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Nearly each NAS or exterior arduous drive assessment today will let you know having your personal storage field at house is a assured means to economize as you can kiss your cloud storage subscriptions goodbye. I’ve written related evaluations myself, however I am doing my greatest to again that up with receipts this time.
The factor is, it is getting more durable to say {that a} NAS (or a big exterior arduous drive, for that matter) is smart. For many who do want massive storage, the Synology DS225+ is usually a nice thought, but it surely’s arduous to advocate.
Why is it arduous to advocate a NAS?
Backside line: spiraling storage prices. And AI is responsible. Particularly: AI knowledge facilities buying all of the elements for themselves.
Lots has been written about how RAM costs have gone by means of the roof due to overwhelming demand from knowledge facilities that may make use of a thousand laptops’ value of RAM in a single rack. This, in flip, has pushed up the value of every little thing that depends on RAM, from smartphones and computer systems to the common-or-garden Raspberry Pi.
But it surely’s not simply RAM that is in loopy demand, the identical is true for arduous drives. AI corporations are shopping for them up at an unprecedented charge. Earlier this 12 months, arduous drive maker Western Digital reported that it had “just about offered out” of arduous drives, with 89% of its income coming from cloud/hyperscaler prospects (learn: knowledge facilities) with the patron market accounting for under 5%.
It is a related story from different arduous drive producers. As with RAM, this demand from AI knowledge facilities is pushing up the price of drives. Within the 4 months as much as January 2026, costs have been up a mean of 46% as reported by Tom’s {Hardware} editor Stephen Warwick. He famous on the time {that a} 4TB Seagate IronWolf and 24TB Seagate BarraCuda price $99 and $499, respectively. Now, they’d be nearer to $220 and $750 — for those who may even discover them.
On the time of writing, the most affordable 4TB NAS drive I discovered from a good outlet was the Western Digital Purple Plus, at $195. The candy spot by way of value per terabyte is the 8TB Seagate BarraCuda, which you’ll choose up for $280.
Which means that even the smallest dual-drive NAS kitted out with two 4TB drives and utilizing RAID 1 mirroring (which implies that the 2 drives offer you 4TB of usable house), will set you again not less than $400. Begin placing a critical variety of drives right into a field — particularly NAS-grade CMR (Typical Magnetic Recording) drives — and the mathematics will get ugly quick.
Notice: There are two several types of drives that you will come throughout in your seek for appropriate drives — CMR and SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). With out stepping into the nitty-gritty technical variations, SMR drives will likely be cheaper, however you all the time wish to go for CMR drives for NAS items; in any other case, you may run into issues. Do not consider me? Again in 2020, Western Digital obtained caught up in a scandal when it shipped SMR drives inside WD Purple drives for NAS use. This resulted in a number of class-action fits and settlements that included the courtroom demanding that the corporate make its labeling clear.
Evaluate these stratospheric value will increase with cloud storage costs. Each iCloud and Dropbox offers you 2TB for $9.99 a month, and that is cloud storage accessible 24/7 from anyplace you have got a connection. You are paying for it to be managed by another person so there’s primarily no studying curve, and the scope for user-initiated data-loss is minimal.
However there’s one other big benefit to cloud storage: knowledge resilience. Even with the absolute best NAS, you are one fireplace, flood, or theft away from dropping your knowledge. There’s an outdated navy adage that is equally relevant for backup: “two is one, and one is none.”
What this implies is that for those who solely have one copy of one thing, you have got a single level of failure ready to chew you. For a correct, dependable backup, it is advisable comply with the 3-2-1 precept — three copies, two media varieties, and one which’s offsite. Since offsite invariably means cloud, most individuals with a NAS will nonetheless want cloud storage.
Who wants a NAS? It is difficult
So, outdoors of the deep pockets of AI knowledge middle moguls, who’re NAS containers economically viable for? My take has modified over the previous 12 months. When you’d requested me again in early 2025, I might have mentioned {that a} NAS was for everybody, particularly these with an information hoarding behavior who did not wish to be nickel and dimed each month.
These days, my reply is extra difficult. I might say you want a particular motive — scale, pace, privateness/management, or sunk-cost {hardware} — and {that a} NAS is unquestionably not for people who find themselves chasing a subscription-cancellation fantasy.
So, perhaps you are somebody with a LOT of information. You may have critically hefty picture and video libraries, massive house media collections, or you have got a number of units that every one want backing up in a single place. I am speaking knowledge properly in extra of the 2TB you’d get for $9.99 a month. Even with the at present vastly inflated costs being requested for arduous drives, for those who issue the {hardware} prices over a number of years, a NAS remains to be the higher choice.
