Why Are NAS Devices Different to Standard External Storage?
Issues with NAS devices arise due to the fact that the NAS is a closed system. It appears on the network as a share, normally with a web based admin utility that gives numerous options for configuration, drive information etc, but few understand the underlying technology that is involved in providing the networked storage solution. Most NAS boxes offer a RAID of some description, in high bandwidth applications this can be a striped RAID 0 array, in more critical environments the device may be set up as a mirrored RAID 1 or even a RAID 5 array. Some devices are configurable and support more than one method of array configuration.
