In the popup that appears, enter the address of the network drive.Open Finder, click Go, and select Connect to Server.

Cheap to buy and simple to set up, they are very popular indeed. NAS drives are useful to home users for sharing movies, music, files, or games across multiple computers within the same house, apartment block, dorm, etc. These typically aren’t used in a home setting, considering that they’re typically overkill and not very affordable. It’s a great way to have central storage that multiple people can use.Ī SAN is essentially a more complicated NAS that can have multiple drives available from within the network. Either way, the device attaches to your router via ethernet and makes its drives available to authorized users. A NAS device can be as simple as an external hard drive connected to your home router or as complicated as a dedicated NAS device with its own hardware and multiple drives. Network drives are usually made up of computers that act as servers to provide storage, generally in the form of a NAS or SAN device. NAS vs SANĪnd that’s where NAS and SAN come into play. It’s like having your own personal iCloud or Google Drive. This also means that any device connected to your network can access these files as well. This means that you can access the files stored on a network drive any time you’re connected to your network, not just when the device is plugged into your computer. However, rather than plugging directly into your computer, it plugs into your wireless router. A network drive is fundamentally the same as these drives – it has a fixed amount of storage and is used to store files.

Map mac network drive