This article is about how to get your large files off your main computer hard drive and onto some external network storage that is more reliable, longer-term, and doesn’t take up precious space on your laptop or desktop computer. Apple don’t make an external storage solution but I found Synology have some great devices.

1. Best Home Network Storage For Mac
2. Best Storage Device For Mac
3. Mac Network Drive
4. Mac Network Setup
5. Best Network Attached Storage For Mac And Pc
6. Best Network Attached Storage For Mac
7. Mac Storage Space

NAS is the best choice for SOHO users; you get file-based shared storage that’s easier to set up, troubleshoot, and access across a mixed computer network. Best NAS devices of 2021: top Network Attached Storage for the home and office By Matt Hanson 08 January 2021 Our pick of the best NAS devices to allow you to access files across all your devices.

I upgrade my Mac computer about every 3 years. Each time I do it’s a bit like moving house – lots of stuff moves with me that I probably don’t need but I’m not ready to throw it out yet.

I just purchased a new Mac mini, but the particular SSD that Apple chose to use in the Mac mini is very expensive. A 1 TB hard disk on a new Mac Mini costs an extra $1280. That’s a lot to pay for an SSD just for storing files. To make matters worse you cannot upgrade the SSD drives in the new Mac Mini.

Enter the NAS?

Many businesses have a different approach to storage, they use what is called network attached storage (NAS). This is an external hard drive that sits outside of your computer and is accessed over the network. It’s a bit like an external thumb drive but it’s on the network so it’s always available from any computer. If you upgrade your computer you don’t have to transfer the data across, it will still be on your NAS.

NAS storage is that it is much slower than a hard drive. Think of it as being more like a filing cabinet or bookcase. It’s primary role is STORAGE and sharing with other computer.

With the purchase of my new Mac Mini I’ve decided it’s a good time to transfer the bulk of my data over to a network attached storage device.

Here’s what I purchased:

1. A Synology DiskStation DS218j – NAS box AU$247

This is the external box that will hold my hard drives and attach them to the network. This particular box has two hard drives in it. Exactly the same data is on each hard disk so that f one of the hard disks fails I don’t lose my data. You can get a 4 drive system that is faster and more secure, but 2 was plenty for me.

I could have also gone with Qnap or another brand, but I picked Synology after doing some research on what works well with a Mac computer.

2. Two Seagate 4TB Iron Wolf drives AU$157 each

It seems like the sweet spot for robust but affordable drives for NAS storage are the Seagate Ironwolf Pro or Western Digital RED NAS. You can spend a lot more, These are in the middle price range yet are more reliable than the standard consumer drive.

I went with Ironwolf because they supposedly work better with the Synology NAS. I chose 4TB drives because that seemed to be the sweet point at the moment in terms of TB per dollar. The two hard drives are in parallel so 2x 4TB drives still only give me 4TB in total.

3. A BR700ELCD CyberPower UPS AU$139

The icing on the cake was to buy an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). If our power fails this little device signals to the NAS to shutdown and supplies it with power for 30 seconds while it shuts down.

This shopping spree set me back AU$700 in total, but this is a lot less than the $1280 for 1TB on the Mac Mini. Plus I now have 4TB of storage not 1TB. It’s now external to my computer, so I can easily access it from other computers in the home, which means all my computers can have a smaller SSD in them. I can use it for Time MAchine backups of my main hard disk. Plus I won’t need to transfer data across from it should I upgrade my computer in the future.

Setting it all up.

I don’t want to describe in detail how to set it up, the instructions are pretty self-explanatory. But here’s a few a tips…

• You have no control over what the Synology hard drives are called, so don’t try changing the name. They are called home, video, music, and photo. So the NAS will eventually look like a series of separate mounted drives like this:

• It’s not like a normal hard drive where you plug it in and it mounts on your desktop. The NAS is set up like a computer and it will have an IP address that you log in to through your web browser. (eg 10.0.0.120).

