Photo: Rozette Rago

After testing 10 routers over 120 hours, we’ve determined that the best router for wirelessly connecting your laptops, your smart devices, and anything else your daily life depends on is the TP-Link Archer A20. It was faster than anything else we tested at both close and long range, it’s reliable, and it shrugs off the stress of handling multiple wireless devices simultaneously.

The TP-Link Archer A20 tri-band 802.11ac router passed all of our performance tests with top marks. If you don’t have a huge or complicated house that needs a mesh-networking kit, the Archer A20 is the best choice to replace an older router or one that doesn’t have the range, speed, or reliability you need now. The Archer A20 has features such as a quad-core processor and band steering over its three channels (two 5 GHz and one 2.4 GHz), which can help you connect your household’s growing collection of wireless devices while avoiding dropped connections and slowdown.

The Synology RT2600ac is a bit pricier than our pick, and it finished our performance tests in a dead heat with the Asus Blue Cave and Asus RT-AC86U for second place. It has a dual-core processor, rather than a quad-core, and it lacks a third wireless radio, which means it may reach its limits earlier than the Archer A20. You can extend the RT2600ac into a mesh network with the add-on Synology MR2200ac router; purchasing a mesh-router kit is often less expensive than buying two separate routers to create a mesh network, though, and many mesh kits have extra features, such as dedicated wireless bands, that help them perform better.

TP Link’s Archer A7 router is relatively inexpensive, and it’s a great choice for small homes or one- or two-bedroom apartments. TP-Link has improved the Archer A7 since we tested it in 2018, adding band steering (here called Smart Connect) and TP-Link OneMesh support via firmware updates. The A7 lacks beamforming and MU-MIMO, two high-end features that can improve speeds but aren’t vitally important, but still performs well at shorter distances. On our toughest test it outperformed two higher-priced competitors, though the Archer A20 and other top performers still beat it overall. It’s typically less than half the price of the Archer A20, and we think it’s the best router you can buy for less than $100.

Why you should trust us

Before joining Wirecutter, Joel Santo Domingo tested and wrote about PCs, networking, and personal tech at PCMag.com, Lifewire, HotHardware, and PC Magazine for more than 17 years. Prior to writing for a living, Joel was an IT tech and system administrator for small, medium-size, and large companies.

Metaphorically, Joel has been a wire cutter for at least two decades: Testing wireless home networking has been a part of his life for the past 20-plus years through all versions of Wi-Fi, back to the wireless phone extension he tacked onto the back of his Apple PowerBook. He did that so he could connect to the Internet from his desk, his couch, and his bed seamlessly (a rarity for the time).

Who this is for

If you’re happy with your Wi-Fi, you don’t need a new router—it’s as simple as that. If you’re having problems with range, speed, or reliability, though, it might be time for an upgrade. An older router that doesn’t support 802.11ac (also known as Wi-Fi 5), has a weak CPU, or lacks Gigabit Ethernet ports can hold you back significantly.

This guide covers standalone Wi-Fi routers. Any of our picks will easily outperform any router you got from your Internet service provider, or any router more than a few years old. These routers are a good fit for apartments or small to medium-size houses with three or four people on the network. If you have more people or a large house—more than 2,300 square feet or more than one floor—you should probably look at our mesh-networking guide instead. A good rule of thumb is that if you’ve considered adding a wireless extender or an extra access point in your house, get a mesh system instead.

What you shouldn’t do is blindly buy either the cheapest router or the most expensive router you can find. Quality doesn’t necessarily scale with price, and a router with a bigger number on it may not actually solve your Wi-Fi problems.

What you need to know about wireless routers in 2019

Photo: Rozette Rago

A typical home network in 2019 doesn’t look like it did a few years ago. Without even getting into the explosion of smart-home devices (everything from smart light bulbs to doorbells to washing machines now expects a decent Wi-Fi connection), most homes these days have two or more personal Wi-Fi devices (phone, laptop, tablet) per person, as well as smart TVs or a streaming media box such as a Roku or an Amazon Fire TV. A busy evening in a typical home could have one person downloading game updates in a bedroom, a second listening to music from a smart speaker, a third watching TV in the living room, and a fourth browsing the Web sitting on the couch—and all of that traffic demands a router that can provide fast performance for lots of devices at once. That development has made us a lot pickier about what routers we accept as the best for the most people, and a lot more interested in features such as band steering and a third wireless band. These features cost more, but they’re worth the expense.

Although all modern routers are at least dual-band—offering one slower but longer-range 2.4 GHz band and one faster but shorter-range 5 GHz band—it’s not easy to take full advantage of both bands. On most cheap (or old) routers, you have to make two separate network names—such as “mynetwork2.4” and “mynetwork5″—and then decide which of your devices should join which network. If you don’t give your networks different names (SSIDs), in practice all your devices end up piling onto one 5 GHz band, and you experience slower speeds, delays, and even dropped connections when several of them are online and busy at the same time.

Band steering—specifically load-balancing band steering—lets you use a single network name for all your Wi-Fi bands and allows the router to decide which devices go on 2.4 GHz and which ones go on 5 GHz based on where they are in your house and how much bandwidth they’re using. Band steering is essential for mesh networks, which have multiple access points and multiple bands to deal with, but the feature is important even in standalone routers, because if you aren’t using all the radios in your router, you aren’t getting all the performance you paid for.

We tested this feature very carefully—unfortunately, some routers that are theoretically capable of band steering merely wind up connecting your devices to the “strongest” signal, cramming everything onto a single 5 GHz band again. Our picks are smarter than that.

Tri-band routers have an extra 5 GHz band in addition to the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands of a dual-band router. This third band allows more devices to connect and be busy at once without slowing the network down so much. Load-balancing band steering becomes even more important with tri-band routers—that extra radio won’t do you any good if none of your devices are connected to it. We used to recommend against spending the extra money on a tri-band router, but busier networks with more smart devices in more congested areas can definitely benefit, and the feature doesn’t cost as much as it used to.

All 802.11ac routers come with an AC speed rating meant to tell you how fast the router is, formatted as “AC1900” or “AC2600,” for example. The bad news is that AC speed ratings are really, really bogus. In the real world, AC2300, AC1900, and AC1750 all mean pretty much the same thing: a dual-band router with one 2.4 GHz radio and one 5 GHz radio, each supporting up to three spatial streams—concurrent connections that the router can combine to increase the throughput available to your device, similar to adding lanes to a highway. A rating of AC2600 indicates a dual-band router with four spatial streams each, and a rating of AC3200 means a tri-band router with three spatial streams each.

When you see a router advertised as 2×2, 3×3, or 4×4, those pairs of numbers refer to the number of transmitters and receivers the radio has, with which the router can communicate over the spatial streams. The kicker here is that the phones, laptops, game consoles, and other devices you’re using are almost always 1×1 or 2×2 (so they support either one or two spatial streams, respectively), and the speed of the connection is determined by the device with the fewest spatial streams. A 2×2 laptop wouldn’t get any more throughput from a 4×4 router than it would from a 2×2 router, though it would still get twice as much as a 1×1 laptop.

What about using those extra streams to connect to another device at the same time? For the most part, that’s a no-go. You might have a 2×2 laptop, a 2×2 phone, and a 4×4 router—but unless all three of them support a technology called MU-MIMO, the router can talk to only one of them at once, using only two streams. With MU-MIMO, the router could talk to the phone using two streams and to the laptop using the other two, simultaneously. Right now, routers with MU-MIMO support are common but not ubiquitous; client devices with MU-MIMO are rarer than hen’s teeth. So having MU-MIMO support—and more than three spatial streams—in your router is nice for future compatibility, but it isn’t really a killer feature right now.

In October 2018, the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry organization responsible for certifying that Wi-Fi devices work together, announced that it was rebranding Wi-Fi 802.11n as “Wi-Fi 4,” 802.11ac as “Wi-Fi 5,” and 802.11ax as “Wi-Fi 6.” We hope the new terminology will help simplify explanations.

The first 802.11ax/Wi-Fi 6 routers are available right now. Much as with the current MU-MIMO situation, many of that Wi-Fi version’s best features won’t work properly unless all (or at least most) of the devices within range of the router also support 802.11ax. Support for 802.11ax in most computers, phones, tablets, and smart devices is still rare and will probably stay that way for another year or two—so if you’re in need of a router, go ahead and buy one of our current picks now instead of trying to hold out for 802.11ax.

How we picked

We researched dual- and tri-band routers from each of the major router manufacturers, including Asus, D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, and TP-Link. We also looked for routers from less well-known manufacturers with strong reviews from tech reviewers or potentially interesting features that set them apart.

We considered six criteria:

• Price: You can buy a great router for $150 to $200, and a good one for $80 to $100. Routers priced higher usually add features that aren’t necessary for most homes, such as gaming enhancements, extra Ethernet ports, or 802.11ax support (which most devices can’t use yet). Once you pass $200, especially if you have dead spots in your home’s current Wi-Fi network, you should consider a mesh-networking kit instead.
• Good throughput: You need this on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. If you have a connection, it should be fast enough to download files quickly and stream videos smoothly.
• Good range: This also applies to both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. You should be able to connect to a well-placed router from anywhere in an apartment or a small house.
• Band steering: This feature helps you make use of all available bands. All 802.11ac routers come with at least two wireless radios, and the router should be able to use all of them without requiring you to manually connect your devices to separate networks.
• A fast processor: A router with a speedy processor can handle more connected devices and offer improved performance. No matter how good your radios are, the slow single-core processors found in most cheap routers can still drag things down.
• RAM: Along with a good multi-core processor, 512 MB RAM helps the router deal with multiple clients simultaneously. For budget routers, which typically need to handle fewer devices, 256 MB or even 128 MB is still fine.

Most routers also offer some other features such as VPN connections, USB ports to share printers or external drives, and limited parental filtering. We looked at those, but we didn’t make them the main focus of our testing—we were more concerned about the quality of the Internet access a router provided, because that’s what most people will notice day to day. MU-MIMO is nice for future-proofing but by no means essential. An extra 5 GHz radio (tri-band) is good for people with lots of devices.

