Within the NAS category, solutions can be divided into three groups based on capabilities, performance, and capacity.
High-End / Enterprise — Enterprise level NAS are used in data centers to store massive volumes of data. These devices will likely end up serving cloud services to consumers. Because of this, they will utilize cloud technologies, like virtualization and clustering of NAS devices to ensure optimized performance.
Midmarket — Midmarket NAS separates itself from low-end NAS by capacity, typically within the mid-upper terabyte (TB) range. These devices don’t meet the needs of high-end NAS applications, namely they don’t allow the use of clustering in optimizing storage.
Low-End / Desktop — While there are home use options for NAS, many disagree that NAS is a desktop application, rather and truly, NAS drives appear in RAID configurations (which itself is a virtualization configuration, and more enterprise application than desktop). These NAS desktop options are typically in the low TB range, and are becoming obsolete as this market is adopting cloud models to replace home storage.