. The best NAS device for Mac has video transcoder embedded. It has many third party useful apps for web and mobile phones and tablets. The best Mac NAS drive features fast speed - 112.75 MB/s, 97.6 MB/s writing. Multimedia packages from the best NAS drive for macOS can organize and manage music, movies, photos and documents. Apr 06, 2018 If you choose to do this, it’s better for your Synology NAS to handle it, rather than macOS, as that will free up resources on your computer. Turn on the “Enable Shared Folder Quota” option. This places a maximum capacity on the shared folder so that Time Machine doesn’t continue to create more and more backups until it fills up the.
Make your Mac invincible
If there’s one thing you need to remember when dealing with high-tech devices, such as laptops and desktops, is that you should always have a recent backup on hand. While it’s true that Macs are as dependable as computers go, no one is protected from their processor overheating, battery dying, files being corrupted by malware, or just a spilled cup of coffee.
External hard drives have been around for decades. First they connected to your computer through USB-A ports and could hold just a few dozen gigabytes. Eventually, they learned to transfer files over WiFi and grew up in size to a few terabytes — becoming de facto the best personal cloud storage available to most people.
But with the explosion of smartphones and streaming services, the amount of media data being saved on our devices has greatly exceeded what regular hard drives can offer. Today, most of us need a robust and expendable home cloud storage solution that’s able to protect our data seamlessly in the background.
What Is A NAS Hard Drive?
NAS (or network attached storage) in many ways is just the right answer for those who want to upgrade from outdated external hard drives and beginner My Cloud app look-alikes.
A network attached storage device is not only capable of wirelessly storing everything you’ve ever created (they generally start at about 2 TB) but also divide its capacity between a few people (so every family member could have their own drive, for example), stream media to Apple TV or Bluetooth speakers directly, and act as a central hub for all storage, with all your other hard drives connected to it.
So let’s look at the best NAS for Mac on the market in 2020, covering every target audience segment.
Simple: Western Digital My Cloud Home
When you just want to graduate from an external hard drive to a network attached storage for Mac, there’s no better candidate than WD My Cloud Home.
Western Digital doesn’t even call this network storage a NAS drive but rather addresses it as a personal cloud storage device. Still, My Cloud Home encompasses all the attributes of grownup NAS drives without the price tag. It goes from 2 to 8 TB in storage capacity, can save all your information via WiFi automatically, allows remote access through a My Cloud app, features shared folders as well as individual volumes, and is capable of streaming to Sonos, Google Chromecast, and more — all starting at just $159.99.
Powerful: Western Digital My Cloud Expert Series EX2 Ultra
If you want to combine the ease of use we’ve all come to expect from WD devices with a power of true NAS storage, take a look at the WD My Cloud Expert series.
The EX2 Ultra is a real NAS drive that could come unpopulated (without hard drives) so you can install your own storage or take up to 28 TB right from the manufacturer. Unlike My Cloud Home, EX2 Ultra introduces RAID (redundant array of independent disks) options that let its two hard drives clone each other and carry the same information for maximum protection.
Macos why does facebook keep asking for my password. And whenever i type that it is saying it's incorrect.The login window can be set in one of two modes: 'list of users' and 'username and password'.Your mac is using the latter, so you have to.type. Apple Footer.This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only. Just giving you an example, of course, I have no idea what name you chose when you created your user account.If you still can't log in then follow the instructions I gave you before for resetting the password. the username and the password (until you can log in and change your settings, naturally).Are you sure you typed the userNAME exactly? In macOS there are two versions, the 'short' name and the long name.You have to type one of them exactly, and, of course, the password also.For example, your long name may be something like 'Kritica Yadav' and your short name (the one that will show next to your home icon in a Finder sidebar) may be something like 'kriticayadav' (the short name can't have spaces and is usually all in lowercase, but that is not mandatory).
In addition, WD My Cloud Expert EX2 Ultra is powered by a dual-core processor for ultra-fast streaming and encrypts your hard drive volumes by default.
Affordable: Buffalo LinkStation 220D
In some cases, you might care less about how intuitive your NAS storage is, what you’re really after is a cheap NAS with good security built in. That’s where you should try Buffalo LinkStation 220D.
Best Nas For Macos 2017
While LinkStation 220D might not win any awards for its user-friendliness, it’s a straightforward unpopulated NAS for Mac that starts at $119.99 and includes RAID support (with an additional USB-A on the back) as well as drag-and-drop backups.
You could set up a shared folder through Buffalo’s Navigator app, but it would be more difficult than you think. Same with getting your iTunes streaming server to work. Overall, good enough for straightforward tasks.
Advanced: Synology DiskStation DS218
Stepping into high-end but still consumer-oriented NAS storage solutions, we can find Synology DiskStation DS218. It comes unpopulated to let you combine your own storage devices and features a Gigabit Ethernet port for connecting to your router as well as three USB-As for any other storage volumes you might be using.
Best Nas For Mac Pro
DiskStation DS218 is RAID-enabled and can act as a media server with real-time 4K video transcoding to Apple TV or any other player — all running on a quad-core 1.4 GHz processor. Some would say DiskStation might simply be too much for a casual user, and they will be right. But for some, it’s just what they were looking for all along.