In addition, we used customer reviews on Amazon and Newegg, plus professional router reviews and performance rankings from CNET, Dong Knows Tech, PCMag, PCWorld, SmallNetBuilder, and Trusted Reviews, to generate our list of contenders. After identifying everything that met all of our criteria, we thoroughly tested the most promising routers ourselves.

How we tested

Testing for most Wi-Fi router reviews consists mostly of connecting a single device to Wi-Fi at various distances, trying to get the biggest throughput number possible, and declaring the router with the biggest number and the best range the winner, at least in terms of raw performance. The problem with this method is that it assumes that a big number for one device divides evenly into bigger numbers for all devices. This is usually a valid assumption for wired networking, but it doesn’t work well for Wi-Fi.

Instead of testing for the maximum throughput from a single laptop, we used four laptops, spaced around 2,300 square feet of a two-story suburban home, to simulate the real-world activity of a busy home network. Because these tests simulated real-world traffic, they did a better job of modeling real-world performance compared with a tool like iPerf, an artificial testing tool that moves data from one machine to another as fast as possible.

Our four laptops ran the following tests:

• One sat in the downstairs master bedroom and simulated a 4K video streaming session. It tried to download data at up to 30 Mbps, but we were satisfied if it could average 25 Mbps or better, which is what Netflix recommends for 4K.
• The second sat in the garage and simulated a Web-browsing session. Once every 20 seconds or so, it downloaded sixteen 128 KB files simultaneously to simulate loading a modern Web page; ideally pages should load in less than 750 milliseconds.
• The third laptop sat in the living room across the house, simulating a second browsing session. It also downloaded sixteen 128 KB files simultaneously, and on this machine we looked for the same quick load times.
• The last laptop sat in a spare bedroom downstairs at close range and downloaded a very large file. We didn’t care about latency—the amount of time between when the computer made a request and when the router responded to it—for our large file download, but we did want to see an overall throughput of 100 Mbps or better.

We’ve labeled this top-down sketch of our test house with the locations of our router and clients for our latest testing setup. The drawing isn’t perfectly to scale, but it is a close approximation of the various rooms, closets, and walls that our routers’ signals needed to pass through. Click for a full-resolution version. Illustration: Sarah MacReading

We ran all these tests at the same time for a full five minutes to simulate a realistic extra-busy time on a home network. Although your network probably isn’t always that busy, it is that busy often enough—and those busy times are when you’re most likely to get annoyed, so they’re what we were modeling in our tests.

These tests simultaneously evaluated range, throughput, and the router’s ability to multitask. We also made sure to enable each router’s load-balancing band-steering feature, when applicable, to make sure that the routers would properly distribute our client laptops across all available bands to improve performance. We didn’t touch most of the other settings—you should be able to connect to the Wi-Fi and have it work without constantly fiddling with things.

To test the router’s best possible speeds at close range, we placed one of our test laptops approximately 15 feet from the router, with one interior wall (or ceiling) between router and laptop; we also performed a long-distance maximum-throughput test at about 50 feet, with four interior and two exterior walls in the way. We tested throughput using a real HTTP download, the same protocol you use to view websites and download files, to better expose differences in CPU speed and general routing performance.

We used a mix of MU-MIMO–compatible and older 802.11ac USB Wi-Fi adapters to simulate a home network serving different clients. For example, many recent Mac and Windows laptops as well as top-of-the-line phones such as the iPhone XS and Samsung Galaxy S10 have MU-MIMO-compliant wireless adapters, while budget smartphones or smart speakers are unlikely to support MU-MIMO.

Because we were testing in the real world, external variables (competing signals, walls, network traffic) affected our results, just as they’re likely to affect yours. The purpose of our testing was not to choose a router that was slightly faster than another; it was to see which routers could deliver consistently strong performance without major issues in real-world conditions.

Our pick: TP-Link Archer A20

Photo: Rozette Rago

The TP-Link Archer A20 is our pick because it was the fastest router we tested with the best range, it’s reasonably priced, and it has features that others lack, such as a quad-core processor and tri-band radios. Those features improve performance by helping the router handle more connections simultaneously, with results that definitely came through in our tests. The TP-Link Archer A20 falls under the $200 sweet spot for standalone routers. Although routers certainly can cost more, we think those models’ extra features (such as optimizations for gaming PCs and 802.11ax compatibility) aren’t worth the extra cash for most folks.

The Archer A20 is a tri-band router, which means it offers two 5 GHz channels for speedy communication at shorter ranges and one 2.4 GHz channel for slower connections at longer range; most routers in this price range offer only one 5 GHz band. The Archer A20 also has a 1.8 GHz Broadcom quad-core processor and 512 MB of RAM to help it deal with the traffic from all your devices. Budget routers like the TP-Link Archer A7 make do with a single-core processor and 128 MB; those specs are certainly sufficient for handling a half-dozen devices in a small apartment, but you need the extra power of a model like the Archer A20 to maintain more simultaneous connections without getting bogged down.

We’ll get into this topic more in the testing section below, but the Archer A20 was the top performer in our multi-client test, which measures how a browsing session is affected by other devices downloading files or streaming videos simultaneously. The Archer A20’s quad-core processor, its 512 MB of RAM, its second 5 GHz wireless band, and its Smart Connect band-steering feature helped it cope with all of our network traffic. We left the router’s configuration as close to out-of-the-box as we could, though we had to enable Smart Connect manually. This chart shows how long our test laptop took to simulate loading a Web page while three other laptops around the house were busy doing other things like downloading files or streaming video.

This test measured how long it took to fetch a Web page, with the X-axis of the chart noting what percentage of requests were fulfilled in that amount of time. A value of 1,000 ms at 50 percent means that half of all requests had one second or less of latency. As you can see, the Archer A20 remained far under the 750 ms threshold throughout our test sequence, just breaking the line only at the 100th percentile. You likely wouldn’t perceive any browsing slowdowns, even while the other clients were hammering the router with streaming, downloading, and other browsing requests. Out of the 10 routers we tested for this guide, the Archer A20 was the fastest and most consistent.

The Archer A20’s band steering was able to keep all our laptops connected to the two 5 GHz bands without slowdowns, even for our long-range clients in the garage and master bedroom. That’s good, because it frees the 2.4 GHz channel for other devices that don’t have 5 GHz radios.

The TP-Link Archer A20’s three radio lights and other status LEDs. Photo: Rozette Rago

The Archer A20 looks like a box with a set of six antennas that swing up out of the router’s body (we tested it with the antennas deployed). It has the usual set of four Gigabit Ethernet ports on the back, along with a single marked WAN port that you connect to your cable modem or fiber gateway. It has one USB 2.0 port and one USB 3.0 port on the back so you can connect a USB hard drive or SSD for media streaming or file sharing. The router can also act as a Time Machine backup device with external storage.

The Archer A20 has four LAN Ethernet jacks and one WAN Internet jack. A USB 2.0 port and a USB 3.0 port are present for adding storage or other accessories. Photo: Rozette Rago

A feature called link aggregation (aka port bonding) lets you achieve Internet speeds up to 2 gigabits by using two connections at the same time. You can connect the main WAN port and LAN port 1 on the back of the router to a cable modem that also supports link aggregation, such as our upgrade pick, the Motorola MB8600. Although very few ISPs support faster-than-gigabit Internet now, this feature offers a way to future-proof if you know that such speeds are something you’re interested in (though most people don’t need a connection that fast). You can also link two of the Archer A20’s LAN ports together to increase bandwidth for networked storage devices that support link aggregation, such as the Synology DiskStation DS418play. Both situations make more sense if you’re running a business from your home.

With the antennas folded down, the Archer A20 could look like a book on a shelf. Photo: Rozette Rago

The TP-Link Archer A20 comes with a two-year warranty, double the length of the protection that comes with the Netgear R7000P, our previous top pick. Routers usually come with one to three years of coverage, though most manufacturers give you two years.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

When you first set up the Archer A20, its Smart Connect band-steering feature is off by default, and the router gives you three discrete (one 2.4 GHz and two 5 GHz) wireless networks instead. It’s a quick fix—you simply have to switch Smart Connect on at the Wireless Settings admin screen to merge the SSIDs and networks—but it’s an extra step that is easy to miss.

Smart Connect is just a toggle away, but you have to set it up manually.

Although the router isn’t very tall (1.5 inches with the antennas stowed), the base is an 8-by-8-inch square, which could be an issue if you are replacing a taller router that didn’t take up so much horizontal desk space. For example, the Synology MR2200ac is a relatively svelte 6 by 7.7 by 2.6 inches (HWD), and the now-discontinued Apple AirPort Extreme was even slimmer at 6.6 by 3.9 by 3.9 inches (HWD).

We recommend installing a whole-home mesh kit if you’re replacing a router and extenders in a larger home, but you can buy a mesh extender for the Synology RT2600ac and TP-Link Archer A7 if you need more coverage (though we haven’t tested those to see how they stack up to actual mesh kits yet). The Archer A20 isn’t compatible with mesh extenders yet, but TP-Link is planning to add OneMesh compatibility in a firmware update. That delay shouldn’t be a problem unless you know you’ll need a mesh network from day one—and in that case we recommend you buy a mesh-networking kit outright.

Runner-up: Synology RT2600ac

Photo: Michael Hession

The Synology RT2600ac router is easy to set up and extremely configurable. It was also speedy on our throughput tests, and it offered excellent performance when serving multiple clients. It’s typically more expensive than the Archer A20, and because it lacks a second 5 GHz radio, it may reach its limits earlier if your household owns a lot of wireless devices or if the 2.4 GHz band in your area is congested, but it still performed well on our tests. You may not be familiar with Synology, but the RT2600ac has been available for a couple of years, and it builds upon the company’s expertise with network-attached storage units and other network devices. The RT2600ac has received good reviews from sites such as Dong Knows Tech, CNET, PCMag, and SmallNetBuilder.

