Networking streaming - NAS (Network Attached Storage)
A NAS or Network Attached Storage is considered by many to be a fairly boring and utilitarian looking product - something more at home in a small / medium office than a modern day, entertainment rich home but nothing could be further from the truth.
What is a NAS device? It's basically just a box comprising of one or more hard drives, an Ethernet connection and an operating system. This box connects to your LAN or Local Area Network via an ethernet cable and allows all those on the network to access and share information from one central location.
What is a NAS device? It's basically just a box comprising of one or more hard drives, an Ethernet connection and an operating system. This box connects to your LAN or Local Area Network via an ethernet cable and allows all those on the network to access and share information from one central location.
This is great news around the modern home because it allows you to store all of your music, video and photos in one central location and allows multiple users to simultaneously share the information with compatible products like OPPO players.
A NAS device is accessed from Network source in the OPPO onscreen menu and displayed with a green network icon in the Source menu within the MediaControl app.
Setup. There is no setup required from the OPPO to access NAS devices - a correctly setup NAS is available to all devices on the network. You'll be please to know that most NAS models allow you to restrict access to specific users and usually offer public folder for storage of Music, Photos and Videos.
NAS devices vary greatly in features, capacity and price so it's best to do your research or discuss your requirements with your local retailer. Many models are plug'n'play and will be online in minutes - others will be more commercially focused with more advanced features and may require additional setup.
Features to look for:
We think the following features are worth looking for when shopping for a NAS device:
Features to look for:
We think the following features are worth looking for when shopping for a NAS device:
Storage - Think about how much capacity you need - both now and into the future. If it's just music then 1TB may be plenty but you'll quickly realise that video requires considerably larger amounts of capacity.
Remote login - Look for a NAS drive that allows remote login from the internet. This allows you to upload and download files securely from anywhere in the world. All your files are password protected.
Mobile apps - Many NAS drives allow playback of music and images over WiFi or celluar from your mobile device. It's like having terabytes of extra storage on your mobile device.
RAID - Entry level NAS devices usually use one HDD or Hard Disk Drive to store all your data - this is referred to as RAID 0. This is great as long as the HDD doesn't fail. For more secure data storage manufacturers offer RAID 1 devices. RAID 1 utilises a second HDD drive as a mirror of the primary drive. If the primary drive fails your data is still available on the alternate drive.