NAS was developed to
address problems with direct attached storage, which
included the effort required to administer and
maintain "server farms", and the lack of
scalability, reliability, availability, and
performance. They can deliver significant ease of
use, provide heterogeneous data sharing and enable
organizations to automate and simplify their data
management.
In addition, the price of NAS appliances has plummeted in recent years, offering flexible network based storage to the home consumer for little more than the cost of a regular USB or Firewire external hard disk.