The RT2600ac’s status LEDs. Photo: Michael Hession

This Synology router ended up alongside two other dual-band routers (the Asus Blue Cave and Asus RT-AC86U) at the top of our performance charts. Like the Archer A20, each of these routers was able to handle the traffic our multi-client test generated and to give us a smooth browsing experience. And the Synology was able to keep a strong connection to our long-distance testing site, transferring data at a speedy 166 Mbps throughput (by comparison, the budget TP-Link Archer A7 was able to manage throughput of only 27 Mbps to the garage).

Like most routers, the RT2600ac includes one USB port, one WAN port, and four Gigabit Ethernet ports on the back. Photo: Michael Hession

Smart Connect (aka band steering) worked out of the box, so we didn’t have to search the administration interface to enable it as we did on the TP-Link routers. It chose bands intelligently, shifting the two farthest laptops (in the master bedroom and in the garage) to the 2.4 GHz band automatically during our multi-client tests. When we ran our single-client maximum-throughput test, the client in the garage automatically jumped back onto the 5 GHz channel. If you’re tech savvy, you can tweak the Smart Connect thresholds to determine exactly when clients will connect to the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz channel, but we didn’t need to do that to get good performance during this round of testing.

You can set the RT2600ac to shift wireless devices between the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz channels automatically depending on their signal strength or network usage.

The RT2600ac comes with a 1.7 GHz Qualcomm dual-core processor and 512 MB of RAM. That’s two fewer cores than in the Archer A20’s CPU, but a dual-band router can’t deal with as many clients overall, so the dual-core CPU is fine.

We found setup quick and easy using Synology’s SRM (Synology router management) operating system, which is based on the company’s operating system for NAS boxes. The TP-Link Archer A20’s setup was similar to that of other routers we’ve configured in the past: The process is straightforward when the setup wizard is guiding you, but you can easily get confused when trying to find a specific setting after that initial setup. In contrast, Synology’s SRM looks and reacts like a Windows-based operating system, so you’ll find settings grouped logically. If you have our pick for the best NAS for home users, the Synology DiskStation DS218+, you’re probably familiar with the interface. It runs in a browser tab, and it gives you windowed panes to navigate between settings.

Synology’s wireless settings are all in one place: no “basic” and “advanced” settings here.

The interface gives each function its own window, which helped us focus on the task we needed to do. Once we got used to the interface, it made more sense to look for various wireless-channel settings in the Wi-Fi Connect control panel. Compare that experience with the TP-Link interface, where you have to remember that the SSID and password are available under the Wireless Settings section in the Basic settings pane but that the security level is two levels deep (under Advanced Setup, and then Wireless Settings) in the Advanced settings pane. The windows also let you keep comparable info open at the same time, so you can check how a setting change affects your clients’ connections without having to slog back through more tabs and menus.

Other advanced features include easy-to-set-up dual WAN failover protection. That is, if your main ISP connection goes down, you can plug your smartphone or a USB 4G modem into the router, and it will use the mobile Internet connection as a backup. Or you can connect a second cable modem or DSL line to LAN port 1, and if the main Internet connection goes down, the router will automatically switch to the backup (and back again to the main line once it’s up).

Setting up a second Internet connection and checking its status is easy—just look at the graphical interface.

The RT2600ac can act as a base station for one or more Synology MR2200ac routers acting as wired or wireless mesh extenders. Although these can extend an existing network to underserved parts of your house after you purchase a standalone router, we still recommend buying a tri-band mesh router kit if you know you will need to cover a large area or have indoor obstacles that block Wi-Fi, such as masonry.

Like the TP-Link routers, the Synology RT2600ac comes with a two-year warranty.

Budget pick: TP-Link Archer A7

Photo: Michael Hession

The TP-Link Archer A7 prompted us to reverse our past theory that you have to forgo vital features to find a router for under $100. While the top picks in this guide outperformed the Archer A7 overall, tested alongside our contenders the Archer A7 held its own and surpassed several routers costing double the price or more.

The Archer A7’s activity LEDs. Photo: Michael Hession

A recent firmware upgrade added band steering (Smart Connect) to the Archer A7, along with OneMesh support. The latter will extend your network with the help of add-on routers or mesh Wi-Fi extenders, but Smart Connect is the more significant upgrade since it will automatically assign devices to the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz wireless band based on which one will deliver better performance. We don’t think the A7 would be as robust as the tri-band Archer A20 for a larger home with dozens of devices—it has one fewer wireless radio, less RAM, and a weaker processor—but this router is certainly sufficient for a starter home or an apartment with fewer smartphones and PCs.

The Archer A7 includes the typical WAN port and four Gigabit Ethernet ports, though its USB port is limited to USB 2.0 speeds. Photo: Michael Hession

The Archer A7 has a 750 MHz single-core Qualcomm processor and 128 MB of RAM, which fall pretty far short of the quad-core processor and 512 MB of RAM in the Archer A20, but its performance in our tests certainly showed that it is a capable router.

During our testing, the Archer A7 connected the long-range client in the garage on the 2.4 GHz channel while retaining the others on the 5 GHz channel, economically splitting the load so that the download and 4K streams didn’t interfere with the two clients browsing the Web. The budget CPU and low memory showed their limitations when the measurements were in the 95th to 99th percentile. This test result is a pretty good indicator of what living with this router would be like in real life: One of every 20 or so page loads will be noticeably slower than average, in this case taking a little over one and a half seconds to three seconds. That’s longer than the 0.42–second result we observed at the 95th percentile for the Archer A20—but the Archer A7 is less than half the price.

Tested throughput at close range in the spare bedroom was pretty good, and this model ran neck and neck with the Linksys MR8300 and the Synology MR2200ac. Throughput at longer range in the garage was quite a bit lower due to the 2.4 GHz connection. That said, the garage client was still able to view a 4K video stream smoothly.

The Archer A7’s interface is very similar to that of the Archer A20, though it has only one 5 GHz band.

The Archer A7 is compatible with TP-Link’s OneMesh routers and mesh extenders. You can use the latter to quickly connect dead zones in your home. However, since it uses the same wireless radios as every other device on your network, it’s not as adaptable as a mesh-networking kit that lets you use either wired backhaul or dedicated wireless radios. That said, it’s notable that you even have that option in a budget router. We’re planning on testing TP-Link’s OneMesh alongside dedicated mesh-networking kits in our next update.

The Archer A7 also comes with a two-year warranty, on a par with the coverage for the Archer A20 and Synology RT2600ac.

An overview of the test results

The TP-Link Archer A20 was our most robust and consistent router when we stress-tested with multiple clients simultaneously. The other top performers came very close to the Archer A20, up until the 90th to 95th percentile.

What this graph shows is how many milliseconds it took to simulate loading a Web page during our multi-client tests. On the left side of the graph is the 50th-percentile result—the result in the middle of the range. We also took a sample at the 75th, 90th, 95th, and 100th percentile—the last being the worst results we got from each device. Keep in mind that while the laptop in this test was loading Web pages, three others were (simulating) downloading a big file, streaming 4K video, and browsing a second website—this was a busy little network, at a busy time.

Although the TP-Link Archer A20 was the clear winner, the Synology RT2600ac, Asus RT-AC86U, and TP-Link Archer A10 were effectively in lockstep. They provided a smooth browsing experience up to the 95th percentile; this means one of every 20 or so page loads will be noticeably slower than average. But even then, the hiccup will last only about a second, barely enough time for you to react and start wondering if there is a problem.

The other half of the group told a different story. The Asus Blue Cave and the Netgear R7000P, our former top pick, as well as the TP-Link Archer A7, our budget pick, did all right up until the 75th percentile but showed a bit more of a spike after the 90th percentile (though still sticking under the 2,000 ms threshold, where things would really go off the rails).

Disappointing results were especially noticeable for the Linksys MR8300 and the D-Link DIR-2680: The MR8300 started off on shaky ground and rapidly moved into poor performance after the 75th percentile, while the DIR-2680 began in poor territory and just went off the charts after that. The MR8300 band-steered all four of our clients to its 5 GHz radio rather than splitting them between bands, and its single-client throughput tests (explained below) demonstrated poor performance at long distance. The Synology MR2200ac coped better on the test by shifting the browsing client to its 2.4 GHz radio, but its long-range throughput was the slowest of anything we tested—if one device on your network is struggling to communicate with the router, it can drag down the performance of everything else. The results we got from these routers illustrate why we use multi-client tests for our router guides—if you were to go by only the single-device close-range throughput numbers below, you might think the DIR-2680 was a decent performer. However, our browsing-latency test shows that in a worst-case scenario—when lots of household members are actively using your Wi-Fi at the same time—the DIR-2680 will show you a dreaded spinning pinwheel more often than the other routers here.

This is a stacked bar graph of the mean latency results from each of our four test clients—adding all those numbers together gives you an idea of how each router might perform when lots of devices on your network are busy. Latency measures how long it takes your inputs to reach the other end of the connection—the time between your clicking a link and the page loading. Unresponsive Web browsing is the first thing most people notice going wrong, so we’ve sorted our results by the length of that bar here.

The TP-Link Archer A20 was clearly the winner in this test, with the Synology RT2600ac, Asus RT-AC86U, and Asus Blue Cave stacked in a group below that. Surprisingly, the TP-Link Archer A7 came next, outpacing multiple more-expensive routers, followed by the Netgear R7000P, our pick in the previous version of this guide. Again coming in last place, the D-Link DIR-2680 labored during our multi-client tests.

We checked how each router performed at short range to the spare bedroom and at long range to the garage by beaming a large file repeatedly to our clients on their own. The majority of the routers were able to top 200 Mbps at close distances, with the best-performing routers pushing 230 Mbps. Only a couple of stragglers (the TP-Link Archer A7 and the Linksys MR8300) fell a bit behind at 180 Mbps, which is still a speedy throughput score.

