Network attached storage at its core is a simple idea: get one or several hard drives and connect them up to a local area network with the help of a slow but efficient mini PC. Within that category though, there’s a huge amount of variety, from dead basic models that look like a normal external hard drive, to more powerful units that can run other useful programs – like media, game or ad-blocking servers.
Knowing where to start with it can be quite difficult, so I’ve taken it upon myself to be your guinea pig and wade through the fiddliness to work out which type of drive is best for your needs.
This is a four page article about the world of NAS drives, and my journey of bulk storage towards the end-goal of having a functioning device for what I need it to do – without tearing my hair out.
What do I need a NAS for?
This is the first and most important question you’re likely to ask if you’ve decided that you want to go beyond having a stack of external HDDs or SSDs for storing your data on, or for more advanced tasks such as running servers of all kinds.
A NAS can do many things, be it for use as a media server on services such as Plex or Jellyfin, for running a home surveillance system, or turning it into a Minecraft server, for instance.
Once you’ve decided what you’re going to be using the system for then determines what kind of system you can get.
My system is mostly going to be used as a Plex server for storing and having quick access to home video and photos, as well as for the large selection of local music and DVD/Blu-Ray backups I still have. Yes, I am a bit analogue, but it’s nice to have what’s essentially your own version of Netflix without the pesky subscriptions or ads, but more on that later.
Level 1: WD MyCloud home storage (or similar)
If all you’re going to be doing is storing photos and videos or using it as an extra backup device like you would a normal external drive, then something like one of Western Digital’s MyCloud Home devices is ideal for these more basic workloads.
It’s about as plug-and-play as you can get with a NAS-style device, and something we’ve used as a family for a few years. Think of it as an external hard drive in an enclosure with some networking attached to it, which means you can plug it into your router, and it’ll work as a storage server with some small setup.
Ours is one of the slightly older three-terabyte WD MyCloud drives that you can’t actually buy anymore, although the process for newer models is likely to be quite similar.
You can plug these drives into power and then connect to them during the initial setup via the MyCloud mobile app or with the desktop site, depending on the model you have. They may also need a direct connection to your router with the Ethernet port to get connected to your network.
Once you’ve got it connected, then you can use WD’s MyCloud web portal to sign in and set things up, before adding any folders and such that you want onboard, and loading up anything you want to store. At this moment, the only way to access the drive is through the mobile app or web portal.
However, if like us, you have some videos you want to watch on compatible devices, then you can poke around in the device’s settings to get them to work as a type of server all on their own.
Our WD drive is able to work as what’s called a Twonky Server, which is another form of Plex-style system that allows you to connect to the server on devices such as smart TVs to view content without going through the built-in web browser.
To do this, I needed to go into the settings of our Virgin Media router, and find the IP address of the MyCloud drive, as it isn’t something that can be done from the web portal. When inside, you can check on things such as system utilisation, how much space you have left, and install apps, including Twonky. These can either be done from the interface, or by ‘sideloading’ them and installing them from a file you’ve already downloaded to your PC.
Once I got it working by enabling it, it is able to show up as a device our LG OLED TV as a ‘storage device’, and works as an external hard drive plugged into the TV would, showing up in the menu when selecting an input.
The only thing to note is you’ve got to make sure your files are named properly with the proper metadata, as opposed to just naming the file itself. You can do this in Windows by accessing the properties of the file by right-clicking it, and then going to the Details tab. This is because, for whatever reason, the method the system uses to pull through file names relies on it using the title stored in the file, as opposed to the ‘XXXXX.mp4’ name.
You can install third-party apps such as Plex onto some of these WD MyCloud drives too and set it up using something called SMB to access it as a network drive in Windows or MacOS, although I’ll leave those until we get to the more ‘advanced’ options later on.
The limitation to this device is its storage capacity. Whatever-sized MyCloud you get is what you have to work with, whether that’s 2TB, 3TB or more. You can plug another drive into the USB port on the rear if you wish for more storage, although that depends on what external drives you have at home as to how much extra it adds.
For just starting out with a smaller amount of media files, these WD MyClouds are great. But, if you want to get into more advanced means than just hosting a small amount of files, then you’ll want to read on to find out about Level 2.