Then there are those that want entry to their knowledge or don’t need it anyplace close to a 3rd celebration — assume video editors working with plenty of footage, or anybody in a privacy-sensitive line of labor. Even for these folks for whom a NAS remains to be proper, it is nearly all the time a “NAS-plus-cloud” answer, not a “NAS-instead-of-cloud.”
And it isn’t simply pricing that is placing me off from recommending NAS containers; the distributors themselves are making it troublesome. For instance, final 12 months, Synology tried to lock prospects into utilizing Synology-validated arduous drives. This user-hostile coverage was reversed, however solely after a backlash, and it stays in place for M.2 drives in NAS containers which have the suitable slot.
Synology additionally eliminated each H.264 and H.265 {hardware} transcoding used for media streaming on {hardware} bodily able to supporting the function, shifting the workload to consumer units and saving costly licensing charges for codecs. A lot for “you obtain it, you personal it.” Not less than cloud service suppliers can solely elevate costs on you.
So with all this in thoughts, and assuming that you’re somebody who wants a NAS, what unit do I counsel? Effectively, the Synology DS225+.
Wait, what? Synology?
Sure. Regardless of the nonsense with drive lock-in and eradicating the transcoding function (I am not strolling again on any of that), Synology makes nice NAS items. The DiskStation Supervisor software program is, no doubt, the perfect NAS software program I’ve come throughout. It turns the NAS field from a Linux server that wants a variety of handholding into a flexible, easy-to-use equipment that you could management regionally or remotely, regardless of whether or not you are sitting at a pc, smartphone, or pill.
The newest DiskStation Supervisor 7.4 has a built-in AI assistant that can assist you diagnose and troubleshoot points rapidly and simply. Plus, Synology has an extended software program and safety patch lifecycle that’s normally 5 years or extra — means longer than these of finances opponents, and lengthy sufficient for the cost-of-ownership math to look good. It additionally has an lively safety bug bounty program, which is precisely what I wish to see on an internet-facing machine housing my knowledge.
I am additionally an enormous fan of Synology’s SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) disk administration system as a result of not solely has it proved to be sturdy, but it surely additionally permits you to combine and match drive sizes and develop a quantity by swapping drives separately fairly than requiring that you just begin with a matched set from day one.
Why the DS225+?
First, a 2-bay NAS is the candy spot by way of knowledge storage. Sure, 4-bay items and people with extra bays are very good and offer you an infinite stage of information resilience, however the prices are excessive, they usually encourage rampant knowledge hoarding. If two 24TB drives (the most important that the DS225+ helps) in a RAID 1 setup aren’t sufficient, you in all probability must take a detailed have a look at why you want a lot knowledge.
The DS225+ can be a sensible choice due to its 2.5GbE port, able to supporting the unit’s 280 MB/s learn and 210 MB/s write speeds. This Ethernet port is a large improve over the DS224+’s 1GbE port, which restricted its switch speeds to about 110 MB/s. For this alone, I used to be more than pleased to abdomen the $360 to improve from older DS220+ and DS224+ 2-bay Synology items.
It is so simple as shifting the drives from one unit to the opposite. And don’t fret about becoming drives right into a DS225+. When you’re utilizing 3.5-inch drives, the method is completely tool-free, and all you want for two.5-inch drives is a screwdriver. It is about so simple as drive becoming will get and is in line with how Synology’s Plus-series trays have labored for years.
You do must reside with a number of compromises, nonetheless. First: the Intel Celeron J4125 processor dates again to 2019 and positively is not the quickest round for this type of software. The unit ships with solely 2GB of RAM, although this may be upgraded to 6GB — however keep in mind what I mentioned about the price of RAM today. And whereas the two.5GbE community port is nice sufficient for most individuals, particularly on a 2-bay NAS, there is not any means so as to add a sooner Ethernet port.
That mentioned, I can not say that I actually care concerning the {hardware} spec. It does what I would like it to do, and for the value it is greater than acceptable. I’ve examined two DS225+ items over the previous few weeks, and I have been nothing however impressed by them. Do not get me flawed, I nonetheless vividly keep in mind the drive-lock debacle of 2025 and the way transcoding was canned, however regardless of that, it is a tremendous NAS field.
ZDNET’s shopping for recommendation
Whereas the bottom Synology DS225+ is $360, count on the whole NAS to be much more when you begin including arduous drives into the combination. By the point you’ve got thrown in a few 4TB Western Digital Purple Plus NAS drives (which, sure, are CMR drives) for simply shy of $200 every, the setup is already $760, but it surely’s a bundle that ought to offer you fairly a number of years of use.
