My Newbie Experience Getting Into NAS

[drrich2]

My Beginner's Journey into NAS​

Hello. Over the past several months I've intermittently researched the topic of NAS (Network Attached Storage) out of general interest with an eye toward having multi-device wirelessly accessible centralized large storage without subscription fees. I'm still very new to the NAS world and stumbling along slowly as I learn this, set up that, etc. Even restricted to a home user perspective, the world of NAS is a real 'rabbit hole' to go down, with multiple factors one need understand and seeking answers leads to finding more questions. My purpose in this thread is to share what I've dug up (and maybe save somebody else the trouble), offer a rough overview of some basics, point to some online experts' educational offerings and invite others who have an interest in NAS to share their experience and advice. I'm a newbie, hoping to explain the basis to another newbie the way I wish somebody had explained it to me.

Making the Jump from your Mac to a DAS to a NAS​

It’s easiest to understand by building on the base understanding most any Mac user has. Picture yourself sitting at your desk with your Mac in front of you. That Mac has an SSD inside of it, where everything (e.g.: operating system, applications, files, photos, music) is stored. But Apple charges a LOT of money for ‘extra’ (i.e.: more than you can scrape by with) SSD storage, so many people attach an external SSD, where they put files, photos, videos, music, etc. This device connects directly to your Mac via USB-C (typically with 10-Gbps speed) or Thunderbolt 3 or 4 (40-Gbps speed) or Thunderbolt 5 (80-Gbps speed).

That approach to adding storage is called a DAS (direct-attached storage). Your Mac is the host, the external device is the client, and the device is usually only accessible by your Mac it’s attached to (though Macs can be set up to act as servers).

But what if you wanted more storage. Like, a whole lot of it (e.g.: you have ripped a bunch of DVD movies, or are a content creator working in video). SSDs are very expensive and tend to top out now at 8-terabytes in size; old school HDDs (hard disc drives) are cheaper, way bigger, far slower and often a bit noisy (especially the very large capacity ones).

Hm. What if you had an external storage device that held more than one disk; say, at least 2, maybe 4 or more? Yeah, that’s the ticket! If that’s as far as you go, there’s a name for it – JBOD (Just A Bunch Of Discs). But…that’s like having a few external SSDs hooked to your Mac and/or dock; you need to be organized and know which content is on which disc. Apple Spotlight is good for search, but what if…you could make your Mac ‘see’ all those discs as if they were one huge virtual disc? And what if those discs, transmitting data together, could better saturate whatever connection you used to give higher speed transfers to your Mac (especially for HDDs)?

That’s called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent (some say Inexpensive) Discs). The data gets spread across the discs, and they work together as one to hold and deliver your data! Awesome! But if that’s all you do, that’s called RAID 0 (zero), and if any disc in that array fails, you lose everything (unless you have an external backup). It’s the fastest RAID, but lacks redundancy (i.e.: there’s no backup function in the device itself). Bummer. You probably don’t want RAID 0.

It’d be cool if your RAID could store data so if one disc, or maybe even two, failed, you couple replace it and not lose any data at all. And there’s a RAID for that. Here are forms you’re likely to see:

RAID 0 – You can access all discs’ full capacity combined like one huge disc, fastest option, no redundancy, any disc fails kiss your data goodbye.

RAID 1 – You have 2 discs and each is a mirror image of the other. If either one fails you lose nothing. But…you only have access to half the storage capacity you paid for (e.g.: if you have 2 4-terabyte drives in your DAS RAID 1, you only have 4-terabytes accessible storage).

RAID 5 (no, I don’t know why the numbers skip around) – Requires at least 3 discs, but only one’s capacity is set aside for redundancy; if any one disc fails, you lose nothing if you replace it before one of the others fails. If more than one fails…you lose it all.

RAID 6 – Like RAID 5, but you have to have at least 4 discs and up to 2 can fail without you losing everything.

 

[drrich2]

RAID Limitations:

• 1.) Many people say RAID is not a backup. Other than RAID 0, I dispute that, but it doesn’t protect you against a major device failure that damages the array or keep separate versions of your document over time (unlike a Mac’s Time Machine backup). I say RAID is a limited backup with some weaknesses. You can back a RAID up to another RAID (expensive option!), a cloud service like BackBlaze (you made out of money?) or a high-capacity external hard drive (so what if it’s slow for backup?).
• 2.) Standard RAID treats every disc in the array as though it had the capacity of the smallest disc in the array. So, if you buy a 4-bay DAS and put in 3 1-terabyte SSDs and 1 8-terabyte SSD, it will treat that as 4 1-terabyte SSDs and only offer 4-terabytes to work with. