Cameron White
Unit 6 Research Paper 1

What is a NAS device? A NAS (Network-Attached Storage) is a server that is dedicated to nothing more than file sharing. It’s usually a network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. NAS usually has a speed of 1GB Ethernet connection but it can be changed to Gb, 10Gb, fiber optic by adding a PCIe network card. They usually have a capacity range from 0-Unlimitied. The capacity varies because you can always add on hardware drive controller cards. You can have a board that has six SATA ports that can allow 30 drives to be attached and 3TB drives are used in RAID 50, then there would be 72TB of storage. When using RAID there aren’t really any fault tolerance. Older models of RAID have been known to lose all storage if one or more drives fail. When using a NAS device there are management features available like using SSL to protect the web management interface to bare minimum, also support of protocols such as SSH for encryption of RSYNC data transfers. SMB’s with more than two dozen users will appreciate a proper management console from which users and permissions can be managed. SMB’s that have deployed Active Directory will be looking for a NAS that supports it as well. Some models can switch off when not in use to save power and you can always play with the settings. NAS can be really helpful and can defiantly be helpful with a family that all has there own computer. With NAS you can have photos and videos and share them/access the/store them with NAS. This will make it easier for the family to share photos and is a great advantage of NAS.