Grab your pick: UGREEN DXP4800 Plus — MSRP $699.99, often ~$630 · Synology DS925+ — ~$589.99 · UGREEN DXP2800 — ~$296.99–$314 · Synology DS224+ · TerraMaster F4-424 Pro — ~$699.99. All prices are street price at time of writing; NAS pricing swings hard with coupons and promos.
A home NAS solves three problems at once: it gives every machine in the house a backup target, it gets your photo library off a cloud subscription and onto hardware you own, and it feeds Plex or Jellyfin without a laptop being left awake. The hard part of buying one in 2026 isn't finding capable hardware — it's that the four-figure decision is really about software, networking, and platform policy, none of which appear on the spec sheet in a useful way.
This roundup picks five boxes across roughly $300 to $700, all sold diskless. Read the budget section at the bottom before you decide how much box you can afford, because drives usually cost as much as the NAS itself.
Loiter Point does not run a lab, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We do not own these units, we have not benchmarked them, and any number in this article that describes real-world behaviour is attributed to somebody who did the work.
What we actually do: we synthesise published independent measurements and reviews, manufacturer specifications, and verified owner reports from support forums and retail feedback, then cross-check them against each other. Where those sources disagree — and on NAS transfer speeds they frequently do, because results depend heavily on the switch, the client NIC, and the drives fitted — we say so rather than picking the flattering number. Interface ceilings (1GbE, 2.5GbE, 10GbE) are quoted as theoretical maximums, not results. Spec rows marked "est. real-world" or "reported" are exactly that: estimates and third-party reports, never our measurements.
We weight four things: the maturity of the software platform, because you live in it daily; networking headroom, because it is the most common bottleneck; transcoding capability, because it decides whether Plex works for remote users; and total cost including drives. We also weight vendor policy history, which is why the Synology section below is longer than the rest.
MSRP $699.99 · frequently around $630, seen near $657 (street price at time of writing)
This is the box we would point most people at. The hardware sheet reads like something a tier above the price: five cores with integrated graphics, DDR5, dual M.2, and a 10GbE port that competitors reserve for $900-plus models. For a household running Plex or Jellyfin with a couple of remote streams, the iGPU matters more than raw clock speed, and this has one.
The honest counterweight is software. UGREEN's UGOS Pro is newer and less mature than Synology DSM — fewer first-party apps, a shorter track record on security updates, and a smaller community when something breaks at 11pm. If you are comfortable with Docker and don't need hand-holding, that trade is worth taking for the hardware. If you want the appliance to be boring, look at #2.
Street around $589.99 · 90-day average ~$639.67 · hit $549.99 with a $90 coupon in Oct 2025 (street price at time of writing)
Buy the DS925+ for DSM. Snapshot replication, Hyper Backup to a second target, Synology Photos with face and subject recognition, and an update cadence that has been dependable for a decade — that's the product, and the hardware is a delivery mechanism for it. ECC RAM and nine-bay expansion also make this the pick if you expect the library to keep growing.
Be clear-eyed about the media limitation. The Ryzen V1500B has no integrated GPU, so Plex cannot hardware-transcode on this box. If every client in your house direct-plays your files — which is typical for smart TVs and Apple TV with well-encoded libraries — you will never notice. If you routinely stream to phones on cellular, or you have a mixed bag of formats, pick #1 or #5 instead.
List $349.99 · seen at $296.99 on Amazon US, around $314 with promo (street price at time of writing)
If you want the most competent hardware per dollar and don't need four bays, this is it. The spec list — N100, 8GB of DDR5, 2.5GbE, two NVMe slots, machined aluminium — reads like a $450 box. Android Central singled out the build quality as the best in the two-bay category, which matters more than it sounds for something that sits in a living room and runs continuously.
The limitation is structural, not a flaw: two bays in a mirror gives you one drive of usable capacity and no room to grow without replacing both disks. If your photo and media library is already past a few terabytes, buy four bays now.
Street pricing varies; check current listing (NAS prices move with coupons)
We are recommending this one on honest terms: it is the oldest and slowest box in this roundup, and it is here because DSM on cheap hardware is still a better daily experience than a fast box with immature software. If your use case is "back up two laptops overnight and get my phone photos out of iCloud," 1GbE is adequate and you will never notice the ceiling.
You will notice it the first time you dump a 200GB video project over the network. At roughly 110 MB/s theoretical — realistically less once protocol overhead is counted — that is a coffee break, not a moment. If large sequential transfers are part of your week, buy a 2.5GbE box instead, and pair it with a switch that can actually carry it; our home networking gear guide covers what to look for.
Around $699.99 on Amazon · non-Pro F4-424 line starts around $499.99 · a 32GB config was seen at $559.99 in a deal (street price at time of writing)
Pure compute, this wins and it isn't close. Eight cores and 32GB of DDR5 give you room to run Plex, Immich, a few Docker services and a light VM simultaneously without the box thinking about it. Reviewers have been consistent on the value of the hardware: Neowin's framing of it as the most powerful media-class 4-bay on the market matches XDA's read of it as a lot of NAS for the money.
