Best home NAS
Network storage is invaluable in small businesses or home offices, but more and more people are finding how useful a NAS can be in everyday life, whether it be for work efficiency or as a streaming media box.
Winner: Synology DS218 Play
Strong performing unit with excellent 4K UHD video transcoding support when using Synology's media centre and smartphone software make it an ideal all-round NAS.
Finalists
A capable 2-bay NAS with similar capabilities to the QNAP TS-231P, it serves home and small business alike with affordable NAS performance.
Designed from the ground up for mobile workflows, the My Cloud Home is the simplest NAS unit to install and administer and doesn't require a PC at all.
Designed for home and SOHO storage and remote file access, this NAS also does well as a media server and sits at the cheaper end of the market.
Best SOHO NAS
Winner: Synology DS918+
Designed for small and medium-sized businesses and IT enthusiasts. With a powerful built-in AES-NI hardware encryption engine, DS918+ provides exceptional encrypted file transmission.
Finalists
Taking full advantage of a quad-core Intel CPU, the Asus AS640T is a comprehensive backup solution for your entire network.
Featuring dual Thunderbolt 3 ports, coupled with M.2 SATA SSD caching and 10GBASE-T connectivity, the TS-453BT3 provides an ideal environment for professional collaborative media editing and high-speed file sharing.
Perfect for anyone wanting high server app performance provided by the 6-core AMD Ryzen CPU and support for up to 64GB of RAM.