At long distance, half of the routers kept our garage client on the 5 GHz channel, and the other half switched it to the slower but longer-range 2.4 GHz channel. Most but not all of the routers that switched to 5 GHz stayed above 166 Mbps, while the top three kept a 200 Mbps throughput measurement. The Linksys MR8300 stayed on 5 GHz but was able to download at only 59 Mbps. One nice thing to report is that all of our competitors were able to download at 25 Mbps or better at long range. According to Netflix, 25 Mbps is the minimum comfortable throughput threshold for 4K video.

Router setup and network maintenance

Regardless of the router you’re using, you need to do a few things to maintain a secure, reliable wireless connection:

• To access your router’s Web-based configuration screen, don’t use any domain names that your router’s manufacturer may have provided as a shortcut—such domain names have been known to get hijacked and can open you up to attack. Instead, connect a desktop or laptop to the router (wired or wireless), open a Web browser, and type in the router’s IP address; here’s how to find it.
• As soon as you set up your router, change its administrator password.
• Use WPA2-PSK (AES) encryption for the best speed and security on your Wi-Fi networks. (Use your router’s mixed-mode setting—AES and TKIP—only if you have older devices that don’t support WPA2.) WPA3 is a newer security standard that purports to be more secure, but very few WPA3-compatible routers and devices are available so far. WPA3 is backward-compatible with WPA2, so you’re fine if your router has it.
• Immediately check for any available firmware updates for your router, and recheck every few months. Updating will help ensure that you get the best performance, security, and reliability. Our picks (the TP-Link Archer A20, Synology RT2600ac, and TP-Link Archer A7) will alert you to new firmware updates when you open the Web-based administration page, but you usually have to open that page regularly to check. If you’re interested in some straightforward steps you can take to make your router more secure, we like this guide by SwiftOnSecurity.
• Try to place your router in a central location in your home. Don’t stash it next to a bunch of other electronics, and don’t just shove it somewhere in the basement. Don’t waste your time wiggling the antennas around—they’re omnidirectional. You can’t get more than a 1 or 2 dBM gain—or loss—from a different antenna position, and that isn’t enough to fix any problems you might be having.
• Don’t just connect everything to your 5 GHz radio “because it’s faster.” Yes, 5 GHz is faster than 2.4 GHz—at short range, at least. But the more devices you’ve got crammed onto a single radio, the more problems you’ll encounter. Note that tri-band routers have two 5 GHz radios. You can connect critical devices such as a streaming set-top box or a gaming PC to its own 5 GHz radio manually. If you don’t have or aren’t using band steering, be sure to manually connect your devices to all the bands your router offers.
• To optimize your network, grab an app such as Wi-Fi Analytics (PC/Android), WiFiAnalyzer (Android, open source) or WiFi Explorer (Mac) to make sure you’ve configured your Wi-Fi networks correctly. See whether competing wireless networks are present on channels 1, 6, and 11 on the 2.4 GHz band, or if any other Wi-Fi networks are on the 5 GHz band. If you’re having frequent problems with lots of signal bars but slow speeds, try changing to a different Wi-Fi channel—but don’t get too hung up on which channel seems to have the most networks visible. Active Wi-Fi use is what causes congestion: One neighbor network with kids home and playing all day might give you more trouble than three neighbor networks with little or no activity.
• If your laptop is having issues connecting to your router, make sure that you have the latest drivers for your laptop’s Wi-Fi card. You can usually find these on your laptop manufacturer’s website, but the Wi-Fi card’s manufacturer might have more-recent drivers. We encountered this issue once during our previous testing: One of our laptops, an Acer, would connect to a router’s wireless-ac network but drop the speeds to almost nothing. When we updated our Acer laptop with Wi-Fi drivers straight from Intel, which were newer than the ones Acer offered, our problem went away.

What to look forward to

Netgear has introduced a new gaming router, the Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR300, which is available for $200. It’s an 802.11ac router with four Gigabit Ethernet ports, a dual-core 1 GHz processor, and dual-band Wi-Fi. We skipped it this go-around because it doesn’t yet support band steering (Smart Connect). We’ll likely test it in our next update once that issue has been resolved.

Netgear also released a new 802.11ax router, the Nighthawk AX4 RAX40. It’s a dual-band router with four Ethernet ports and an 800 MHz Intel dual-core processor. It’s priced around $200, and like the XR300 it doesn’t support band steering right now—when (and if) it does, we’ll take a look.

D-Link released a set of 802.11ac Exo-branded routers and Wi-Fi mesh extenders at the CES 2019 trade show. They weren’t available during our test period for this guide, but we’ll look out for them for our next standalone Wi-Fi router and Wi-Fi extender guide updates.

THE COMPETITION

Our previous pick: Netgear R7000P Nighthawk

The Netgear R7000P Nighthawk was our pick during the last iteration of this guide, but its ranking has dropped a few notches. Its performance put it in the middle of the pack compared with the new routers we tested, and it has a shorter (one-year) warranty. The Archer A20’s price is usually $10 to $20 higher than that of the R7000P, but we’d pick the Archer A20 for its extra performance, two-year warranty, and future-proofing features like link aggregation.

Everything else

TP-Link sells a variant of the Archer A20 called the Archer C4000. The company confirmed to us that the hardware was “almost identical” but that “the available firmware features on each model may vary.” Most people should stick with the Archer A20, since we haven’t tested the C4000.

The Asus RT-AC86U and TP-Link Archer A10 were notable competitors; they matched the Synology RT2600ac in performance so closely that you’d have to take a magnifying glass to the graphs of their results to see the difference. All three trailed the Archer A20 in speed and tri-band support, but we enjoyed the RT2600ac’s ease of use, its admin interface, and its advanced features, such as the ability to tweak its band steering; these factors pushed the RT2600ac ahead of both the RT-AC86U and Archer A10.

The Asus Blue Cave showed promise because of its design, AiMesh compatibility, and good reviews. It performed just as well as the Netgear R7000P and TP-Link Archer A7, landing in the middle of the pack, but it didn’t distinguish itself beyond its easy-to-live-with exterior and middling price.

You can configure the Synology MR2200ac as a standalone router, but this model is more notable because you can use it as a mesh extender along with the RT2600ac. The MR2200ac has only one Ethernet port, though you can use it to extend a wired network. It uses the same excellent Synology SRM router OS as the RT2600ac, too. However, it finished in the bottom tier of our performance tests. We’re definitely going to look at the MR2200ac again when we update our mesh-networking and Wi-Fi extender guides, but we suggest skipping it as a standalone router.

The Linksys MR8300 and D-Link DIR-2680 wound up at the bottom of our performance charts. Both suffered lower throughput in our long-range tests, and both were less able to handle the browsing traffic when all four of our clients were tagging the router at the same time. The MR8300 is notable for being compatible with Linksys’s Velop mesh system and for using a mobile app as its primary interface. The DIR-2680 has internal antennas, which make it look less like a robot, and it includes McAfee-branded Internet security, but ultimately it trailed the other models here on our tests.

We considered routers from Motorola, specifically the MR1900, MR1700, and MR2600. The MR1900 will be discontinued soon, while the latter two routers lack band steering and are both more expensive than the TP-Link Archer A7.

We also thought about the TP-Link Archer A5 and Archer A6, since both rank among the least expensive 802.11ac routers with a typical price tag under $50. However, both also lack band steering, which is available in enough inexpensive routers now that we consider the feature to be a must-have.

Previously tested

We tested 14 standalone wireless routers for previous iterations of our guide. Most of these routers are still available, though some have been replaced by newer models; we didn’t retest these routers in 2019, but we stand by our dismissals.

The TP-Link Archer C7 was our main pick for several years due to a combination of an extremely low price, a long range, and high throughput. Our new budget pick, the Archer A7, is the continuation of the C7 line under a new name. The C7 does a good job within its limitations, but more modern routers outperform it, particularly if you don’t want to manage multiple network names.

The Asus RT-AC3200 is a tri-band router at a flagship dual-band router price, with great range and coverage plus really good device- and traffic-analysis capabilities in its UI. Unfortunately, its band steering was broken when we first tested it, and it’s still broken; it claims to steer across all three bands, but in our testing it never once connected a device on 2.4 GHz.

Netgear’s R7800 is an older model that doesn’t support band steering.

TP-Link’s Archer C5400 is a tri-band router offering MU-MIMO support and 4×4 radios. Unfortunately, what it doesn’t offer is band steering, which makes those three radios inconvenient to use. The C5400 also had lackluster long-range 5 GHz performance in our tests.

Netgear’s R6700 was updated to the R6700v2 in early 2017, but it’s not the upgrade you might expect. The revised version has a MIPS CPU instead of the older model’s more-powerful ARM processor, and the R6700v2’s MediaTek radios are tweaky and unreliable.

Apple officially discontinued the AirPort Extreme in spring 2018. When this device was current, it was a decent but not great home router; now that it’s unsupported, we don’t think it’s worth buying at any price.

The Amped Wireless Titan offers really good short-range 5 GHz performance. However, in our tests its longer-range 5 GHz performance was quite poor, and its 2.4 GHz performance was mediocre; it also lacks band steering.

Linksys’s EA8300 is a tri-band router with band steering. When we tested the EA8300 in 2017, its version of band steering crammed all of our devices onto the first 5 GHz radio, as though the router had no band steering at all.

The Securifi Almond+ was easy to set up from its built-in touchscreen. Unfortunately, the Wi-Fi performance from the Almond+ was mediocre at best and particularly underwhelming at long range.

The TP-Link Archer C9 performed poorly on our tests. The C9 also suffers from a weird, awkward standing-on-end design, and TP-Link sells five separate hardware revisions, making it hard to tell what you’re going to get (or how long the company will support it, if you buy one).

We thought the D-Link DIR-878 dual-band router showed potential with MU-MIMO support, band steering, and beamforming. Like the Netgear R6700v2, however, it uses MediaTek radios, and so far we haven’t seen anything with a MediaTek Wi-Fi chipset that performs reliably.

