NAS stands for “Networked Attached Storage”, meaning a hard drive of some type that can be accessed by the computers on your network.
The main idea is to give you space for storage without bogging down your actual computer. While this may sound like something that should stay in the realm of corporate computing, there are numerous uses for it inside of the home also.
NAS drives
The main point to having one is it gives you a centralized point in the home for every one to store files and then everyone else can easily get to them, say like your family photos. Continuing the thought of sharing those files is to put your MP3 music collection on to the NAS drive, and then setting up your iTunes, or other comparable player, to pull the music from there and stream it to your computer. This way everyone in the house can share the exact same music collection without having to have multiple copies everywhere. You can also use this to stream videos to devices such as the Apple TV.
Some of the other interesting uses though can be as a centralized back-up system; prices for extremely large drives is getting cheaper by the day, if the NAS is large enough, every computer in your home can back up their files to just one drive. That is something that is priceless to be honest, until you have a computer crash and lose everything, you’ll never quite grasp how good having a back-up system feels.
In short, a NAS in the home makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons, and it’s something I recommend for everyone with a home network.
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[...] also can use external hard drives or a Network Additional Storage (NAS) to back-up to, but these also require you to remember to do it on a regular basis. There is [...]