A Guide to the Best 6-Bay or 5-Bay NAS Drives to Buy Right Now
I know, I know – it’s kind of a vague subject, but 6-Bays, 5-Bays and RAID 6 targeted machines are sudden a ‘thing’. Do you remember when buying a NAS drive was so easy? Even as little as 5-6 years ago, the choices in the types of network-attached storage solutions you could buy was quite simple. It went 1-Bay > 2-Bay > 4-Bay > 8-Bay > Rackmount >MASSIVE. Then, as the demand and utility of NAS systems grew, so the average NAS buyer became remarkably more discerning. Brands like Synology, QNAP and Asustor suddenly realised that there were gaping holes between the solutions in their portfolios. First, they set about creating cost-effective versions of their existing ranges to create multiple options for those looking for the traditional storage scales mentioned. However that was not enough, as it did not address the main growing demand – that of users needing 3-Bays, 6-Bays, 12-Bays and ultimately, solutions that levered a users budget less on the hardware resources and more towards its supported storage media capacity. Therefore the last few years have seen the portfolios of these NAS brands expand to fill in these gaps, to allow the RAID 6 (dual-redundancy/safety net) focused users, the mixed media preferred users and even the data-rich but money tight users to have their own rather unique needs to be fulfilled. So, that is what we are looking at today, three of the very BEST examples available to buy for 2022 that slide into those gaps in the portfolio. These are solutions that provide storage across two or more storage media types, that provides a good base of storage against a RAID 6 configuration (but not break the bank) and allow the end users a great degree of storage & performance, without heading into the more premium price tag 8-bay alternatives. Of all by best of the year articles, this has been the most unusual to curate, as, unlike the usual crowd, these are comparatively obscure solutions. If NAS is a particularly niche area of technology, then these solutions are the most niche of the niche that you will find – but are all the very best of their own crowd of odd-ball scale solutions on the market!
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