What is the main disadvantage of NAS? Is a NAS a security risk?

[opopow]

What is the main disadvantage of NAS? Is a NAS a security risk?

[Aleph256]

Not if you set it up properly, like any kind of network-connected device.

[Needfuldoer]

In my experience, the main disadvantage of a NAS is that you'll look back on all the time you spent without one wondering why you didn't build one sooner.

 

(And of course there's the purchase cost of the hardware, and ongoing cost of electricity to keep it running, but amortized over a couple years it's less than it costs to subscribe to a service like DropBox.)

[Lurick]

Everything is a "security risk" if you do something stupid like opening up ports on your router FTP/RDP/SMB/etc and letting anyone access your NAS remotely without proper protection.

 

What's the actual question though, why do you think you need a NAS? What would you be looking to use a NAS for compared to a single drive or two in your PC? Do you need media sharing locally? Remote media sharing? Video transcoding and streaming?

[ianm_ozzy]

17 hours ago, opopow said:

What is the main disadvantage of NAS? Is a NAS a security risk?

 

The obvious risks are poor passwords for security.

 

I have truenas scale as my home NAS.

Anything important on there  is stored encrypted.

 

Storage for games, well no.  No encryption overhead there.

 

If accessing from outside your home network, it is a risk.

 

What I do is access through a zero trust network, specifically zerotier.

The NAS does not access it directly, but through the router.  I use the opnsense router with a zerotier plugin. There are very strict port forward/network rules applied.

 

An obvious issue of a NAS is  being on 24/7 - so power usage.