Most consumer-grade and home-office NAS units have one or two bays, while models designed for the office have four or more.

We may earn affiliate commissions from buying links, which help support our testing.

Weve tested the top connected drives to tell you which one will work best for your home or small business.

The Asustor AS5202T may be pricey, but this two-bay NAS delivers fast performance and is equipped with top-shelf hardware and loads of apps.

The Asustor AS5304T is a powerful four-bay NAS device equipped with top-notch hardware and a generous catalog of apps.

The QNAP TS-251B-4G is a speedy, easy-to-use dual-drive NAS device equipped with a generous supply of ports and apps.

The Synology DiskStation DS1019 is a five-bay NAS device that offers speedy performance and valuable features, including support for numerous RAID configurations, 4K video transcoding, and a host of apps.

Its easy to install, offers a wealth of apps, and delivered speedy performance in testing.

The Asustor AS4002T is a feature-packed dual-drive NAS that performs well and is easy to install and configure.

The Synology DiskStation DS218j is an excellent entry-level two-bay NAS device thats supported by a bevy of management options and third-party apps.

The Promise Apollo Cloud 2 Duo is a simple, good-looking NAS device that offers copious easy-to-use personal cloud storage, although its a bit slower than the competition.

The TerraMaster F5-422 is a five-bay NAS drive that offers many business-friendly features including a speedy 10GbE LAN port, link aggregation, and a fistful of RAID options.

The TerraMaster F2-221 is a dual-drive NAS that performs well and comes with some helpful features, but its hampered by a difficult setup process and meager tech support.

While you can certainly use an external hard drive for offloading and backing up files from your PC (and by extension, from your phone ), if you disconnect the hard drive and leave it in your office, you wont be able to get to those files from home, and neither will anyone else.

There are ways to allow other users to share and access the files on your hard drive, but they may be challenging to implement, or carry security risks.

Instead, consider a good network-attached storage (NAS) device.

As its name implies, a NAS is high-capacity storage that connects to your home or office network so that you and other users you designate can access your files from mobile devices and PCs without plugging in to the drive.

What Can You Do With a NAS Once you decide that you need to store files on a network drive, you then need to figure out what you mean to do with them, in order to determine what kind of NAS you need.

For example, sharing access to Office files like spreadsheets and Word documents with your coworkers is a simple job for a NAS.

If youre using the NAS to back up your laptops overnight, thats pretty straightforward, as well.

But if youre serving HD videos over your home network to two tablets, a laptop, and your smart TV, all at the same time, youll want a NAS with higher specifications for memory, processor, and network capabilities.

Youll also need a more powerful NAS if you want to store big media libraries, like a collection of 100,000 stock photos, for your graphic arts studio.

So youll need to understand the terms and features before you go shopping.

Media Nas Cloud Drives For Mac