comtemporarybusiness

The Whats & Whys of NAS First off: What is a network attached storage, or NAS, device? In its simplest form, it's a hard drive or hard drives in a box, connected to your router. Inside the chassis is a small motherboard, with a CPU and some memory to control its functions, plus a power supply. That’s all there is to it—like we said, a simple concept wrapped in opaque terminology. The main benefit of a NAS drive is that anyone who is connected to the router for his or her Internet connection, either wired or wirelessly, can access the hard drive. As a result, the NAS can act as a central, local repository for files, media, and anything else that needs to be shared by multiple folks all using the same network. Advanced features in today's routers also let you extend that file-sharing access to people outside your local network, in essence letting you host your own "personal cloud." (That's a term NAS makers throw around—a lot.) The much cheaper alternative to in...