NAS Compares Best Home NAS for £500

Best NAS Drive for Home and Family

I have gone through tons of your WD / QNAP / Synology videos and I still have no idea what the best option is for me. Your videos are extremely helpfull and detailed, but I am brand new to all of this.

Based on what I have heard from you – I like the WD simplicity for what I have to do, but that simplicity also scares me. I also am hesitant to set up some sort of user account for Plex, as it seems to go against the idea of a NAS that I can take offline. I can make my way around windows/OSX and I can do surgery on an iPhone / MacBook / laptop, but I am new to the world of networking and NAS.

Here is the list of what I need in order of priority:

1) backup laptops (2) / phones (2-5)
2) organize music/photos – multiple copies of photos and music on various devices and remote backups that I need to find duplicates
3)share music with family members – house music centrally and allow them to download to personal devices
4)I am a probable cord cutter that will need storage for OTA DVR. We currently have a Samsung Smart TV that we use for streaming.

Please let me know if you need any more info. I hope it is nice and cool wherever you are because it’s hotter than balls here in Texas.

Thanks,

Choosing the Best NAS Drive for Home on a Budget

Good morning Will. Sorry to hear that it’s hot as balls there in Texas… it’s 7AM on a dark morning in the UK here and it’s as cold as a polar bears arse here!

Anyway, to business, there are a whole bunch of options for you, but the budget you have mentioned will make it a little tough, as points 3 and 4 in your question require a moderately capable CPU. You will need to look at NAS that features an ARM 64bit CPU at the very least and likely an Intel Celeron 64bit to be sure. In order to stay on top of this.

I would recommend you purchase one of the following Three NAS drives:

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[jeyare]

Mark, still great, that you educate people about NASes.
But:
- beginning of the answer with CPU recommendation for someone who prepare such general request isn’t the right way. No shame that NAS newbies here around us. It’s normal. But they absolutely don’t care about ARM or Intel.
- same for a comparison cost of 3 NASes with different HDDs (1T vs 3T,...). Sure you can provide a way, that with this model you will get 3x storage space, just for few bucks more. But the difference between 3x more or less space is the real difference of saved/invested money to the space. Clear for us, but why to be so unclear for NAS newbies?
Good behaviour economy principles there:
- Syno is cheap, but with 2T capacity then out
- QNAS is gold middle way with 3x more space than Syno. The gold must be every time positioned in middle.
- Asus has only 4T capacity, the 20£ difference for the QNAS with 1.5x more capacity is reasonable
Nice try
Btw what is the difference between 2x1TB and 2x3TB disks?