Professional: Drobo 5N2
Those who work in the fields of photography, animation, or video production know how much unique data could be worth. From that perspective, Drobo 5N2 is not an expensive device at all, although it starts at about $550 unpopulated.
Drobo 5N2 features five hard drive slots, some of which can be used for RAID and some for actually expanding the NAS storage capacity. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports can be combined into one to provide astonishing transfer speed for the high-end devices that can handle it. This NAS even features its own internal battery for a complete fail-proof setup.
How to properly back up your Mac
Whether you’re using NAS or a regular external hard drive for your backup plan, you need to know how to approach backups in a comprehensive manner, so you don’t forget any important files.
Get Backup Pro is one of the most versatile backup managers you can find. It instantly connects to your NAS drive and offers incremental backups on a set schedule or cloning options that allow you to reboot your Mac from an external drive should it break. Get Backup Pro’s speed and reliability are unparalleled, far exceeding those of Time Machine, for example.
How to recover lost files from an external drive
Mistakes happen and regardless how robust your backup solution is, there would be a moment when you’d accidentally delete a file not backed up anywhere else, be it from your Mac or an external drive. What do you do now?
Disk Drill is master data recovery software that’s able to get into the deepest corners of your data volumes and retrieve information that you thought was forever gone. Your best friend here is to act quickly and launch Disk Drill right after you saw a much-needed file disappear — that’s why keeping this app in your toolkit at all times is a true secret lifesaver.
How to make the most out of home cloud storage
Nowadays, most of us have already signed up for all the free tiers at all the most popular cloud storage providers: DropBox, Box, OneDrive, Google One, and so on. Some of us even have paid plans. The problem is all of them being scattered in various places and easy to forget.
CloudMounter offers a genius solution to gathering your cloud network storage solutions (from Amazon S3 to Backblaze) in one place by mounting them on your Mac as real hard drives, essentially folders like any other. This provides you with a new world of possibilities when it comes to searching through your files, ensuring proper encryption, and effectively transferring data.
As you can see, picking the best NAS hard drive has a wealth of advantages over using a regular external hard drive. What’s better, you can enhance this experience even further by mounting all cloud network storage as local drives with CloudMounter, backing up files securely with Get Backup Pro, and recovering anything that’s lost with Disk Drill.
Best of all, CloudMounter, Get Backup Pro, and Disk Drill are available to you absolutely free for seven days through Setapp, a platform of more than 170 outstanding apps for your Mac. And you can try them all today at no cost to see how else you can improve your daily life without any effort on your part.
Are you planning to create your own NAS (Network Attached Storage) using some old hardware and drives? Then for that self-made DIY NAS server you definitely need some OS or software to work; obviously, because the operating system is the thing that will control the functions that your NAS server will provide later. However, still, there are only a few well known Linux operating systems that dedicatedly meant to do this job. Yet, whatever out there are quite developed to provide Linux/FreeBSD based SAN (Storage Area Network) or NAS (Network Attached Storage) solutions to enterprises, small offices or homes.
Top Open source Linux DIY NAS software
Before listing Linux or FreeBSD distros for creating network Attached storage OS, I would like to say there is no “best operating system” either for NAS or computer. The choice of an operating system depends heavily on what you are going to do with the NAS server. In this guide, we focus on software that understands a NAS server primarily as a system for the provision of data in your office or home. With the operating systems we mention in this article, you can copy data back and forth, perform backups, along with some advanced tasks (such as establishing a VPN connection or installing a mail server) including plugins to extend OS capabilities.
Here we are about to list some best NAS solutions to help you if you are planning to data management using open-source software in 2020.
1. FreeNAS OS
You might be already familiar with its name. It is one of the best FreeBSD based NAS software solutions that not only provide easy to use interface but also plugins to extend features such as for the Plex server. The operating system is designed to enable a self-built NAS system based on free software.
The company behind it actually deals in NAS hardware for enterprises, however, the OS is available free of cost for the general public.
The best thing is you don’t need to have a hard drive for FreeNAS installation, a simple USB drive would be enough, of course, to save data hard drives are needed those can be managed from its graphical user interface.
In addition, the operation of the FreeNAS is extremely simple. In terms of upgrades and updates, the manufacturer and their product life cycles are released from time to time. It uses the OpenZFS file system which is highly reliable and can be configured from the admin web interface volume manager.
Key Features:
- It provides easy to use graphical interface.
- Supports all major protocols for file sharing such as CIFS/SMB (Windows), AFP (Apple), and NFS (Unix).
- It makes easy to stream and share your movies and music.
- Backup and snapshots are possible.
- Checksums ensure only error-free data gets written to disk
- Self file repair file system.
- It offers encryption on ZFS volumes.
- It offers useful plugins such as Plex, Owncloud, Minecraft and more to use NAS more than a storage device.
- Docker and in-built virtualization support.
