Speaker 1: This thing right here is my own private google drive, but it's so much more than that. It automatically backs up every computer and smartphone in the house, it records all 12 of my security cameras, and it lets me host a bunch of services alongside it all while keeping everything local and secure. And all that this is, is a NAS, and in plain terms, a NAS or network attached storage, is simply a computer that has some hard drives that you connect to your network so that you can access it wherever you are in the world. It could be a laptop or a PC, either old or new, or it could even be something as simple and low powered as a raspberry pi. But when you put it like that, it seems cool, sure, but not something amazing, and a NAS is so much more than that, and we'll get to that later because right about now, you might be thinking, if you want more storage, why don't you just buy a bigger external hard drive? And yes, you can, but that comes with severe limitations. For starters, an external hard drive is not a computer, and if there's one certainty in the world of storage, it's that your hard drive will fail, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when, and having your drives plugged into a low powered computer running 24-7 means that you can have a lot of security measures with it. You can have automated tests on your hard drives so you can tell from months in advance if there's a problem coming, and you don't even have to think about it, every month, you'll just get an email updating you on the status of your drives. And even if one does fail, you'll have a rate setup which is going to give you redundancy, and this means that one and sometimes more of your drives can fail at the same time, and you'll be fine. You can also set automatic backup tasks to pretty much anything you can think of, and to top it all, if you ever need more space, you can simply slot in a new drive and expand your storage. And not to mention, with an external hard drive, you have to carry it around with you. A NAS, as the name implies, is attached to your network, which means that you can access it from anywhere around the world. And all of this is just about the storage itself, because there's a lot of different amazing and free services that you can run in a NAS. But let's say that you don't care about any of that, and you're just thinking, why should I get a NAS instead of just using cloud storage? If you're someone like me that takes a lot of photos and videos and has a big library collection of movies and other sources of media, then you're starting to look at a small fortune for cloud storage. But even if all the storage I ever wanted was just a couple hundred gigabytes, I would still get a NAS, because storage space is just one perk, and there's a lot of unexpected benefits that come with having a NAS. And the first is that you'll get much faster speeds with a NAS than you would with a cloud provider or with most external hard drives. Let's say you have a cloud storage like Google Drive or OneDrive. Even if you have a fiber connection that gives you a full gigabit of download speed, you'll likely have nowhere near that for your upload speed. Not to mention, a lot of cloud providers actually put a cap on the speed at which you can download or upload to their cloud service. But when you have a NAS in your home, even the most basic one with a single disk, you'll be able to saturate a full gigabit both up and down without an issue, because it's not going to go into your ISP, it stays inside your home. And most people don't even have access to fiber in their home, so this difference becomes even bigger. And if you have a NAS with a 10 gig port and you have the necessary 10 gig networking equipment, then you can saturate a 10 gigabit connection, which is insane. Even if there were any ISPs providing that kind of bandwidth, the costs would be astronomical. The second benefit is all the services that you can run in the NAS, because your NAS is just a computer that's on 24-7, so you can have loads of services on there that only make sense to have if they're always on. The most popular is probably a Plex media server, which organizes and streams your media, kind of like a personal Netflix, but there's so many more. I also run services like Home Assistant and Homebridge, which automate a lot of things in my home. I also have an NVR app for all my cameras, Monica CRM, which is a CRM for personal relationships, and a lot of really lightweight services such as Change Detection, which automatically detects a change on any website, and so much more. And all of this is inside Docker containers. And you don't need to know Docker or virtual machines right away, but you probably will, which leads to my next point, which is learning. This is probably the single best reason for having a NAS. It doesn't matter what NAS you choose, whether it's an all-in-one solution from the likes of Synology, or if you choose to build your own PC, reuse an old one, or even use a Raspberry Pi. You will learn a ton, seriously. You'll learn a lot about hardware, but most importantly, software. Once you start using a NAS, it won't be long before you start learning about Linux, networking, and especially Docker, which is nothing short of amazing. And speaking of learning new things, a great source that I learn from on a daily basis is through the sponsor of today's video, which is Brilliant.org. Brilliant provides a fun and engaging way of learning maths and sciences through its online platform of short, interactive lessons. Brilliant's approach breaks down challenging concepts into manageable parts, making it a more enjoyable and effective way to learn, which makes STEM subjects more memorable. I'm going through the process of installing some solar panels here in our home, so it was especially interesting to take Brilliant's solar energy course, and I was shocked at how little I knew about the subject. And because Brilliant has thousands of lessons with exclusive new content monthly, there's always something new to learn. Get started for free today by visiting Brilliant.org slash FromSergio, and