D-Link’s DIR-867 is a lower-cost version of the DIR-878. Under the hood, it uses the exact same CPU and Wi-Fi chipsets as its larger counterpart, but—oddly—it tends to perform slightly better. “Better” isn’t the same thing as “well,” though, and we cannot recommend either router.

The Ignition Labs Portal makes bold claims about performing leaps and bounds better than competing routers by making use of restricted DFS frequencies. The theory is, if your environment is swamped with lots of devices, using other frequencies will bypass congestion and make your experience better. Unfortunately, those frequencies are restricted for a reason: They’re used by military radar, air-traffic controllers, and similar high-priority devices. Even though it’s legal to use those frequencies in civilian devices, you have to respect those “big boy” devices’ priority and cease transmission entirely if you can sniff even a hint of them in operation. This limitation led to very poor results for the Portal in our testing.

The less said about D-Link’s DIR-842, the better. The DIR-842 was completely unable to connect to our test clients at long range. Its throughput was also poor at our short-range test site.

Jim Salter contributed to previous versions of this article.

This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter. To see the current recommendation, please go here.

When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commissions.

The most convenient drive for backups: Portable hard drive

Who this is for: People who frequently move between locations and want a hard drive to back up important documents and photos from their laptop.

Why we like it: The 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is one of the lightest, thinnest hard drives we tested in our guide to the best portable hard drives, and it was consistently faster than the competition in our multi-file music and photo transfer tests. More important, it’s reliable—the tried-and-true Slim has been one of our picks for four years, and has an acceptable 9 percent reported failure rate across nearly 2,701 user reviews on Amazon. Seagate includes handy backup software, too.

The 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is reliable and has fast transfer rates. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

Flaws but not dealbreakers: The Backup Plus Slim’s USB port wobbles when pressure is applied to the cable. If you break the port, you won’t be able to access your data until you find a new enclosure. The Slim has a two-year warranty that’s a year shorter than that of Western Digital’s drives, and we’ve read some complaints about Seagate’s customer service on Amazon, but we don’t think either of these issues are dealbreakers.

Learn more in our full guide to the best portable hard drives.

If you spend most of your time at one desk: Desktop hard drive

Who this is for: People who spend most of their time working in one place and want to keep their important documents and photos safe on a higher-capacity, faster, and more cost-effective hard drive.

Why we like it: Western Digital’s 4 TB My Book is very reliable—we found it had a 6 percent failure rate across nearly 400 reviews on Amazon—and it offers the best balance of speed and price. It was about as fast as its competition in all of our tests, it’s the least expensive drive we tested, and it has a longer warranty (three years) than the other contenders. Plus, 4 TB should be more than enough space for your future storage needs.

A great external desktop hard drive should be reliable, fast, and inexpensive, like the 4 TB Western Digital My Book. Photo: Rozette Rago

Flaws but not dealbreakers: All of the desktop drives we tested were good, and we found the speed differences between them to be small. Because they perform so similarly, we recommend getting the cheapest desktop hard drive you can find from a trustworthy maker. Right now, that means the 4 TB Western Digital My Book. If you find a drive we’ve tested that costs less, go for it: WD’s Elements and Easystore drives are just as fast and reliable as the My Book.

Learn more in our full guide to the best desktop hard drives.

The best performance: Portable solid-state drive (SSD)

Who this is for: Photographers, creative professionals, and people who don’t mind spending a lot per gigabyte to get a compact 500 GB drive that’s between three and five-and-a-half times faster than portable hard drives or desktop hard drives.

Why we like it: The 500 GB Samsung T5 Portable SSD works reliably, and it was consistently faster than other portable SSDs in our tests. The Samsung supports faster, USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds with a Type-C port, and it includes AES 256-bit hardware encryption to protect your sensitive data. The T5 is about as expensive per gigabyte as other external SSDs, and it’s one of the lightest and most compact. It has the most straightforward software to navigate, which makes it a breeze to set up encryption or check for updates. Plus the T5 has an indicator light that lets you know when it’s connected. It comes with a three-year warranty.

The Samsung T5 Portable SSD works quickly and reliably, and it supports USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

Flaws but not dealbreakers: Compared with hard drives, the Samsung T5 Portable SSD is extremely expensive. But if you’re willing to shell out the cash, you’re safe doing so because it doesn’t have any major flaws.

Learn more in our full guide to the best portable solid-state drives.

If you have a large media library: Network-attached storage (NAS)

Who this is for: Network-attached storage is ideal for people who have large media libraries, because you can store your files in one place and stream them locally to other devices. It’s also useful for backing up multiple computers to a single location. You could also use a NAS if you have too much data to store in Dropbox or Google Drive, or if you don’t trust your data to a cloud storage provider.

Why we like it: The Synology DiskStation DS218+ is the fastest NAS we tested, and it offers powerful hardware for around $300 (plus the cost of hard drives, around $250 for a pair of 4 TB drives or around $500 for a pair of 8 TB drives). It also includes AES-NI hardware encryption acceleration for added security, has upgradable RAM, and comes with flexible software that’s easy to understand and works with a wide variety of third-party apps, such as Plex, BitTorrent Sync, and GitLab. You can use the DS218+ as a home backup device, a media streamer, a mail server, a website-hosting device, a BitTorrent box, or a video-surveillance recorder.

The DS218+ was the fastest, most powerful NAS we tested, with more security than other models, and easy-to-use software. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

Flaws but not dealbreakers: A NAS is larger, bulkier, and pricier than other external drives we recommend, and it requires setup and management, as well as a dedicated Ethernet line.

Learn more in our full guide to the best network-attached storage.

If you frequently move data between computers: Flash drive

Who this is for: People who need to quickly move large amounts of data often—large media files like raw photos and video—from one computer to another, without relying on the Internet for convenience, speed, or privacy.

Why we like it: The 64GB Kingston DataTraveler Elite G2 combines a low cost with one of the most consistently fast speeds in a flash drive we’ve tested. It has a metal casing with an excellent build quality but is not so overly bulky that it will end up blocking any other USB ports on your laptop. It also has a blinking activity light that indicates when data is being transferred—a neat feature that other flash drives tend to lack. The Kingston DataTraveler comes with a five-year warranty, which is less than SanDisk’s lifetime warranty, but we still think this is plenty of time to find any issues with the drive.

Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

Flaws but not dealbreakers: The small cap that protects the USB plug is easy to lose, but USB-A connections are durable, so it’ll work fine without it. A tethered cap would solve this issue easily.

Learn more in our full guide to the best flash drives.

Further reading

If you’d like to learn how to reformat your external drive to work with your operating system of choice, check out our guide.

When was the last time you backed up all of your important documents and photos? Check out our step-by-step guide to backing up your computer for an easy way to get started.

This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter. To see the current recommendation, please go here.

When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commissions.

Why you should trust us

Thorin Klosowski wrote about consumer electronics for more than six years at Lifehacker and has extensive experience with Linux and DIY NAS devices. He has set up more backup systems, from NAS to cloud storage, for family members and friends than he cares to count.

Before joining Wirecutter, Joel Santo Domingo tested and wrote about PCs, networking products, storage, and personal tech at PCMag and PC Magazine for more than 17 years. Prior to writing for a living, Joel was an IT tech and sysadmin for small, medium, and large companies. He has professionally backed up data as diverse as news stories on plane crashes and Mariah Carey album art.

Who this is for

A network-attached storage device, or NAS, is a small always-on computer generally used for backing up computers and serving files to devices on your local network. It includes at least one but usually two (or more) hard-drive bays, a (usually) Linux-based operating system optimized for network storage, and enough CPU power and RAM to do everything it needs to do while using far less power than a repurposed old computer. Unlike a USB drive or an external hard drive, a NAS with two or more hard drives can provide data redundancy, copying the contents of one drive over to the other automatically.

A NAS is great if you have a large media library, because you can store your files in one place and stream them locally to computers, phones, tablets, speakers, or media centers throughout your house (or even outside it). The same goes for photographers storing photos, music producers archiving music files, designers stockpiling massive Photoshop files, and anyone else who needs to access large amounts of data from multiple computers. Most people don’t need to store thousands of raw photo files, terabytes of raw video, gigabytes of lossless digital music, or backups of their Blu-ray collection, but a NAS is a useful tool for the people who do.

You should consider a NAS if you have more than one computer at home, since you can back them all up to the NAS rather than connect an external backup drive to each computer. And if you want to protect your data and backups from theft and natural disasters, a good NAS is capable of uploading files directly to a cloud backup service, too.

A NAS is also useful if you have too much data to store in Dropbox or Google Drive, or if you don’t trust your data to cloud storage providers. When you use a NAS, your data remains in your home and does not go to the cloud unless you tell it to do so. Many NAS devices have even added photo-management tools and file-syncing services that attempt to replicate various cloud storage offerings. While those NAS tools aren’t as rich with features as commercial services from Google, Apple, and others, they can at least provide an adequate alternative to pricey subscriptions.

Most NAS devices can also act as email, database, and virtual private network (VPN) servers. You can use them for BitTorrent, to host CMS, CRM, and e-commerce software, or as DVRs for networked security cameras. A NAS is a computer, so it can do almost anything a Linux computer can do. While that flexibility is great, it can also make some NAS devices confusing to use. Each NAS has its own manufacturer-specific version of Linux, and some are more approachable than others.

If you want to share and store data on your network, you may not need a NAS. Many routers have a USB port for connecting an external drive, but because routers have slower processors than our NAS picks and because their software isn’t purpose-built for file sharing, this setup will be slow and suitable only for the most basic file sharing and backups. It will also lack data redundancy because you’re backing up to only one drive, so you’re taking your chances in case of a drive failure. Windows, macOS, and Linux also have built-in file-sharing features that make using your computer as a file server easy. But that approach takes up disk space on your computer and is more difficult to manage securely, and your computer has to be on all the time, which consumes more power than a NAS and might make the data inaccessible when your computer goes to sleep.

