The Best NAS Devices for Your Home After Months of Testing

Whether you want to to back up all your valuable files, making it easy to share and collaborate, or create your own entertainment cloud, network attached devices (NAS) and solutions. These mobile servers can extend your home network and help you offload services from your computer and other devices.

I’ve spent the last few months testing NAS devices from some of the top brands and looking at families looking to create backups and maybe switch to a fancy server to reduce subscriptions. These are the NAS devices I recommend.

You may also want to check out our related tips, such as How to Set Up a NAS Server, How to Protect Your Digital Lifeand Best External Hard Drives.

My Favorite NAS Servers

Although it is unlikely, Synology is still the heavyweight champion of the NAS market, and this dual-mode NAS is perfect for the average home. It’s very fast, either topping the charts or close to my test, hitting 300 MB/s read and 250 MB/s write, although this drops to more than 100 MB/s if your network has 1 Gbps everywhere (router, port, cable, or switch). It has many ports (2.5-Gbps and 1-Gbps Ethernet ports and USB ports on the front and back). The best equipment includes a fast Intel Celeron J4125 quad-core processor, 2 GB of RAM that can be upgraded to 6 GB, and two hard drives (up to 40 TB). It’s compact and quiet, with little fan noise when it’s busy. The screwless tray design makes it quick to install drives.

Installation and configuration are easy and accessible. Synology’s software, via web and mobile apps, is the most polished and user-friendly I’ve tried, and Synology offers a wide selection of software (all polished with third-party software like Plex and Jellyfin). This NAS offers tons of flexible backup options, works well as a media server, and offers many extras, including a VPN server and security camera support.

Bottom line, Synology devices are expensive. Remember that, as with most NAS devices, you will need to provide your own drives. Synology also briefly closed its NAS line to Synology drives, deeming third-party drives incompatible. Although it did back this up after some protests, so you can use third-party drives now, it’s a bit of a red flag. There’s also no HDMI port here, which you might want to connect to a TV. If you think you need more space, a Synology DiskStation DS425+ ($520) adding more colors.

For people who want a simple network backup that doesn’t need a lot of thought or modification, I also tried the all-in-one Synology BeeStation Plus, which comes with built-in storage (prices are currently higher due to AI-driven reduction), but no software or additional features. It’s quick and easy to set up, works well for automatic backups, and has a good camera app that can detect faces, but its performance is average.

Stable Synology BeeStation ($365) it is cheaper, but it has half the space at 4 TB. For a straightforward backup solution, BeeStation is as simple as it gets, but you can get a lot for your money.

Synology offers a lot many NAS devicesincluding strong business practices. It also makes great routers that can be combined to create mesh and security cameras that I haven’t seen yet.