It does all the basic NAS stuff it just lacks the more esoteric features like an email or web server, and surveillance cam video recording. If you don't need all the advanced features of a QNAP or Synology NAS, or want to save a few bucks, we recommend the Western Digital My Cloud Mirror. Synology's operating system is very similar to QNAP's and has essentially the same features, but QNAP has a bit better value for the price.

The DS214 lacks expandable memory and doesn't have an HDMI port. It's almost as fast as our pick, though it has less RAM and a less powerful CPU.

If the TS-251 is unavailable, or too expensive, we recommend the $290 Synology DS214. Two 4TB drives will give you 4TB of total storage (because the drives are mirrored) and will cost around $320 on top of the cost of the NAS. We like Western Digital Red drives, which are designed for home NAS use. You can buy a TS-251 with hard drives included, but it's usually cheaper to buy drives separately. We don’t like that the TS-251’s chassis and drive bays are a little cheap-feeling and flimsy it's not quite powerful enough for reliable on-the-fly video transcoding through Plex Media Server, the most popular media-streaming app. It has two USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports, and is one of the few NAS we tested that has an HDMI port, so you can connect it to your home theater system and play movies and media directly to your TV. The TS-251 has a dual-core Intel Celeron processor and 1GB or 4GB of RAM (expandable up to 8GB). Its operating system, QTS, is novice-friendly but has enough power and detailed configurations for power users. Drive mirroring and hot swap work well, it's easy to setup and use, and it supports a plethora of third-party apps, like Plex and WordPress. The QNAP TS-251 ($319 without hard drives) is fast: it can read and write data over the network at more than 100MB per second. More expensive NAS are overkill for most home use.

Cheaper NASes have underpowered hardware, only one drive bay or operating systems that are complicated or half-baked. We focused on NASes that cost less than $350 (diskless). Setup should be simple, and it should come with good mobile apps for media streaming and remote access. It should have several USB ports, for backing up external drives to the NAS (and vice versa) as well as connecting printers or Wi-Fi dongles. It should also support hot-swapping-changing hard drives without turning off the NAS. Dual-drive NAS devices support drive mirroring-the contents of one drive are copied to the other, so your data is safe even if a hard drive fails.

Best nas for home media streaming 2016