The reservation is the platform. TNAS has historically been the least polished of the three software stacks in this article, and TerraMaster has had a rougher security and firmware history than Synology. That is a real risk for a box holding your only copy of the family photos — it is manageable if you keep the NAS off the open internet, patch promptly, and maintain an off-box backup, which you should be doing regardless.
In early 2025 Synology introduced a drive-compatibility policy that made third-party hard drives — Seagate IronWolf, WD Red Plus, the standard NAS drives everyone owns — effectively unusable in its 2025-generation models, including the DS925+, DS1825+ and DS425+. The unit would refuse to complete setup with an unverified drive. Not a warning banner: a hard stop.
After significant backlash, Synology reversed course in DSM 7.3, released October 2025. Third-party HDDs and 2.5" SATA SSDs are now accepted on those models without warnings or restrictions. The caveat that still applies, and that buyers keep missing: the reversal does not extend to M.2 NVMe drives. Creating an M.2 storage pool still requires drives from Synology's official compatibility list, so if you were planning to drop a pair of cheap consumer NVMe sticks into the DS925+ for caching, check the list first.
We are including this history because the fix does not make the episode irrelevant. Platform policy — what the vendor can decide about your hardware after you have bought it, via a firmware update — is part of what you are purchasing. Synology reversed this one under pressure, which is a reasonable sign. It is still worth knowing the policy existed. (Sources: Tom's Hardware, Synology Knowledge Center, NASCompares.)
Interface ceilings, as theoretical maximums rather than measured results: 1GbE tops out around 110 MB/s, 2.5GbE around 280 MB/s, and 10GbE around 1.1 GB/s. You only see those numbers if every link in the chain keeps up — the switch, the client's NIC, the cabling, and critically the drives themselves.
That last one is where 10GbE marketing gets ahead of reality. A four-drive array of spinning disks will typically saturate 2.5GbE comfortably but will not come close to filling a 10GbE pipe. Ten-gigabit mainly pays off when you add NVMe caching or run an all-SSD array. Buying a 10GbE NAS and plugging it into a 1GbE switch buys you nothing at all — check your switch and your client machine before you pay for the port. If your network is the weak link, start with our guides to Wi-Fi routers and mesh Wi-Fi systems, and remember that Wi-Fi 6E or 7 clients will still be slower to the NAS than a wired 2.5GbE link.
| Model | Bays | CPU | RAM | Networking | M.2 | Street price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UGREEN DXP4800 Plus | 4 | Pentium Gold 8505 (5-core, iGPU) | 8GB DDR5, exp. | 10GbE + 2.5GbE | 2 | MSRP $699.99; often ~$630 |
| Synology DS925+ | 4 (to 9) | Ryzen V1500B (4-core, no iGPU) | 4GB ECC, to 32GB | 2 × 2.5GbE | 2 | ~$589.99 |
| UGREEN DXP2800 | 2 | Intel N100 (4-core, iGPU) | 8GB DDR5 | 2.5GbE | 2 | ~$296.99–$314 |
| Synology DS224+ | 2 | Celeron J4125 (4-core, iGPU) | 2GB, exp. | 2 × 1GbE | — | Check listing |
| TerraMaster F4-424 Pro | 4 | Core i3-N305 (8-core, iGPU) | 32GB DDR5 | 2 × 2.5GbE | Yes | ~$699.99 |
All prices are street price at time of writing and move frequently with coupons and promotional pricing. Verify before buying.
Drives. Every box in this article ships diskless. This is the single most common budgeting mistake — filling four bays with NAS-rated drives often costs as much as the NAS itself, sometimes more, and it means the real entry price of a 4-bay build is well north of $1,000. Decide your capacity target first, then work backwards to the chassis you can afford. Buy NAS-rated drives; desktop drives in a 24/7 vibrating four-bay array are a false economy.
A UPS. Strongly recommended, not optional in our view. A NAS is a computer that is always on, always holding dirty write caches, and running a filesystem that does not enjoy sudden power loss. Every OS here supports graceful shutdown triggered by a USB-connected UPS. A basic line-interactive unit is cheap insurance against a rebuild — see our UPS and battery backup picks for sizing.
An actual backup. RAID is not a backup. RAID protects against a drive failing; it does nothing about ransomware, a bad delete, a failed controller, a fire, or a theft. Follow 3-2-1: three copies of the data, on two different media types, with one copy off-site. In practice that means the NAS plus a cloud target or a rotating portable SSD you keep somewhere else. Synology's Hyper Backup and standard tools like restic or rclone all handle this.
For most households the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus is the right buy: four bays, an iGPU that makes Plex behave, dual M.2, and 10GbE you can grow into, at a price where competitors give you 2.5GbE and a slower chip. The cost is a younger software platform.
If you would rather the appliance be boring and dependable, buy the Synology DS925+ and accept that hardware transcoding is off the table — just go in knowing the 2025 drive-policy history and the M.2 compatibility-list caveat that survived the reversal. On a tighter budget, the UGREEN DXP2800 is the value play and the Synology DS224+ is the simplest possible on-ramp if you can live with 1GbE. And if you want maximum compute and are comfortable managing a less mature platform yourself, the TerraMaster F4-424 Pro gives you eight cores and 32GB for the money.
Whichever you pick: budget for the drives, put it behind a UPS, and set up an off-box backup on day one. The hardware choice matters far less than doing those three things.