Battle of the NAS appliances

We put eight NAS appliances into one head-to-head torture test. Which came out alive, and which didn't live up to our expectations? Read on to find out.

The Synology DiskStation DS1817+ led the pack with both just about the lowest cost per bay and best performance overall. The device's DiskStation Manager software is particularly best-of-show.

The ioSafe runs the same DiskStation Manager software as the Synology, but is hardened against flood and fire. Considerably more expensive, but pretty much natural disaster proof, this is a go-to box if you want to keep your data safe.

The Synology DS916+ is the smaller brother of the 8-bay unit we reviewed extensively. Long-term testing shows this devices performs well in cloud storage and RAID recovery.

The Drobo 5N2 is a much faster version of Drobo's classic network storage device. The rock-solid RAID performance and great light design is marred by the requirement to install management software and the limited app selection.

The QNAP TVS-473 was the leader in terms of number of apps, and it was the only box to feature an HDMI port for direct use as a video server. Overall, an excellent box, it did fail our Mac file transfer test.

We had an odd drive failure freeze problem in our test of the Western Digital MyCloud PR4100. This reduced the overall score. Otherwise a nice device, it has a limited number of apps, but a clean interface.

We did not like the Buffalo TeraStation 5410DN, which failed many of our tests and has few apps. The company claims that you should only use their drives, formatted at the factory, so if you want a turnkey solution with pre-configured drives, this might be a solution.

We tested the 2-bay TerraMaster F2-420 and found it to be a nice little machine, with a surprisingly nice interface. It had some scaling-over-time limitations and a relatively low app selection, so it scored in the middle of the pack.