It’s likely that you’ve never asked yourself this question because a NAS is a device that serves as external storage for your other devices, and it is therefore what acts as a hard drive. However, can others connect external hard drives or USB sticks on a NAS?
And if so, what are their functions? Can we use this other equipment as additional storage for the main one? Can data be transmitted between them faster and easier than via the cloud? Let’s see all these questions and their answers.
Connect external drives to a NAS
If you are a regular user of this type of equipment you will know the answers and they will seem very obvious to you, however, for those who have just purchased one they can be interesting, since they can save us time and money into many of the functions we can perform with them.
When purchasing your first SIN The first thing to do is to acquire at the same time specific hard drives for this new equipment and, depending on the bays you have, the options and possibilities are very different, since a NAS with a single disk will not be the even as one who can possess two or more.
In the case of only having a NAS with space for hard drives, you might face different problems that you would not have with multiple bays, among which the possibility of copying data between them or simply increasing the capacity, which, if not well chosen. in his case, it will be impossible, at least internally.
For this there are possibilities that we will see below, namely that by being able to connect external storage units we will solve both problems. The first of them, copying between units, will be very simple, since we will not need to install the unit. If we have an external hard drive, we can connect it using a USB cable and copy files from internal to external or vice versa with ease.
In case you want increase NAS capacity at a specific moment because the internal space is full, we can also use this method, either with a USB key or external hard drive
In summary, a NAS device supports in most cases external drives So if we only have one bay or we simply have them all full, we can quickly and temporarily connect a USB stick or other external drive as if it were a computer.
So now you know, choose the capacity of your drives carefully, but if at a specific moment you need to connect more storage, you can do it externally through its ports, which, although it seems logical, many people don’t know it. And, in the end, a NAS is a mini PC adapted in another way, but with the same functions, at least for storage.
