#BEST NAS SOLUTION FOR MAC DRIVER#
#BEST NAS SOLUTION FOR MAC SOFTWARE#
#BEST NAS SOLUTION FOR MAC WINDOWS#

Nothing funky driver magic going on there.ĭrivePool also lets you migrate your data from their original locations into the virtual drive without formatting.

#BEST NAS SOLUTION FOR MAC WINDOWS#

Windows just sees USB hard drives, and that's great. First, because DrivePool isn't doing anything to your drives, the system is more stable.

Instead it's organizing your files completely invisibly into hidden folders on each drive. This sounds reminiscent of RAID, but DrivePool hasn't actually done anything to your individual drives. But behind the scenes, DrivePool is divvying up your files to each of the drives that you include in the pool. The one upside is that it's free.ĭrivePool creates a virtual drive on your computer that looks and acts just like any other drive. Over the years I've tried to make this setup work and it's always ended in tears, so I don't recommend it.

#BEST NAS SOLUTION FOR MAC SOFTWARE#

On the Mac you can use Disk Utility's built-in 'soft RAID' (short for software RAID) functionality to combine drives together, but there's only one redundancy option, and that's RAID 1, which is good but far from ideal. Once loaded, the drive enclosures described above will show you each separate drive in your operating system of choice, and now we need a way to combine them together. It's not without its own idiosyncrasies it's not 100 percent stable on my motherboard's USB-C 3.2 port, but is rock solid with USB 3.0 ports. I have a few 10TB drives in it, and the fact that you don't have to put the drives into trays is divine - you just load them in like cartridges. The Sabrent enclosure shown above is actually cheaper, far more attractive, and actually works. So, if you have your drives setup as a RAID in an enclosure like this, the whole array just continuously connects and disconnects. Several times I have thought my drives were dead to instead find that the enclosure was just too buggy to keep the drives connected. I say this from a place of experience: Cheap Mediasonic enclosures have given me nothing but problems. We only include products that have been independently selected by Input’s editorial team. Input may receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article. This is a long way of saying: Don't cheap out on the enclosure and the controller within. They may work decently with one another under normal, light use, but blasting multiple drives at the same time with hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of data will exacerbate any tiny instabilities between chips. What I mean is, both your motherboard and these drive enclosures have their own USB controller chips embedded within each. Unfortunately, USB isn't the most stable technology for doing heavy data work. Yes, I too miss the days of Firewire, but now it's all USB all the time. The simplest and most common type of enclosure these days are USB enclosures. Unlike a NAS, these enclosures don't have embedded computers within they simply connect each drive to the host computer. The hardwareĪ multi-bay drive enclosure is simply an external hard drive that holds multiple drives. What most people need is a multi-bay drive enclosure and a multi-drive software solution.

In a soft raid setup, a disk that simply fails to mount causes all sorts of problems.

Breaking the array because of user error leads to total data loss.

You have to format all your disks before you can build the array.

You might need power-user levels of storage for all of your digital goodies, but you shouldn't have to be a system administrator to do it. The thing is, even with redundancy, a RAID array is easy to break.

Best nas solution for mac