the first 200 people that sign up get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. Thanks Brilliant for sponsoring this video. Another big one is privacy and safety, and when I say safety, I'm referring to something I make extended use of with my NAS, which is using snapshots and file versioning, which is something most cloud providers don't have. So if you want to go back in time to how you had things set up, say, a week ago, that'll be tough to accomplish on a cloud provider, whereas with a NAS, it's just a couple clicks, and you can set up any other type of safety measure that you want. Also, if you deleted something in your Google Drive and you only realized that months after the fact, that data is likely gone, as the industry standard is to only keep deleted files for 30 days. If you have a NAS, however, you call the shots. You could keep backups for as long as your storage allows it. There have been multiple times where I've deleted files that I thought I wouldn't need, only to realize 2 or 3 or more months later actually needed those, and getting them back from my NAS took seconds. Not to mention, if you have a NAS, your data is truly yours, and you have full control over it. And I'm just scratching the surface here because there's a whole world of possibilities of what you can do with a computer that's also attached to your network. For instance, my NAS is also an NVR for my surveillance cameras. I have about 12 cameras in and outside of my house, and they all record to my NAS instead of using a cloud service to store them. This not only saves me a lot of money on cloud subscriptions, but also, and more importantly, keeps my data local. And I also want to say that things have come a long way in these technologies. NAS-specific operating systems have become super pleasant to use, and every day there's more and more open-source software that you can run in your NAS. But things have also come a long way in networking as well. Nowadays, I can use something like Tailscale that lets me instantaneously and securely access not just my NAS, but anything in my network wherever I am in the world. This is all done for free, without port forwarding or setting up a VPN server. Alright, so before we move on to the hardware recommendations, I just want to say, and this is crucial, a NAS, although 100 times better than an external hard drive, is not a backup. A NAS lets you have a RAID, which gives you redundancy for one or more drives depending on your RAID configuration, which means that if one drive fails, nothing happens. You just replace that drive and you move on. If something happens to your NAS, like somehow you break it, or God forbid something happens to your house and destroys the NAS, and you had no backup, and your data only lived in that NAS, then that's it. But having a solid backup strategy is not only simple, but very affordable. Because even if you have loads of storage, chances are only a portion of that is stuff that you want to make sure it's safe, and operating systems like Synology's DSM makes it extremely easy to set automatic backup tasks. And they even integrate seamlessly with dozens of different cloud providers. You can also backup to another PC or another Synology in just a couple clicks, and you can decide exactly what you want to backup, how often, and even the exact time of the day that you want those backups to occur, all in a very user-friendly interface. And those backups can also be encrypted, so even if someone gets access to your backups in the cloud, they can't even open them. There are great services like Backblaze that let you backup your data for a very small amount of money. I have about 400GB of what I deem important storage, and Backblaze lets me back that up for less than $2 a month. Alright, so now let's say you're convinced and want to get a NAS. You will soon find that the possibilities are endless, because you can have a NAS running on any computer, even something as small and cheap as a Raspberry Pi, and I was in that exact same position when I was shopping for my first one. Fast forward a few years now, and I've had 2 different Synologies, custom built PCs running TrueNAS, Unraid, etc, and a Proxmox server with lots of different VMs and containers inside. And the first big question you gotta ask is whether to go for an all-in-one solution from the likes of Synology or QNAP, or to go for a custom build where you buy all the parts, build the PC, and put whatever OS you want in there. And for 99% of people, I recommend going with an all-in-one solution, and as you can tell from this video, I'm a big fan of Synology. Not because of their hardware, but their software. I don't think there's anything out there that competes with it in ease of use and reliability. Not to mention if you need support for whatever reason, you can literally just call them. But that doesn't really help much, because there are dozens of different Synology models, and I could spend hours talking about this because it's not just how many bays you want, but also the CPU, the possibility to upgrade the memory, and other factors. But if I had to pick 3 models for 3 different entry points, I would say the DS220J if all you want is a file server and nothing else. If you want a file server but also a media server that you can transcode in, then look for models that have Intel integrated graphics like the DS920+. And lastly, if you want to experiment with running a bunch of services, you'll definitely want to have Docker, which is only available on the plus line and above, so I recommend going with a 4 bay like the DS920 or 420+. And if you really want 10 gigabit ethernet on the NAS, don't just look for the ones with the 10 gig expansion port, but also with a lot of bays, so you can actually saturate it such as the DS1522+. Unless of course you're willing to pay for SSD drives which cost considerably more per terabyte. I'm going to leave all of these recommendations and a few others in the description below. And that's going to be it for this video guys, I hope you enjoyed it, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.