it. NAS units usually do not have a keyboard or display, and are controlled and configured over the network, often by connecting a browser to their network address. The alternative to NAS storage on a network is to use a computer as a file server. In its most basic form a dedicated file server is no more than a NAS unit with keyboard and display and an operating system which, while optimised for providing storage services, can run other tasks; however, file servers are increasingly used to supply other functionality, such as supplying database services, email services, and so on.

A general-purpose operating system is not needed on a NAS device, and often minimal-functionality or stripped-down operating systems are used. For example FreeNAS, which is Free / open source NAS software designed for use on standard computer hardware, is just a version of FreeBSD with all functionality not related to data storage stripped out. NASLite is a highly optimized Linux distribution running from a floppy disk for the sole purpose of a NAS. Likewise, NexentaStor is based upon the core of the NexentaOS, a Free / open source hybrid operating system with an OpenSolaris core and a GNU user environment.

NAS systems contain one or more hard disks, often arranged into logical, redundant storage containers or RAID arrays (redundant arrays of inexpensive/independent disks). NAS removes the responsibility of file serving from other servers on the network.

NAS uses file-based protocols such as NFS (popular on UNIX systems) or SMB/CIFS (Server Message Block/Common Internet File System) (used with MS Windows systems). NAS units rarely limit clients to a single protocol.

NAS provides both storage and filesystem. This is often contrasted with SAN (Storage Area Network), which provides only block-based storage and leaves filesystem concerns on the "client" side. SAN protocols are SCSI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, ATA over Ethernet (AoE), or HyperSCSI.

Despite differences SAN and NAS are not exclusive and may be combined in one solution: SAN-NAS hybrid
The boundaries between NAS and SAN systems are starting to overlap, with some products making the obvious next evolution and offering both file level protocols (NAS) and block level protocols (SAN) from the same system. However a SAN device is usually served through NAS as one large flat file, not as a true filesystem. An example of this is Openfiler, a free software product running on Linux.

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