Network Attached Storage (NAS) Devices

Here's an example of a network attached storage. I actually have a few of these in my house and I love them. It is so handy. What it is is it's file storage that I can plug into my network and have access to anywhere on my network, and it also does a lot of like streaming and does some other apps.

You connect a NAS into your switch, and then from there you can get to it from a device. So it's really great when you're trying to store data, backup data, or get it to somebody else's computer. It's just a central place for storing all of your files.

What a NAS Is

The key point to a network attached storage is that it's storage, and we attach it to a network, and so it has a network connection to attach to a network, and then we can access it from any machine. The example that we have here is like the Synology, that's one of my favorites there, but there are other brands that are out there. The purpose is to store data and make it available to everyone on the network, or certain people on the network.

Operating Systems and Apps

Some OS examples: the Synology has this Disk Station Manager. Others just have some sort of firmware that they install on it, so it just depends on which brand it is that you're talking about. There are some standard apps; a lot of it is file sharing apps, but there are some other apps that are on there also, like you can stream audio or video or any kind of media. So there's actually a lot of options from that perspective.

Some benefits are the ease of use, there's a lot of scalability with it, and some drawbacks are if it's not done right there's some security concerns with it.

Inside the Device

This is a NAS, a network attached storage, and it's storage, but it attaches to a network so I can access it via a network. So let's jump into this item and see what it looks like on the inside.

Here we have the hard drive right here, and it pretty much is covering up anything else that we can see in here, so I'm going to take the hard drive out and then we'll take a look at what's underneath, and probably take this plate off.

All right, now we're looking at the inside of this. We have some battery here that's probably to save some of the settings for the machine. Looks like we also have the processor; my guess is one of these is the processor, so maybe this, and one's probably the memory. We see a couple other chips here, we got a few other chips around here. So anyways, my guess is that this is probably the processor and maybe this is some of the memory there. But this is inside the Synology NAS.

Not a great view on the other side without me taking too much more apart, but there's not too much on the other side of this board. All right, time to put it all back together.

The Operating System

And there we have it, it's all put back together. I've logged into one of my Synologys to show you what the operating system looks like. This is Disk Station Manager, or DSM. In the bottom right hand corner here we see some health status and the CPU and RAM and just some different stats on the health of this device. In the top here we can see the taskbar with several notifications here, and different users, and we've got a search menu here. In the top left we got the main menu that brings up the different applications.

There's a bunch of packages that we could install, so I've opened up the Package Center. Here's a bunch of different packages that we could install on here. For instance, if I wanted to turn this into a streaming server, this has the ability to install a Plex Media Server. So that's just one example of things I can install on here.

This looks and feels very similar to like the Pi or Linux system, and that's because it is built off of a Linux system. So they've taken Linux and then they built this DSM on the DM components.