If you’re an IT professional looking for a business-level NAS, this guide is not for you. Nor does this guide cover more-advanced uses of NAS such as iSCSI targeting, SANs (storage area networks), or RAID configurations such as RAID 5, 6, or 10 for multidrive NAS devices. Websites focused on enterprise network storage, such as Computer Weekly and StorageReview.com, can help in those cases.

This guide also won’t cover people who want a NAS that can support 1080p on-the-fly video transcoding via Plex Media Server. Every NAS we recommend supports Plex, which works great if your box is connected directly to your display via HDMI or your videos don’t need transcoding to stream to your devices. Many NAS devices can also manage decent on-the-fly transcoding with their own apps, but Plex transcoding currently requires a lot of CPU power, and none of the models we tested were able to handle transcoding in Plex reliably. NAS boxes that can manage 1080p on-the-fly transcoding through Plex are too expensive for most people—you’re better off running Plex Media Server on a computer or on an Nvidia Shield TV and using the NAS for media storage.

You could make your own NAS with old computer hardware and free software such as FreeNAS or XigmaNAS, but a dedicated NAS device uses far less power (usually about as much as a couple of LED light bulbs), has a better interface and more apps, and comes with a manufacturer warranty and technical support. The benefit of a DIY NAS is customization; you can choose where you spend money and upgrade things basically forever. You can even keep the price pretty low with something like a Raspberry Pi–powered NAS for around $200, though even with a Raspberry Pi 3, a NAS like that won’t be very quick. If you’re curious about installing FreeNAS, this YouTube guide walks you through the process, and this forum post includes a list of hardware recommendations.

How we picked

Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

Since this guide’s original publication in 2011, we’ve assembled a list of every two-bay NAS from a reputable vendor. Right now, that includes models from Asustor, Drobo, Netgear, Noontec, QNAP, Seagate, Synology, Thecus, WD, and Zyxel. We’ve read professional NAS reviews on CNET, PCMag, PCWorld, SmallNetBuilder, and StorageReview.com, and we’ve also looked at customer reviews on Amazon and Newegg.

Back in 2015, we surveyed 1,094 Wirecutter readers on what they wanted in a home NAS, and most of those requirements still hold true. When deciding which models to test, we paid attention to a number of key features that most home users needed:

• Two drive bays: Hundreds of NAS devices are available, and you can find models with one, two, four, eight, or more drive bays. For most home users, a two-drive NAS is just right, because it protects your data by mirroring the contents of one drive to the other (a configuration known as RAID 1, or a mirrored array). This setup gives you half the NAS’s actual amount of storage for files. For example, a NAS with two 8 TB drives in RAID 1 still has 8 TB of total space available (equivalent to about 300 Blu-rays), not 16 TB. As a result, your data remains safe and accessible even if a drive fails. Single-drive NAS devices don’t provide this data protection, and NAS boxes with more bays introduce more complex RAID configurations, such as RAID 5, RAID 6, or RAID 10, that require more planning and research to configure.
• Price: Home users don’t need to pay more than around $250 to $350 for a two-bay NAS (not including the price of the hard drives, unfortunately). More than that and you’re entering more complex and powerful business-class territory. If you opt for a cheaper model, you usually sacrifice read and write speeds or end up with a less-polished operating system.
• CPU and RAM: We preferred a reasonably powerful dual-core Intel Celeron processor, but we didn’t rule out ARM-based configurations as long as their processing speeds were similar. Most NAS devices released within the past year have at least 2 GB of RAM, so we stuck with that as our minimum.
• Hardware-level encryption acceleration: File encryption is good to use even if you access your NAS exclusively inside your home network, because it protects your data if someone breaks into your house and steals your NAS or your disks. (It can also protect sensitive data on a NAS that’s on a larger network, or one that attackers could target.) Some NAS boxes can also encrypt data before backing it up to a cloud service, providing an extra level of protection in case the cloud service is hacked. A NAS that includes hardware encryption acceleration offers read and write speeds that are much faster than those of a model that relies solely on software encryption.
• Easy-to-use software: Each NAS manufacturer has its own operating system. NAS software tends to take a kitchen-sink approach that often makes it confusing to use, but some operating systems, like those from QNAP and Synology, are better than others.
• Wide support for backups: A NAS should support computer backups via File History or system-image tools on Windows, Time Machine on Mac, and rsync for Linux. It should also allow you to back up easily to a cloud storage service like Amazon Glacier or Backblaze. And a NAS should offer a Dropbox-like file-syncing service so you can sync files across computers.
• Media-streaming capabilities: Most NAS boxes can stream videos and music to various devices in your home. You can do this using software from the manufacturer or third-party programs like Plex. Music streaming should work via DLNA and iTunes without a complicated setup process.
• Drive-failure notifications: A NAS should at the very least notify you with beeps and status lights if a drive fails. It’s better if the device can also send you an email or text message.
• At least two USB ports: Between backups, dongles, and other accessories, it’s nice to have at least two USB ports on a NAS. You should have two copies of every backup. If you plan on doing that on your own instead of with a cloud service, you’ll want to have a USB port on your NAS so you can back everything up to an external drive. It’s also nice to have a USB port on the front of the NAS with a quick-copy function so you can copy the contents of a USB drive to or from your NAS without fussing around with software.
• Third-party application support: If you want to add features or services to your NAS, you need to do so with third-party software, so support from third parties is key. This includes media center software, Web-server software, analytics, and more.
• Hot-swappable drive bays: Hot-swappable drive bays are necessary so you don’t have to shut down the NAS to replace a failed drive or increase capacity.
• Warranty and support: Lack of customer support is one of the most common complaints in Amazon reviews of NAS devices. Most of the models we tested come with two-year warranties. Most also offer some form of tech support, largely through online knowledge bases and forums. Some have email and phone support, and a few vendors also provide detailed, accessible tutorials and videos on their websites.

We also found a few features that were nice to have but weren’t dealbreakers for most people if they were missing:

• Wi-Fi support: You should connect your NAS to your router with an Ethernet cable if you want the best speeds, but if that’s not possible, you’ll need to be able to install a USB Wi-Fi dongle or PCIe expansion card.
• IP-camera DVR support: If you have a do-it-yourself home-security camera system, you’ll need somewhere to store all that video. A NAS is handy for this purpose, but the setup and management can be a bit much for an average person, not to mention the confusing licensing schemes (like this one from Synology) that determine the number of cameras a NAS supports. A NAS won’t work with popular DIY home-security cameras like the Nest Cam Outdoor or the Netgear Arlo, as those models save their footage to a cloud service instead.
• Uninterrupted power supply (UPS) support over USB: Your NAS should be smart enough not to lose everything if the power cuts out, but UPS support will communicate to the NAS to shut down properly before it loses power, which should help secure your data.
• VPN services: It should be easy to set up VPN services so you can access your home network securely from a public Wi-Fi network, but this isn’t something everyone needs, and it’s also a service that a good wireless router can already provide.

How we tested

First we set up each NAS following its included install guide, if it had one. Next we looked at the Web interface’s organization and features. We tested ease of use by configuring user and group accounts, as well as file and folder access permissions. We checked to see if the NAS offered a secure cloud service for remote access, which would avoid having to mess with port forwarding and static IP addresses. We also looked at Android and iOS mobile apps for accessing and administering the NAS.

The easiest way to measure real-world NAS performance, at least for how a home NAS will be used, is to copy files to and from the NAS and calculate the data rate. Since 2015, we’ve run read-and-write tests the simplest way we can: by copying files over Gigabit Ethernet and measuring the elapsed time. In 2018, we tested one new model, QNAP’s TS-251B, against the Synology DS218+ and the other devices we tested for our 2017 update. We installed 8 TB WD Red drives in each NAS, connected each model via Gigabit Ethernet to a Netgear Orbi router, and connected a desktop PC with Gigabit Ethernet to another port. We used Windows 10’s built-in Robocopy file-copying tool to read and write three datasets to each NAS: a 32 GB music folder with 6,154 MP3 files; and a folder with two large files, an 8.1 GB MKV file and a 7.07 GB Linux ISO file. We ran each test nine times in each direction: three times with encryption turned off, three times with disk or folder encryption turned on, and three times with in-flight SMB encryption turned on.

To simulate drive failure, we pulled a drive from the NAS while it was running. A NAS should beep or flash an LED to alert you that something is wrong, and the interface should show a drive-failure notification. If the NAS allows you to set up SMS or email alerts, that’s even better. If a drive fails and the NAS doesn’t produce a notification, you’re at risk of data loss if the second drive also fails.

Next we replaced the pulled drive with one of equal or greater capacity. A NAS should detect a new drive and automatically re-create the mirrored array. With each device, as it rebuilt the RAID 1 mirror, we confirmed that all data stored on the NAS was intact and accessible.

This process also allowed us to test the quality of each NAS device’s drive bays. A good NAS has drive trays or slots that make the drives easy to remove but are sturdy enough to ensure that the drives fit tightly and securely, with no chance of getting disconnected by a random bump.

We also connected a flash drive to one of the USB ports. A NAS interface should recognize a connected drive and display its make, model, and file system. It should allow transfers between the USB drive and the NAS.

All our NAS picks have some sort of energy-saving feature. We used a Kill A Watt EZ to test the power consumption on each NAS when it was performing a task (such as a file copy), when it was idle, and with its energy-saving options enabled.

Our pick: Synology DiskStation DS218+

Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

The Synology DiskStation DS218+ is the best two-bay home NAS for most people. It typically sells for less than $350 (diskless) as of this writing, its read and write speeds are the fastest of any NAS we tested, and it includes a modern Intel Celeron processor, hardware-level encryption, and a flexible and easy-to-understand interface with a wide variety of third-party apps. The DS218+ supports media playback through its own apps or Plex Media Server, supports RAID 1 drive mirroring, alerts you to drive failure, has three USB ports (including one on the front), and supports all the features Wirecutter readers have asked about, such as the FTP protocol, VPN server capabilities, IP cameras, UPS compatibility, and SSDs.

