NAS are simply one or more regular IDE or SATA hard drives plugged in an array storage enclosure and connected to a network Router or Hub through a Ethernet port.  Some of these NAS enclosures  have ventilating fans to protect the hard drives from overheating.

Benfits:

• Very good option for local backups especially for networks and small businesses.
• As several hard drives can be plugged in, NAS can hold very large amounts of data
• Can be setup with Redundancy (RAID) increasing the reliability and/ or read and write performance. Depending on the type of RAID level used, the NAS can still function even if one hard drive in the RAID set fails. Or two hard drives can be setup to double the read and write speed of single hard drive.
• The drive is always connected and available to the network making the NAS a good option for implementing automated scheduled backups.

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