Best NAS drives: Which network storage appliance is right for you?

Network-attached storage (NAS) appliances are the ideal solution for growing businesses facing a storage crisis. They offer a cost-effective, high-capacity storage solution that provides your teams with fast local access to data and can easily grow with you as demand increases.

Cloud storage is a natural contender for these duties, but once you take into account their regular monthly fees, these services can become very expensive over the long term – especially if you’re using them to store increasingly large amounts of data. It’s true that NAS appliances represent a much higher initial spend, but on-going costs will be comparatively insignificant.

They are also more versatile than cloud storage as they provide a ready-made repository for on-site server and workstation backup and won’t be impacted by internet and service outages. You don’t have to worry about a cloud provider’s ‘shared responsibility model’ either, as moving storage in-house means you have total control over all aspects of security and data governance.

There is a huge range of NAS appliances on today’s market with capacities to match every demand and prices to suit all budgets. We’ve lab-tested and reviewed plenty of them over the past 12 months, and in this guide, we reveal our favorite models.

Best NAS drives 2025

Best known for its classy PC accessories and power chargers, Ugreen is also making a name for itself in the NAS market with a family of six desktop appliances. The 6-bay NASync DXP6800 Pro is incredibly well built, but what lies beneath its sleek aluminium shell is even more interesting as it’s powered by a 10-core Intel Core i5-1235U mobile CPU and comes with 8GB of DDR5 memory upgradeable to 64GB. 

Port choices are equally impressive as it sports pairs of 10GbE multi-Gigabit, 40GbE Thunderbolt 4 (TB4), USB-A 3.2, and USB-A 2, an integral SC4 card reader, and an HDMI 2 port to pipe video from the CPU’s integrated Iris Xe Graphics chip. There are no restrictions on storage, so you can use any hard disk or SSD you want, and it also has dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots underneath for use as a storage pool or cache.

NAS performance over 10GbE is quite respectable, with a share mapped to a Dell Windows server returning sequential read and write rates of 8.9Gbits/sec and 6.8Gbits/sec. Ugreen’s UGOS software has also benefitted from a steady development program as it now offers 31 apps, including a hypervisor, IP SANs, and a snapshot manager.

The NASync DXP6800 Pro is a powerful business NAS solution, and although the UGOS software can’t match the likes of Synology and Qnap for app choices, Ugreen is steadily catching up. Businesses that want a superbly built NAS with dual 10GbE and TB4 ports simply won’t find a more affordable solution elsewhere.

Price: Diskless, £742 excluding VAT

Read our full Ugreen NASync DXP6800 Pro review for more information.

NAS appliances are perfect candidates as backup vaults, and none do it better than Synology’s ActiveProtect DP7400. Targeting mid-sized businesses and enterprises, this PBBA (purpose-built backup appliance) delivers unified data protection and recovery services with support for Windows and Mac endpoints, Windows and Linux servers, databases, file servers, VMware and Hyper-V hosts, and all Microsoft 365 (MS365) services.

Deployment takes just 15 minutes, and you use its smart web console to create protection plans. Ransomware protection is excellent as all plan creation tasks offer the choice of standard or immutable local storage, where the latter stops any backup versions from being deleted until the retention period you’ve set has expired. 

Backups can be replicated to cloud storage such as Synology C2 and Amazon S3 accounts, and it will only accept immutable buckets with Object Lock enabled. Data restoration features are abundant as you choose a workload, load the recovery portal, view its files, folders, volumes, or MS365 items, pick a recovery point, and decide where to send them.

Synology’s desktop ActiveProtect DP320 and DP340 appliances provide backup services for remote locations and are managed from the DP7400, although they are comparatively expensive. Not so with the DP7400, as the one-off purchase price includes around 122TB of usable backup storage along with unlimited client support, and Synology’s smart APM (ActiveProtect Manager) OS makes it a breeze to create a fully-managed 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy.

Price: Approx. £35,000 excluding VAT

Read our full Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review for more information.

Qsan’s XCubeNXT XN8126D takes data availability to the next level. This hybrid storage array employs dual controllers running in active/active mode and teams up fault-tolerant FC and IP SANs with NAS share clustering services for all-around redundancy.

