- #How to format usb drive for personal cloud using external pro#
- #How to format usb drive for personal cloud using external software#
- #How to format usb drive for personal cloud using external free#
If you’re not a technical person, no worries. If you’re not sure which one would work for you, just use their NAS selector tool. They also have a lot of different models with a wide price range.
#How to format usb drive for personal cloud using external software#
What I like about Synology is that they are constantly updating their hardware and software so that it supports the latest technology. They have several mobile apps that work very well for managing the NAS, viewing your files, streaming photos and videos and for managing your personal cloud. The software running on the NAS is excellent and is almost like using Windows. My Synology NAS is several years old, but can still be updated to the latest version of DSM ( DiskStation Manager). I personally have a WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra and a Synology DS 411+II and I find the Synology to be an absolutely amazing device. All the major hard drive vendors have NAS devices with some sort of personal cloud option, but only a few work really well and have a suite of apps to manage the cloud data. So which NAS should you get? Well, when it comes to cloud storage, what you are really looking for is great software. You can do a lot with these devices, which makes the up-front cost more bearable.
#How to format usb drive for personal cloud using external free#
For example, if you take the 8 TB NAS above and use RAID 1, you’ll only have 4 TB of free space. The only issue is that you lose some available space. If you put your drives into a RAID array, one drive can fail and you won’t lose any data.Īll of the devices mentioned here support RAID on the NAS devices and it’s actually really easy to setup. The reason I suggest a NAS device with two or more hard drives is for data protection. Of course, there is one caveat to consider. If you get the dual drive version, then it can be considered a NAS in my opinion.Īs you can see, though, you can get 8 TB worth of storage for about $400, which is not bad at all. However, if the drive fails, you lose all your data, which may or may not be duplicated somewhere else.įor example, if you consider the WD My Cloud Personal NAS, the single drive is really just a network hard drive. I recommend staying away from single network hard drive solutions because it’s pretty much the same thing as using a regular external hard drive, except you get all the cloud features. A NAS has multiple hard drives that can be configured in a RAID array, thereby providing in-built data protection. In my view, a network hard drive is a single hard drive inside a device that connects to the network and provides a web interface to control and access data. Note that a NAS device is slightly different than a network hard drive. So what do you need to buy in order to get your own cloud storage setup? Well, you’re basically buying a network attached storage device or NAS. If you want more than that, you need to become a business customer with at least 5 users.
#How to format usb drive for personal cloud using external pro#
To get to 10 TB, you’d have to pay a whopping $360 a month! With Dropbox, you can only get a max of 1 TB with a Pro account. With OneDrive, you can only add more space after 1 TB in 50 GB increments. For example, after the 1 TB plan on Google Drive, it skips to 10 TB and you have to spend $99 a month. Personal cloud storage is also really good for anyone who has terabytes of data they need to store, but don’t want to pay the hefty monthly costs associated with anything over 1 TB. Again, you’ll get all the mobile and desktop apps and everything will be synced, but you’ll have the data stored locally on your own devices.Īgain, you’ll have no monthly fees to worry about, but you’ll have a higher up-front cost. If you want the advantages of cloud storage, but the security of having everything locally stored, you should consider setting up personal cloud storage.