Published May 9, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT Jeff's been involved in the IT industry since before the Internet and spent more than 20 years working in technical support, system administration, network administration, and consulting roles. He holds an undergraduate degree in English, a Master's degree in English with a focus on professional writing and editing, and another Master's degree in Computing & Information Systems. After teaching university English and computer science for a few years, Jeff launched his writing career . He's written for Macworld , Tom's Hardware , groovyPost , The Mac Observer , and more before beginning here at XDA. For a long time, I treated my NAS with a very narrow kind of respect. It was the box that held files, backed up machines , and gave me somewhere safer to put things than a random external drive. That was useful, but it also made the NAS feel strangely passive. It sat there doing its job, but it rarely felt like the center of anything .…