While I work in IT in my day job, I try to leave the really tricky stuff to the team around me. I don’t find administering servers particularly interesting, and the last thing I wanted to do was add a server to my home. So whenever the opportunity to review even the simplest forms of server, a Network Attached Storage (NAS), I politely declined. It felt a little too much like work, and far to niche a product for the general readership of Livewire. But Synology were insistent I try their server and I’m glad they were.

First, an explainer on Network Attached Storage that I’ll keep as simple and as brief as possible. A NAS is the next step up from an external hard drive. As the name suggests, you access it over your network, rather than via a direct USB connection. This allows the unit to be as large as you need it to be, and hidden in a closet if you want. Synology units can house just one or 16 drives, depending on your needs.

When you pop the drives in, you have a choice of formatting them either as one giant bucket of data, or as multiple buckets, with the data spread across each bucket in a way that if one of your hard drives fails, no data is lost. There are more choices available, but these are the two most common set ups.

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Setting up a NAS is usually a pretty painful process. At best, you’ll be guided through poorly designed “wizards” to activate everything from your administrator account, the type of buckets for your data, the type of permissions per user, and the sharing protocols you might want to use on the network. At worst, you’ll be doing all of those tedious tasks via a command line or the kind of maddening web interface you see on the worst kind of modems.