available outside of my home and at work. I would definitely need to be able to access files while mobile on my phone or laptop.
Most NAS devices can / will do this.
What kind of specs / performance do you want from the NAS?
Do you have a router / ISP connection that is above 1gbps?
How much storage do you need?
How much redundancy do you want?
Are you opposed to building your own NAS?
Do you want to use traditional spinners or SSD's?
Tired of paying for cloud services on a monthly basis? Well, this is exactly where NAS kicks in. Here are the best NAS devices to replace monthly paid cloud services.
mashtips.com
There are several ways to back up or protect your data, but if you are looking for a professional backup and restore (effective recovery is essential.
geekflare.com
This year’s Bitcatcha list of Best NAS for Home Users has some strong contenders. We’ve dug deep to bring you the ideal models for various use cases. We found Synology came up tops in many categories. Network Attached Storage, or NAS, is a slightly lonesome category of devices. They don’t often...
www.bitcatcha.com
The issues i have with off the shelf NAS devices:
Speed - disks tend to be bottlenecked by the design
Speed - Network tends to be insufficient @ 1gbps
Security - OS has bugs and tends to be a security risk i.e.
WD remote wipe issue
RAM - usually using older DDR3 RAM which is more expensive compared to DDR4
CPU - underwhelming at best for anything more than just dropping / moving files
If you're up for taking an old PC or buying a SFF PC that has some bays for drives you're better off since a NAS off the shelf typically starts at $200 w/o drive and you can buy a brand new SFF PC for $150. If the SFF PC doesn't have many bays then looking for a storage case for $100 is a good idea to be able to load it up with drives. Running storage on a network doesn't require complicated HW or expensive HW for that matter.
Taking the PC method you just need Linux or one of the prebuilt OS options which are Linux based and configure the system to mount the drives. If you want redundancy you just use MDADM for Raid which is also free. Remote access using the PC method should be more secure than leaving ports open for accessing things remotely as you can choose a port you want to map to the internal device other than the standard ports that hackers look for and scan.
With the PC option you can start small with a case that has room for say 2 drives and if you find yourself filling the space you can either bump the drive size up or expand into a bigger case. The other option if you have a PC that's powered on 24/7 you could go DAS which just connects to the PC and you access the PC remotely to get to the files. You could also plug a DAS into your router if it has a USB port to share the files though this is typically the path of least resort.