Most NAS devices in this price range use slower ARM-based processors from Realtek, Alpine, or Marvell, or older-generation Celeron processors. Some still ship with 1 GB of RAM or less. The DS218+ has a modern dual-core 2.0 GHz Intel Celeron processor and 2 GB of RAM, which you can expand to 6 GB. Our runner-up, the QNAP TS-251B uses the same Celeron processor and 2 GB of RAM, but the DS218+’s CPU is faster than the processor in nearly every other NAS currently available in this price range, and you’ll notice that speed difference when copying lots of files or performing multiple backups simultaneously. The Linux-based DiskStation Manager (DSM) software isn’t complicated; if you’ve used a Windows or Mac computer, you’ll be able to find your way around DSM and figure out how it works pretty quickly.

* indicates testing in 2018; other testing performed in 2017. Higher numbers indicate better performance.

The DS218+ had the best performance of the six NAS units we tested in 2017 and 2018, with unencrypted write speeds between 97 MB/s and 109 MB/s. (You won’t see much higher speeds from another NAS unless you’re using 10 Gigabit Ethernet or link aggregation, because these speeds are right at the limit of Gigabit Ethernet when you take encoding into account.)

The QNAP TS-251B uses the same Celeron CPU, and its performance was similar to the DS218+ during side-by-side tests, though the DS218+ was just a bit faster than the TS-251B when dealing with lots of small files. Both handily beat the TS-231P2, the WD My Cloud Home Duo, and the Apollo Cloud 2 Duo in small-file write speeds. The playing field was much more level when we tested using our folder containing two large files: The DS218+ was in a dead heat with the TS-251B in our large-file write tests, and the differences between most models we tested, aside from the Apollo Cloud 2, Duo were minimal.

Once you remove the front panel from the DS218+, you can easily pop out and replace the drives. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

Aside from the beefier processor in this model, the DS218+ (as well as all other current Synology NAS devices) uses a different default file system than others, called Btrfs (most other NAS models, including offerings from QNAP, use the ext4 file system). The file system shouldn’t have a huge effect on the file-transfer speeds, but it does introduce some features to Synology NAS units that other models don’t have, such as snapshots, which can protect folders from accidental deletion by making copies of shared folders periodically. Btrfs also features near-instant server-side copying, data integrity checks, and metadata mirroring, which supposedly helps with data recovery in the case of hard-drive damage. Most NAS owners won’t notice the differences between the two. If you do prefer ext4 for any reason, you can set up the DS218+ to use that file system instead of Btrfs when you create a volume.

The interface in DiskStation Manager offers an overlay for system health as well as easy access to all the settings you need.

The DS218+ doesn’t support volume encryption to securely lock your entire drive, unlike the QNAP TS-251B, but you can encrypt individual shared folders. Even with the DS218+’s hardware encryption acceleration, you’ll still see a ding to read-and-write performance with encryption turned on. In our tests, file transfer in encrypted folders was around 60 percent of the speed of transfer in non-encrypted folders. That hardware encryption acceleration also didn’t help with SMB in-flight encryption at all, which slowed the file-transfer process to around 50 percent of the speed of unencrypted transfers. In-flight encryption protects your files during the transfer process, so it’s not something you need to worry about if you’re on your home network the whole time.

You get quick access to every package you install with DSM’s drop-down menu.

The DS218+’s interface, DiskStation Manager, is one of the most user-friendly operating systems on any NAS device. DSM has a toolbar on the top where you can access the main menu, notifications, and login options, search for files, and check on system health. Below that toolbar, you have a desktop where you can access Package Center (a store of sorts filled with add-on software), the file browser, the control panel (which includes all your settings), and a support area offering video tutorials, FAQs, and more. Synology has a demo version of the operating system available online; it’s worth checking out before you make your purchase.

You can quickly find and install new applications in Package Center.

Like most of the NAS operating systems we tested, the DSM interface includes a pop-out dashboard widget that gives an overview of the NAS’s drive health, as well as its processor and memory usage. You can customize the dashboard to include storage, connected users, and more. DSM also includes handy features for novices. For example, if you click on the File Services tab in the DSM control panel, it displays the key command you’ll need to access the file share on your PC (“DS218plus”) or Mac (“smb://DS218plus”). While these commands may be familiar to veteran systems administrators, new users or anyone who has forgotten the server name will welcome the embedded tip.

DSM has an optional cloud service called Cloud Station Server that allows you to access your files remotely. If you don’t want to connect to any cloud service, you can still access your NAS remotely through a virtual private network (VPN) hosted on the NAS itself or Dynamic DNS with port forwarding, but for most people Cloud Station Server is much simpler. DSM also includes Cloud Station ShareSync, which allows you to use your NAS to sync files across devices, similar to a service like Dropbox.

There’s also the confusingly named Cloud Sync package, which allows you to sync or back up specific folders or your entire NAS to various cloud platforms, such as Backblaze, Google Drive, Amazon, and Dropbox, which makes creating redundant off-site backups very easy. You can set those backups to happen on a schedule and optionally encrypt them before you upload them to another service.

DSM packs in numerous security measures. In the main menu you’ll find a security adviser that alerts you to malware, improper network configurations, out-of-date applications, weak passwords, and any systemwide configuration issues, though you will have to log in to the DSM interface regularly to see its advice. It supports HTTPS for remote access, TLS or SSL secure connections, and two-factor authentication.

For better or worse, instead of having one big app with tons of features, Synology takes a piecemeal approach to its mobile apps. DS Audio, DS File, DS Photo, DS Cloud, and DS Video are for accessing media. DS Finder is for monitoring the stats on your NAS, DS Get is for managing downloads, and DS Cam is for managing IP cameras. There’s also VPNPlus if you’re using the VPN server functions, DS Note if you use Synology’s notes app, and MailPlus if you use your NAS as an email server. All of Synology’s apps are available for Android and iOS, and they’re on a par with those of Synology’s biggest competitor, QNAP. Both companies’ mobile apps are best in class among NAS devices—no other NAS provider comes close.

Like most NAS boxes, the DS218+ supports multimedia streaming through Synology’s own apps, DLNA/UPnP, and iTunes. In our tests, the DS218+ didn’t take long to scan a music and video library and make the files available across a Wi-Fi network on various computers, TVs, game consoles, and phones.

The DS218+ has a Gigabit Ethernet port alongside two USB 3.0 ports in the back. It also includes an eSATA port if you ever want to add more drives. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

The DS218+ supports on-the-fly hardware transcoding, supposedly all the way to 4K video. It does this using its own Video Station and DS File apps. If you prefer to use Plex, you will not have access to the hardware transcoding features, since Plex’s transcoding is CPU-bound and NAS devices in this price range just don’t have the horsepower to do that. With Synology’s apps, we were able to play several 1080p MKV files on various devices over 802.11ac Wi-Fi without issue, but when we tried the same with three different 4K movie trailers, they were all unwatchable due to stuttering. We also had issues with any 4K video using the DTS audio codec, in which no sound would play. Some formats, such as M4V, wouldn’t play at all. Files that didn’t require any transcoding, like MP4 files, played flawlessly on all devices. On-the-fly transcoding is dependent on the file format, the various codecs, and the device you’re watching the transcoding file on, so your mileage will vary here.

Still, even though Synology advertises the DS218+ as being capable of all kinds of transcoding, you’ll want to use a more powerful computer than the DS218+ (or any other NAS in this price range) if you’re serious about on-the-fly media transcoding. We recommend transcoding your video files ahead of time if you plan on using your NAS as a media server. You can do this with the Offline Transcoding feature in Video Station, though unfortunately you need to manually choose individual videos to convert. If you’re looking for an automated option, QNAP’s software allows you to set up a specific folder that the NAS monitors; the NAS then transcodes any files you drop in.

In our tests, the DS218+’s data-protection features worked as advertised. With the DS218+ running, we pulled the drive out of the second bay and the NAS beeped at us until we acknowledged a drive-failure notification. We also received an email notification at the address we’d set up previously. Logging in to DSM, we found another notification as well as instructions for how to rebuild the drive array in the Storage Manager once we replaced it.

The front of the DS218+ features a removable plate that hides away the drive bays, as well as LED indicators for general status, network connectivity, and the status of each drive. You can adjust the LED brightness or set it up on a schedule so the lights dim at night. The DS218+ has three USB 3.0 ports. It also has an eSATA port so you can expand the NAS with external drives using one of Synology’s compatible expansion units. Like every NAS we considered for this guide, the DS218+ has two drive bays. Unlike other options, the drive bays are tool-less, so you don’t need a screwdriver to install a drive.

A USB Copy button sits on the front of the DS218+, but before you can use it you need to tell the NAS what the button should do when you press it. For example, you can set it up so that when you connect a thumb drive you’ve stored photos on, pressing the button will copy the entire contents of that drive over to a specific folder. Or you can set it to export, say, only video files from a specific folder. It takes a little effort to get the button working how you want, but Synology’s guide should help you configure the feature. While QNAP models often have a front USB port, most other NAS boxes do not, so it’s nice to see on this Synology unit.

When it came to power consumption, the DS218+ consumed between 19 and 23 watts during file copy, slightly better than the QNAP TS-251A and TS-231P2.1 This Synology NAS used about 6 watts while in power-saving mode, compared with the QNAP models’ 10 watts. Power-saving features won’t work if you enable any media server functions, because the NAS needs to be available all the time; you have to disable media servers and a handful of other similar services, such as cloud access and the mail server, if you want the power-saving mode to work. You can also turn the DS218+ on and off according to a schedule, and it supports Wake-on-LAN and multiple fan-speed modes, the latter of which can help reduce the overall noise of the DS218+. No NAS is completely quiet, but to our ears the DS218+ was less noticeable than the QNAP TS-251A or TS-231P2.

