Over the past few months nosotros've shown you a couple of network-attached storage (NAS) devices selling at two rather distant price points. The 8-bay QNAP TS-809 Pro Turbo, you might recall, offered the highest levels of performance, but carried an equally imposing starting cost of $one,700, escalating up to around $three,000 when equipped with eight 2TB drives. Manifestly, this device is targeted at businesses that accept that kind of extreme requirements.

And then we had the 4-bay Synology Disk Station 409+, priced at $600 without hard drives, which might come equally a more than reasonable choice for the home or pocket-sized role, while however delivering good performance and a compelling feature fix.

In that location are a number of legitimate reasons why NAS devices are becoming so pop in work environments, but because of the costly setup investment, they have remained more than of a luxury than a necessity for abode users.

More affordable products are finding their way to the market all the time, even so you should be wary with some of them. For example, one of the cheapest 4-bay NAS devices available right at present is the Promise NS4300N SmartStor at only $290. I fabricated the terrible mistake of purchasing this production because of the attractive price signal lone. The effect was average performance, worsened past a nightmarish setup procedure and overall poor functionality that was plagued with issues. Turned out it was not merely the cheapest, but also the worst 4-bay NAS device coin could purchase.

Unfortunately at that place isn't much else in the iv-bay realm within that price range. All the usual suspects have their base models starting at over $400, which got me thinking that perhaps at that place but isn't any decent NAS to be had for less with those characteristics.

So late last year Synology seemingly answered our cries with a pair of "budget-friendly" NAS solutions. The iv-bay model, known equally the DS410j, is currently retailing for $370, so it's not much more expensive than the Promise SmartStor we disliked so much. It's also about $seventy cheaper than their DS409 and costs $230 less than the DS409+. But will it be able to meet dwelling users' ever-growing and evolving storage needs? We hope nosotros tin can answer that for you.