• Before you use the NAS you need to log in and create a user. You can then choose drives that will be available for that user. (eg photo etc). You can choose to make all the drives available (like in the screenshot above) or just 1 or more of the drives.
• To mount the NAS and see it on your desktop you need to use the ‘Go’ menu in your OSX Menu Bar and select ‘Connect to Server.’ Type in afp:// followed by the IP address of the NAS. eg afp://10.0.0.120
• When you log in as a user it will mount your own home folder, but not other people’s home folders. If you log in as a different user you will see a different home folder. The NAS looks different depending on who you have logged in as. But ‘shared’ folders appear the same to everyone.
• You can backup to the NAS. If you want to back up using Time Machine you need to create a completely separate user (I called my user ‘Time Machine’). This is because you want your regular user to have access to the entire 4TB of the hard drive, but you need to limit the amount of space available to Time Machine (1g 1.5TB) otherwise Time Machine will just keep on backing up to the NAS until it is completely full!
• When you tell Apple Time Machine to back up to the NAS it will automatically create a sparse-bundle in the NAS folder and put the Time Machine backup there. There are many articles on the web telling you that you need to use Apple’s disk utility to manually create a sparse image but these are wrong. Time Machine does this automatically for you. At least it did for me in OS X Mojave.
• Once you can see all the NAS hard drive folders on your computer, you will probably want to make them mount automatically each time you reboot your computer. To do this simply go to system preferences, login items, and drag the hard drive across.

• You’ll need to work out what you want to store on the NAS, and what you want on your computer. I’m still working this out, and the built-in Apple apps DO NOT play nicely with an NAS. They like to have everything in your user folder.
• It won’t really work to put your entire user folder onto the NAS because that will slow things down too much. Plus you want your computer to be able to boot properly when the NAS is not available so you don’t want any files that your computer to depends (eg the user folder) on stored on the NAS.
• I decided to manually move my large files. This turned out to be my Photo library (hard), iTunes (easy), and movies (easy).
• It’s complicated to put your Apple photo library onto a shared NAS. Apple say not to do it. It needs to be on an OSX Extended journaled Volume or APFS. You can put it on an OSX Extended Journaled sparse bundle disk image. This was giving me problems so I’ve put my Apple photos library back on my SSD drive.
• It’s easy to put your iTunes movies onto the NAS. Just move it across and point the iTunes folder there from iTunes preferences.
• I’ve moves all my movies across except for the iMovie folder.

Make your Mac invincible

If there’s one thing you need to remember when dealing with high-tech devices, such as laptops and desktops, is that you should always have a recent backup on hand. While it’s true that Macs are as dependable as computers go, no one is protected from their processor overheating, battery dying, files being corrupted by malware, or just a spilled cup of coffee.

External hard drives have been around for decades. First they connected to your computer through USB-A ports and could hold just a few dozen gigabytes. Eventually, they learned to transfer files over WiFi and grew up in size to a few terabytes — becoming de facto the best personal cloud storage available to most people.

Get the best backup app

Keep data safe, whatever hard drive you use. With Get Backup Pro, there’s zero chance you lose anything important on Mac.

But with the explosion of smartphones and streaming services, the amount of media data being saved on our devices has greatly exceeded what regular hard drives can offer. Today, most of us need a robust and expendable home cloud storage solution that’s able to protect our data seamlessly in the background.

What Is A NAS Hard Drive?

NAS (or network attached storage) in many ways is just the right answer for those who want to upgrade from outdated external hard drives and beginner My Cloud app look-alikes.

A network attached storage device is not only capable of wirelessly storing everything you’ve ever created (they generally start at about 2 TB) but also divide its capacity between a few people (so every family member could have their own drive, for example), stream media to Apple TV or Bluetooth speakers directly, and act as a central hub for all storage, with all your other hard drives connected to it.

So let’s look at the best NAS for Mac on the market in 2021, covering every target audience segment.

Simple: Western Digital My Cloud Home

When you just want to graduate from an external hard drive to a network attached storage for Mac, there’s no better candidate than WD My Cloud Home.

Western Digital doesn’t even call this network storage a NAS drive but rather addresses it as a personal cloud storage device. Still, My Cloud Home encompasses all the attributes of grownup NAS drives without the price tag. It goes from 2 to 8 TB in storage capacity, can save all your information via WiFi automatically, allows remote access through a My Cloud app, features shared folders as well as individual volumes, and is capable of streaming to Sonos, Google Chromecast, and more — all starting at just $159.99.

Powerful: Western Digital My Cloud Expert Series EX2 Ultra

If you want to combine the ease of use we’ve all come to expect from WD devices with a power of true NAS storage, take a look at the WD My Cloud Expert series.

