These popular budget-friendly home NAS servers under $200 pack enough power to fulfill basic backup and media streaming needs. They all feature 2 hard drive bays, allowing for the 2-drive setup with data replication. With this setup, if one drive fails, your data is still safe on the other drive. This is the main advantage of 2-drive NAS servers over the single drive ones, and is well worth the slight premium in price.
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| Synology DiskStation DS216j | QNAP Turbo NAS TS-231 |
WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra |
Buffalo LinkStation 220 |
TerraMaster NAS F2-220 |
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| Processor | Marvell Armada Dual Core 1.0GHz | ARM Cortex-A9 1.2GHz | Marvell Armada Dual Core 1.3GHz | ARM 800MHz | Intel Celeron Dual Core 2.41GHz |
| RAM | 512MB | 512MB | 1GB | 256MB | 2GB |
| Ports | 2x USB 3.0 1x Ethernet |
3x USB 3.0 1x eSATA 2x Ethernet |
2x USB 3.0 1x Ethernet |
1x USB 2.0 1x Ethernet |
2x USB 3.0 1x Ethernet |
| Cloud Backup | Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, Baidu Cloud | Azure Storage, Google Cloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, hubiC, Baidu Cloud | Amazon S3, ElephantDrive |
none | Dropbox |
| Media Streaming | DLNA | DLNA AirPlay Chromcast |
DLNA UPNP iTunes sever |
DLNA iTunes sever |
DLNA UPNP iTunes sever |
From the hardware standpoint, TerraMaster — a relative newcomer to the home NAS space — is clearly in the lead here, with almost double the processing power and double the RAM of the runner-up from Western Digital. This advantage is considerable, and will be especially beneficial when streaming media.
However, being a newer NAS provider, TerraMaster does not have the app ecosystem comparable to those of QNAP and Synology, which have hundreds of free apps for everything from cloud backup and media streaming to security and other utilities. TerraMaster F2-220 is very good value for the hardware it comes with, but new buyers should carefully evaluate their needs against the available apps. If the app ecosystem and a mature operating system are important to you, both QNAP and Synology are superior to TerraMaster from that standpoint, and will make solid entry-level NAS servers.
