Selecting a NAS and configuring it for your company’s needs requires careful evaluation and planning. This comparison chart will help you target the most important details.

More about NAS selection:

For prosumers and SMBs, using dedicated network attached storage (NAS) devices combines the ease of use of cloud storage services with the convenience and speed of an on-premise solution. Choosing a NAS device requires a moderate amount of research, as there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and most vendors have multiple SKUs with largely overlapping feature sets. Likewise, the software powering these devices is often (at least in part) proprietary, and certain features may be restricted to certain SKUs.

From the vendor perspective, various considerations should be kept in mind about how the devices are being used. Products from QNAP use a disk-on-module to store and run the NAS OS, which allows drives to spin down when there is no disk activity. By contrast, Synology products store the OS on the storage drives, which requires disks to spin up for OS operations (logging, etc.) that are not directly related to data transfer. QNAP and Synology devices are multi-platform and are mostly managed from a web interface, though tools for Windows, OS X, and Linux do exist. Drobo products can’t be used with computers running Linux, as the management software operates only on Windows and OS X.