Best NAS for home & small office

A NAS gives you one always-on place for backups, media, files and self-hosted apps — without paying a cloud subscription forever. Here's what actually matters when you choose one, then picks in three tiers.

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Bargain get-it-done · Intermediate prosumer / IT generalist · Pro daily-driver for techs

What to look for

Bay count. More bays mean more capacity and safer RAID. Two bays is the entry point; four gives you room to grow and better redundancy. Buy more bays than you think you need today.
RAID. RAID protects against a drive failure — but it is not a backup. Plan for redundancy and a separate copy of anything you can't afford to lose.
CPU & RAM. Light file storage needs little; Plex transcoding, Docker containers and many users need a stronger CPU and more RAM. Match the silicon to the workload.
Apps. Plex for media, scheduled backups for your machines, and Docker for self-hosting — check the vendor's app ecosystem supports what you want before you buy.
2.5G / 10G networking. Gigabit caps a NAS at roughly 110 MB/s. A 2.5G or 10G port (and a switch to match) is what lets fast drives or SSD caches actually stretch their legs.
Vendor: Synology vs QNAP vs UGREEN / TerraMaster. Synology has the most polished software; QNAP packs more hardware per dollar; UGREEN and TerraMaster undercut both on price. Drives are usually sold separately — budget for them.

Network-attached storage (NAS)

An always-on box for backups, media and self-hosted apps. Match the tier to your capacity needs, how many apps you'll run, and whether you need fast (multi-gig) networking.

Bargain 2-bay (Synology DS223 / UGREEN) — simple backups and file sharing for a home or one-person office. Add two drives and go. Find it →

Intermediate 4-bay (Synology DS423 / DS923+, QNAP) — room to grow, real RAID, and the CPU/RAM for Plex, Docker and several users. Find it →

Pro 4-bay+ with 10GbE / rackmount (Synology DS1522+, QNAP TS-h class) — multi-gig networking, big capacity and rackmount options for a busy office. Find it →

Remember drives are usually sold separately, and RAID is redundancy — not a backup. To actually feel 2.5G/10G speeds, your switch and cabling have to match; keep a known-good Cat6/6a patch cable on the run to your NAS.

Is your NAS actually reachable at full speed?

Backups silently slowing down, or the NAS dropping off the network? Acutis Go is free: run it on the machine that talks to your NAS and watch latency, packet loss and throughput so you know whether it's the NAS, the switch or the cable.

Download Acutis Go — free

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