
Manufacturers of NAS systems have been around NAS for so long they don’t realize many of their customers don’t have an intuitive understanding of things like storage pools, volumes, and RAID. NAS technology has a vocabulary all its own which can be confusing for many people. Setting up a NAS is a little more involved than setting up a computer and plugging it into your network. No time to read right now? Download this articlein convenient PDF format.

Also, the applications written for NAS operating systems are far superior to what you get with an external hard drive. The big difference between a NAS and an external hard drive is external hard drives are connected with slower USB ports that are only good for one computer at a time. A NAS is, basically, a group of hard drives with a dedicated Operating System and a network connection.
