Despite the upswing of the cloud and increasingly cheaper SSDs, the most convenient and most affordable way to store large amounts of data is still a hard disk drive. In this article we take a look at 18 models meant for use in a NAS.

Hard drives might not be the cutting edge in terms of computer technology; for now there is not a cheaper way to store data. Nowadays there are a lot of affordable consumer models that offer an enormous capacity of 10 TB. If you want to store a lot of data locally, you cannot ignore this option.

A useful way to realize this is to use the hard drives in a network attached storage, or NAS. This has a lot of advantages compared to placing your drives in a system. For example, with a NAS every computer in the network can access the data. The rest of the functionality depends on if you purchase a cheap and ?bare? NAS purely for storage, or if you purchase a more expensive model with more features. The more expensive NAS-devices can download on their own and allow you to access your data through the internet (or with the use of certain smartphone-apps).