Connecting DIRECTLY With Your NAS without Using a Switch or Router
Let’s all be honest for a second about one of the biggest advantages and disadvantages of network-attached storage, namely the speed, external security and method with which you can access your data. Having secure yet unlimited access to the data locked in your NAS from anywhere in the world is all well and good, but often all you want is the quick and easy connectivity more often found in traditional DAS and USB style storage. You want to enjoy the benefits of the software, maybe have the option of remote access and even still share are all the lovely data inside your NAS with multiple users, but you want it via direct connectivity with the NAS over a single cable, not having to play around with routers and switches. Add to this that many users are now taking advantage of connectivity such as thunderbolt and 10Gbe, and you find that it is genuinely desirable to be able to access your NAS via a much more direct method. In today’s article, I am going to show you how to set up a direct, one cable connection between your NAS drive and your Windows PC. The majority of the steps can also be applied to other operating systems, such as Linux and Mac, but this guide should show you how to set up a direct-attached storage style of connection with your NAS, whether you want to access the NAS software GUI or see the NAS Drive storage within the file management tools of your operating system natively (Windows File Explorer, Finder, etc)
Important – This guide is based on the assumption that you have set up your NAS system storage already. This includes physically installing the disks, powering on, installing the system firmware, creating an account, created and completed your RAID storage pool, created at least one volume and created at least 1 shared folder. I appreciate that this is alot of the first-time setup stuff, but don’t worry. Below are video guides for the first time setup of Synology, QNAP, Asustor and Terramaster NAS.
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