2. OpenMediaVault NAS software OS
OpenMediaVault (OMV) is another network-attached storage (NAS) software operating system and well-known for home or small office clouds. It is based on Debian Linux distribution, yes, the familiar one thus easy to install and manage without much system knowledge. This opensource Linux NAS software supports all major protocols such as SSH, (S) FTP, SMB / CIFS, and RSync and also can be expanded via plug-ins, for example, DAAP Media Server, Shairport – AirPlay/RAOP receiver, and more…
Open Media vault Key Features:
- It comes with a web-based user interface thus not a problem to backup and accessing the storage drives from anywhere.
- Based on Debian, thus easy maintenance of updates using the apt command.
- Web-based administration, User management, Scheduled jobs, Multilanguage support, Service announcement via DNS-SD and Plugin system.
- In terms of networking, it supports Link aggregation, Wake On Lan and IPv6 support.
- Openmediavault provides a wide range of options to manage the storage volumes such as GPT partitions, RAID JBOD/0/1/5/6/, Quota feature to restrict user, SHare Management, EXT3/EXT4/XFS/JFS filesystem support and more…
- It is faster and lighter weight and one best NAS OS even some people prefer it over FreeNAS.
3. XigmaNAS (formerly NAS4Free)
XigmaNAS was earlier known as NAS4Free. If you want to create your own DIY NAS box, it provides easy-to-manage file server to provide data storage and smaller server tasks such as media services with little effort.
It also based on FreeBSD just like FreeNAS, actually, it had been developed using the code of FreeNAS and later in 2018, NAS4Free was renamed to XigmaNAS. It can be used USB sticks, memory cards or hard drives and SSDs as boot media. It is also possible to boot it from a live CD or a live USB stick.
XigmaNAS has extensive documentation directly on its own website, thus installation and handling would not be a big pain.
Like FreeNAS, XigmaNAS server functionalities can also be expanded using its extension based system. For example, you can save data related to BitTorrent directly on the NAS hard drives. Conversion of NAS server into a media server is also possible using the Plex media server extension that allows to manage media data in a visually appealing manner and to stream it to other devices. Or you can install an interface that also makes access from smartphones in a more convenient way.
Key Features of XigmaNAS:
- Complete management via a web interface
- Software raid (0,1,5) and optional file encryption
- File systems: ZFS v5000 (Feature Flag), UFS, Ext2 / 3, FAT, NTFS
MBR and GPT partitions - Disk encryption with support for cryptographic hardware acceleration,
- Numerous network protocols such as CIFS / SMB (Samba v4.x), FTP, NFS, TFTP, AFP, RSYNC, Unison, SCP (SSH), iSCSI (initiator and target), HAST (Highly Available Storage), CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol ), Bridge, UPnP and BitTorrent
Services such as UPNP server, iTunes server, iTunes / DAAP server, web server, torrent client etc. - Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
- Monitoring with email alarm
- Monitoring of hard disk drives and solid-state drives (SSDs) via SMART
4. Rockstor – Centos based Linux NAS solution
This Linux NAS software is slightly different and has a more stable base that is CentOS. The biggest difference between FreeNAS and Rockstor is it uses the Btrfs file system, which is very similar to ZFS used by FreeNAS. Btrfs is a so-called CoW (Copy-On-Write) file system and developed by the Oracle to provide high read and write performance and to handle fault tolerance, repair and easy administration.
Rockstor supports the protocols/features AFP, Active Directory, LDAP, NIS, NTP, NUT-UPS, SFTP and SNMP. Shares can be made available via NFS and Samba (Smb / CIFS). The SMART function for hard drives has also recently been supported.
This player is a universal tool for all formats and extensions, so except MKV files you can easily watch videos in MP4, MOV, MP4, DivX, AVI, etc. You can freely work with subtitles by changing their languages, font colors, sizes, encodings, etc. The intuitive and user-friendly interface allows you to easily operate Mac MKV player without any technical knowledge and skills. Elmedia will load subtitles automatically for your MKV files. Advanced features offered by the Elmedia Player PROThe paid version of Mac MKV player gives you exclusive possibilities to enjoy screenshots of any scenes in your favourite movies and make lots of screencaps out of the whole motion picture. Gomplayer for mac catalina.
It only supports 64-bit modern systems with at least 2Gb RAM and for best out of it, 4 to 8Gb is recommended depending on the number of data hard drives used.
Rockstor offers the possibility to integrate plugins via Docker. The plugins are available as containers, which Docker virtualizes on the host system.
Apart from the traditional NAS system, it can be also used as Personal Cloud Server and SMB Cloud Server, we can set as per the requirement and data availability.
Key Features of Rockstor:
- Linux, BTRFS based open source storage OS with Bitrot protection, checksums, compression and other advanced filesystem features
- Copy-on-write Snapshots
- File sharing is possible across all major systems such as Linux, Mac, Windows and Mobile devices.
- GUI installer
- Customizable Dashboard
- Rockstor supports file backup with Rsync, Apple Time Machine and Windows Backup.
- Resource monitoring with SNMP.
- Add-ons for media streaming, backups, cloud storage and more.
- And more…
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