You can add wireless capabilities to the DS218+ with a Wi-Fi dongle. This unit also supports more than 5,000 different IP cameras and has special configuration settings for uninterruptible power supplies. The DS218+ comes with a two-year warranty, and Synology offers various support options, including tutorials, email support, and browser-based text chat.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Synology’s DSM software is easier to use than other NAS software, but it’s still not as intuitive as an operating system like Windows or macOS; even if you’re technically inclined, it will take a couple of hours to fully understand how to do anything beyond basic backups. And like most NAS makers, Synology’s customer support can be slow. We’ve see a couple of complaints in Amazon reviews that Synology doesn’t offer truly live chat and is slow to respond to support tickets. If you have problems, you’ll usually need to comb through forum posts to answer your own questions instead of contacting support.

If you plan to use the DS218+ to store video footage from an IP camera, you have to license each camera on your home surveillance system. You get two of those licenses for free, but beyond that you have to pay $50 per camera. QNAP, along with most other NAS makers, has the same licensing system.

Runner-up: QNAP TS-251B

Photo: Sarah Kobos

If the Synology DS218+ is out of stock or if its price jumps significantly higher, the QNAP TS-251B is an excellent alternative. It also includes an HDMI-out port, which is handy for monitoring surveillance systems or if you want to view media directly from your NAS connected to a TV.

Like the DS218+, the TS-251B uses an Intel Celeron J3355 processor and 2 GB of RAM, which is significantly faster than the older Celeron and ARM-based processors in the other NAS devices we’ve looked at. While the DS218+ is a bit faster when transferring lots of smaller files, like during our music folder transfer tests, they are so close in performance that you’d likely not notice the difference unless you were monitoring both with a stopwatch. Like the DS218+, we recorded speeds of 109 MB/s for large multi-gigabyte files, and around 90–101 MB/s transfer rates for folders filled with thousands of music files. Unlike our main pick, the TS-251B can encrypt whole volumes, not just folders. Both the DS218+ and TS-251B are fast for home file storage and background tasks like backing up your family’s laptops, downloading torrents, and automatically transcoding videos from a queue.

Popping out and replacing drives is as easy as it is in the DS218+. Photo: Sarah Kobos

The TS-251B is easy to upgrade, thanks to its PCIe-card expansion slot. QNAP offers SSD caching, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and USB 3.1 Gen 2 expansion cards. We don’t think most home users will need these features or even need to know why you’d want them, but they’re nice additions for those who do.

QNAP’s excellent user interface, called QTS, is similar to Synology’s DSM and offers the same features, including media streaming capabilities, a file manager, photo and video apps, video-surveillance functions, backup options, and the App Center, from which you can install many more apps such as Plex Media Server. Design-wise, QTS takes at least some of its inspiration from iOS, loading up all your add-on packages as icons on a desktop. As with DSM, it’s a good idea to check out the live demo of QTS before you buy so you can see how it works.

Unlike the Synology DS218+, the TS-251B includes an HDMI port for video output. Photo: Sarah Kobos

Like the DS218+, the two-bay TS-251B uses RAID 1 to mirror data across disks, and in our tests it adequately reported drive failure by beeping several times and sending a notification to the email address we’d set up ahead of time. When we pulled out a drive and inserted a fresh one to simulate replacing a failed drive, it rebuilt its array without trouble.

QNAP provides a two-year warranty and excellent support both over the phone and via an online forum, plus a knowledge base and tutorials.

Upgrade pick: Synology DiskStation DS418play

Photo: Synology

A two-bay NAS is the best option for most people who want to use theirs for home backup, but if you need more capacity or data protection, get the Synology DiskStation DS418play. This model has the same CPU and memory specs as the DS218+, but with two more drive bays. The DS418play has one fewer USB 3.0 port on the back but offers dual Gigabit Ethernet for link aggregation; this feature doubles the network bandwidth available to your NAS, though not many home routers support that function.

A NAS with four or more bays gives you more storage options than a two-bay NAS does. For starters, you can opt for RAID 5, 6, or 10; those data storage configurations require three or more disks but provide better data protection and (depending on which RAID configuration you choose) can offer better performance. A four-bay NAS also lets you expand your storage capacity more easily since you can start with two drives and add more as needed, whereas the only way to expand the storage space on a two-bay NAS is to replace first one drive and then the other with higher-capacity drives.

Four-drive NAS devices are typically more suited to professional settings—and if you want to use one, having a good understanding of RAID storage management will help. But if you have the extra dollars, want additional data redundancy and space, and don’t mind learning more about RAID, the DS418play is a good bet.

NAS care and maintenance

Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

When you first set up a NAS, it prompts you to log in to its interface via a browser, typically with the “admin” account and no password. Very few NAS devices prompt you to change or reset the admin password—doing so, however, is a crucial security step, because the NAS connects to the Internet and is thus a ripe target for threats. So the first thing to do with any new NAS is to change the password on the admin account (both Synology and QNAP prompt you to do this during the initial setup).

Creating a unique user account for each person who accesses your NAS is a good idea. You can do so on any of the NAS devices we tested by going into the user settings in the interface. Be sure to give each user the appropriate permissions—you don’t want everyone to have god-level admin access to your NAS! If you want to give someone the ability to upload files to the NAS, give that user write permissions as well as read permissions. If someone should only download files, make them a read-only user.

Maintaining a NAS doesn’t take much effort, but you should keep a few things in mind. Because a NAS is almost always on, place it in a location that doesn’t get too hot, and ensure that it gets sufficient airflow—confirm that the back panel has a few inches of clearance so as not to obstruct the exhaust fan. When something goes wrong with a NAS, the culprit is usually drive failure, and according to this infographic from Seagate, temperature extremes are one of the top five causes of hard-drive failure.

Data corruption is another big issue with hard drives. Because most NAS devices ship diskless, you’ll have to provide and install your own drives. Be sure to check the compatibility list of hard drives on the NAS vendor’s website so that you install supported drives. Otherwise, if something goes wrong with the NAS, you may have problems getting customer support—or worse, you may discover that you voided the warranty.

The same rule applies to memory: If you buy a NAS that allows you to add RAM, check with the vendor to make sure that you purchase supported memory.

Every NAS device in this guide supports WD Red hard drives, which are specifically built for NAS use. WD engineers designed these drives to tolerate heat and vibration better than typical hard drives (though not as much as enterprise-server drives), so these drives are ideal for multidrive NAS setups. They’ve received accolades from both professional reviewers and NAS owners because they provide good performance and large storage capacity at a decent price. TechRadar explains, “The WD Red 6TB performs excellently, offers a gargantuan amount of storage and is a more affordable proposition than enterprise 6TB hard disks.” Seagate, another favored hard-drive manufacturer for NAS, has its own line of drives specifically for this purpose.

What to look forward to

Other NAS makers have been playing catch-up to QNAP and Synology on the operating system front, and while those other competitors are still nowhere near the usability of either in that regard—and most still have terrible customer support—they’re at least getting closer with their operating systems. If you’re curious, nearly every NAS maker, including Asustor, Thecus, and Zyxel, offers a live Web-based demo of its operating system that’s worth checking out.

The competition

As we mentioned above, both Synology and QNAP sell many, many NAS devices, all of which run the same software but vary in processor type and speed, RAM, number of drive bays, and features. Our picks offer the best combination of performance, features, and price for most home users, and Synology’s and QNAP’s respective software offerings are more powerful and polished than those of other NAS makers. Our testing over the years has reinforced this conclusion, as has AnandTech’s two-part dive into NAS operating systems and features.

Since 2015, we’ve tested a lot of NAS devices, including many that are now discontinued, such as the QNAP TS-251A, QNAP TS-251, Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay Home Media Storage Device, Synology BeyondCloud Mirror, Synology DiskStation DS214, Synology DiskStation DS216play, Synology DiskStation DS216+II, Asustor AS-5002T, and WD My Cloud EX2. Some are still available but use older CPUs, are priced too high, or fail to meet our memory requirements, such as the Asustor AS-202TE and Synology DiskStation DS216.

The WD My Cloud Home Duo is WD’s take on a beginner NAS, but the simplified design of the operating system introduces more problems than it solves. The My Cloud Home Duo needs to be connected to the Internet if you want to use all its features, even within your home network. You’re also required to use the WD Discovery software to mount a user directory on the My Cloud Home Duo, and it needs an Internet connection to do so, for some reason. You can mount the Public folder directly to skip over WD’s software, but in that case you lose access to any files stored in the user directory, which for most people is everything. And in our tests, reading and writing to a user folder was far slower than using the Public one: When we mounted the Public folder on the My Cloud Home Duo, we saw write speeds at a little less than 80 MB/s, but when we ran the same write tests on the user folder—the method most people will use—the speeds dropped to 15.62 MB/s. WD’s support page doesn’t offer any explanations or solutions.

We also tested the QNAP TS-231P2, which is part of QNAP’s budget line. The TS-231P2 lagged the TS-251B on our read-and-write tests, and includes hot-swappable drives and hardware encryption. The TS-231P2 is a solid NAS, and if it drops in price, if you have no need for an HDMI port, or if you hate even just the possibility of a karaoke party breaking out anywhere near you, it’s worth a look.

We also looked at the Apollo Cloud 2 Duo. Like the WD My Cloud Home Duo, the Apollo Cloud 2 Duo is a simplified NAS and comes packed with hard drives already installed. Unfortunately, it lacks basic features and third-party app support, including stuff like Plex, which even the WD model has. Its read and write tests were also extremely slow compared with the results from other NAS boxes we tested. When we reached out to Apollo for clarification on these results, representatives replied that the Cloud 2 Duo uses in-flight encryption by default and the user cannot disable it. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially since the WD My Cloud Home Duo doesn’t support encryption of any kind, it is unfortunate that you can’t adjust those settings in exchange for a speed boost when you’re in a secure environment.

Samara Lynn contributed to a previous version of this article.

This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter. To see the current recommendation, please go here.

When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commissions.