it stands for Network Attached Storage.kites wrote:what’s a NAS?
it usually is an enclosure that houses multiple drives. typically, you can assign the NAS an IP address so that you can access the files from anywhere on your network. So for example, you could keep the NAS in your living room attached to your router, but you could still hit it from your garage or bedroom studio as if it was connected to you workstation.
i think the part that fishmokey was speaking to has more to do with the RAID array aspect of them. depending on which version of RAID you decide to implement, you can lose 1, 2, and in some configurations more, drives before you lose data. since drives in a RAID array are semi-redundant, the typical hard drive failures can be easy to fix by plopping in a replacement drive and letting the RAID set rebuild.
if you're interested, QNAP makes a good NAS. then there are all the usual suspects like Western Digital, Seagate, Dell, etc.