The EX2 Ultra is a real NAS drive that could come unpopulated (without hard drives) so you can install your own storage or take up to 28 TB right from the manufacturer. Unlike My Cloud Home, EX2 Ultra introduces RAID (redundant array of independent disks) options that let its two hard drives clone each other and carry the same information for maximum protection.

In addition, WD My Cloud Expert EX2 Ultra is powered by a dual-core processor for ultra-fast streaming and encrypts your hard drive volumes by default.

Affordable: Buffalo LinkStation 220D

In some cases, you might care less about how intuitive your NAS storage is, what you’re really after is a cheap NAS with good security built in. That’s where you should try Buffalo LinkStation 220D.

While LinkStation 220D might not win any awards for its user-friendliness, it’s a straightforward unpopulated NAS for Mac that starts at $119.99 and includes RAID support (with an additional USB-A on the back) as well as drag-and-drop backups.

You could set up a shared folder through Buffalo’s Navigator app, but it would be more difficult than you think. Same with getting your iTunes streaming server to work. Overall, good enough for straightforward tasks.

Best Home Network Storage For Mac

Advanced: Synology DiskStation DS218

Stepping into high-end but still consumer-oriented NAS storage solutions, we can find Synology DiskStation DS218. It comes unpopulated to let you combine your own storage devices and features a Gigabit Ethernet port for connecting to your router as well as three USB-As for any other storage volumes you might be using.

DiskStation DS218 is RAID-enabled and can act as a media server with real-time 4K video transcoding to Apple TV or any other player — all running on a quad-core 1.4 GHz processor. Some would say DiskStation might simply be too much for a casual user, and they will be right. But for some, it’s just what they were looking for all along.

Best Storage Device For Mac

Professional: Drobo 5N2

Those who work in the fields of photography, animation, or video production know how much unique data could be worth. From that perspective, Drobo 5N2 is not an expensive device at all, although it starts at about $550 unpopulated.

Drobo 5N2 features five hard drive slots, some of which can be used for RAID and some for actually expanding the NAS storage capacity. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports can be combined into one to provide astonishing transfer speed for the high-end devices that can handle it. This NAS even features its own internal battery for a complete fail-proof setup.

How to properly back up your Mac

Mac Network Drive

Whether you’re using NAS or a regular external hard drive for your backup plan, you need to know how to approach backups in a comprehensive manner, so you don’t forget any important files.

Get Backup Pro is one of the most versatile backup managers you can find. It instantly connects to your NAS drive and offers incremental backups on a set schedule or cloning options that allow you to reboot your Mac from an external drive should it break. Get Backup Pro’s speed and reliability are unparalleled, far exceeding those of Time Machine, for example.

How to recover lost files from an external drive

Mistakes happen and regardless how robust your backup solution is, there would be a moment when you’d accidentally delete a file not backed up anywhere else, be it from your Mac or an external drive. What do you do now?

Mac Network Setup

Disk Drill is master data recovery software that’s able to get into the deepest corners of your data volumes and retrieve information that you thought was forever gone. Your best friend here is to act quickly and launch Disk Drill right after you saw a much-needed file disappear — that’s why keeping this app in your toolkit at all times is a true secret lifesaver.

How to make the most out of home cloud storage

Best Network Attached Storage For Mac And Pc

Nowadays, most of us have already signed up for all the free tiers at all the most popular cloud storage providers: DropBox, Box, OneDrive, Google One, and so on. Some of us even have paid plans. The problem is all of them being scattered in various places and easy to forget.

Best Network Attached Storage For Mac

CloudMounter offers a genius solution to gathering your cloud network storage solutions (from Amazon S3 to Backblaze) in one place by mounting them on your Mac as real hard drives, essentially folders like any other. This provides you with a new world of possibilities when it comes to searching through your files, ensuring proper encryption, and effectively transferring data.

As you can see, picking the best NAS hard drive has a wealth of advantages over using a regular external hard drive. What’s better, you can enhance this experience even further by mounting all cloud network storage as local drives with CloudMounter, backing up files securely with Get Backup Pro, and recovering anything that’s lost with Disk Drill.

Best of all, CloudMounter, Get Backup Pro, and Disk Drill are available to you absolutely free for seven days through Setapp, a platform of more than 170 outstanding apps for your Mac. And you can try them all today at no cost to see how else you can improve your daily life without any effort on your part.

Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.

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