BACKGROUND I like studying & taking notes on my Windows tablet. This tablet has low disk space. So, currently, I get my documents & comics via network...from my living room home theater PC. But I don't like the idea of leaving my expensive living room PC turned on all the time... This is what ends up happening, as I work through the day...entertain evenings...and fall asleep reading at night. POSSIBLE SOLUTION So I watched this introduction video about a type of product called "NAS" (Network Attached Storage): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwhT-KI16jo If I understand correctly, this is like a hard drive dock that is simply connected via home network. This would be perfect for my situation. In my head, I imagine having a NAS hard drive where I put all my work documents. I "stream" these documents to my tablet and work on them. In case it's "on" for a long time, I don't have to worry about wearing out parts like power supply, graphics card, etc. PROBLEM But now I am kind of stuck. I don't know what product to look for. I don't know anything about company reputations. So I'm hoping you experts here will help me. HELP So let me break down what features are important to me: 1) Some sort of power-saving feature: - I may never get around to manually turning off this device, due to my schedule. I would hope my NAS has some mechanism to automatically "wind down" & maybe "power down" when I'm not using it. I don't want the thing running on full blast...if say, I forget to turn if off before bed. 2) Accepts variety of hard drive brands: - I don't want to be stuck on some proprietary system where I'm limited to a particular hard drive vendor. Also, I hope this would accept my current Western Digital drives which contain all my other non-work-related data. Because later on, I might like the idea of NAS and start streaming my movie, music drives etc. 3) Works well with Windows 7/8.1/10 (maybe Android & Apple, but not important) - All my important devices at home run on either Windows 7, 8.1, or 10. I also have some Android & Apple devices, but those are rarely used & not important. So definitely Windows compatibility. As an extra, the others would be good as well. 4) Some sort of GUI...with decent features. - I'm still not clear whether NAS's have GUI's or not. But if they do, I suppose the more features the better. One thing I would definitely like is some remote turn-on/turn-off feature that I could execute via my device. I imagine other features like sleep settings, power saving etc. would be beneficial. 5) Nothing big right now. A single or dual dock. Something under $200. - I did an initial search and saw some pretty big products...with lots of docks & priced over $500. Definitely not what I need! Maybe just one or two connected drives would suffice. I hope that can be affordable. UPDATE!! 6) Appears on my Windows network workgroup normally. - I'm a little confused by some of the images I see out there. I am not familiar with FTP and do not want to be limited to web browser access. I would hope that the NAS drive appears as a location in my Windows network "Workgroup". That way I could "map as network drive" and use it properly with my desktop software.
Synology, Qnap and Asustor are probably the best for home use. Synology has good support (can't speak for the other two, I never owned one of those).But.... from your description even a raspberry pi 3 + a usb portable hdd, with openmediavault would be fine for your needs. (and will consume 2-3 Watts) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUbaJ-Tjg5s Or you could build a small system with Intel Braswell or the newer Intel Apollo Lake mobo eg. http://www.asrock.com/mb/index.us.asp?s=Intel CPU and have a very powerfull nas (similar to the Asustor AS3204T) for half the price. and use openmediavault, freenas, etc. Panagiotis
FYI, some [wireless] routers have a USB port that can be used for network storage and media serving. Take a quick look at yours.
Got an old XP system laying around? I "repurposed" my old XP computer into a NAS. I loaded it up with a bunch of drives, enabled sharing, then blocked Internet access to the NAS/computer in my router. A friend has one of these and claims it works great. You do need to supply your own drive. He connected to his router via Ethernet but he said the wireless side worked fine too.