The chassis crams 26 SAS3 SFF hot-swap drive bays in 2U of rack height, and the controller’s SAS3 ports support all of Qsan’s XCubeDAS expansion shelves and a total of 546 drives, allowing capacity to be pushed to an incredible 16.7PB. There’s no vendor lock-in, so you can choose any storage device you want, and the XN8126D also supports Western Digital’s supermassive UltraStar Data60 and Data120 JBODs.

Storage is easily configured from the QSM 4 web console, as we used the wizard to choose drives, create storage pools, and decide on thick or thin provisioning, pool encryption, and auto tiering. When creating volumes, you choose the block option for FC and IP SAN presentation or file volumes for NAS shares, and snapshot protection can be applied to each volume and scheduled for as often as every five minutes.

NAS cluster creation is a simple process, and we found that failover worked well. The web console showed Controller 1 was providing the primary link, so we rebooted it while running a continuous Ping on the cluster IP address. We saw Ping timeouts while Controller 2 took over, and in only 18 seconds, our NAS share was back in action.

Starting at around £11K for a diskless unit, the XCubeNXT XN8126D is very competitively priced. It offers a truly enormous expansion potential, and its active/active architecture delivers five 9s reliability, making it a great choice for mixed workloads.

Price: £11,000 excluding VAT (MSRP, diskless)

Read our full Qsan XCubeNXT XN8126D review for more information.

Qnap’s TS-h1277AFX will appeal to teams running demanding workloads such as real-time 4K/8K video editing. This sleekly designed all-Flash desktop NAS appliance supports up to twelve SATA SSDs, is powered by an 8-core 3.8GHz AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU, and its base 32GB of fast DDR5 memory can be upgraded to a massive 192GB. 

Network features look good as it sports dual 2.5GbE and 10GbE ports, while the three PCIe Gen4 slots can be used to add Qnap’s dual-port 10GbE, 25GbE, or 100GbE cards. The appliance is also compatible with a wide range of GPGPU cards, with two power cables already provided for them.

For testing, we installed eight 1TB Western Digital Red SA500 SATA SSDs and created a single RAID5 array. Performance over 10GbE is outstanding as a NAS share mapped to a Dell PowerEdge R760xs Windows Server 2022 host returned Iometer sequential read and write rates of 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.3Gbits/sec, and the same results for random operations.

IP SAN speeds over 10GbE were equally impressive, with a 1TB iSCSI target returning Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.3Gbits/sec, and also the same rates for random operations. Moving up to a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the iSCSI target delivered sequential read and writes of 18Gbits/sec and 18.3Gbits/sec, while random operations recorded 18Gbits/sec and 17.8Gbits/sec

The TS-h1277AFX is a solid choice for content creators and video editors who need fast access to data. Support for low-cost SATA SSDs makes it more affordable than appliances that require expensive PCIe NVMe SSDs, and Qnap’s QuTS hero software delivers a wealth of business features, including great data protection services.

Price: Diskless, £3,083 excluding VAT

Read our full Qnap TS-h1277AFX review for more information.

Targeting enthusiast home and small business users alike, Asustor's Nimbustor 4 Gen2 AS5404T is a four-bay NAS enclosure equipped with a potent quad-core 2GHz Intel Celeron N5105 CPU and 4GB of DDR4 upgradeable to 16GB. An unusual, and possibly unique feature, is that the AS5404T teams up its four main SATA drive bays with four M.2 NVMe SSD slots – twice as many as most competitors – opening up more possibilities, such as using two SSDs as a read/write cache and two more to provide a high-performance mirrored storage pool.

The ADM (Asustor Data Master) operating system isn’t quite as slick as Synology’s DSM, but it's still a relatively straightforward OS, in which you'll easily find the bulk of features you might want for a small office. ADM excels when it comes to apps, with 339 currently available in App Central – more than twice as many as either Synology’s Package Center or Qnap's App Center offers on similarly priced devices. 

The appliance is equipped with dual 2.5GbE multi-Gigabit ports and returned excellent performance numbers in our lab tests. With four 1TB Western Digital hard disks configured in a RAID5 array, we watched the ATTO Disk Benchmark app report fast read and write operations of 281MB/sec and 256MB/sec.

For the money, this is simply an excellent NAS. It doesn't have the greatest operating system, but it offers the perfect balance of power and features, while its flexible drive support and upgradeability allow it to grow with your business. 

Price: Diskless, £413 excluding VAT

Read our full Asustor NimbusStor 4 Gen2 review for more information.