Capacity RAID is a technology that virtually combines multiple disks to build a huge storage capacity. RAID has several levels, such as RAID 0, 1, 5, and 6, to specify the balance of data striping, redundancy for disks, and parity information. For example, using four 4 TB drives to build RAID 5, then you will get up to 12 TB of free spaces and 4 TB of a blocked space for store parity information.

Data protection The previous example may sound like wasting 4 TB of capacity, but parity information is key to protecting NAS files against drive failure. RAID 5 can sustain the loss of a single drive. The tolerable number of disk fault is various based on your RAID levels. RAID ≠ backup One thing to keep in mind is that RAID is NOT backup. To ensure your data safety, it is essential to maintain backups of important data on multiple devices, such as clouds, external drives, or remote servers.

Speed Since data is simultaneously written and read to multiple disks, NAS provides much faster data upload and download speeds. If you use NVMe SSDs to build a volume, the speed and response times will be at the same level as your local drives.

Performance Because NAS is dedicated to serving files, it removes the responsibility of file serving from other networked devices. And since NAS is tuned to specific use cases (like big data or multimedia storage), clients can expect better performance.

Easy setup NAS architectures are often delivered with simplified scripts, or even as appliances preinstalled with a streamlined operating system, greatly reducing the time it takes to set it up and manage the system.

Accessibility Every networked device has access to NAS.

Fault tolerance NAS can be formatted to support replicated disks, a redundant array of independent disks, or erasure coding to ensure data integrity.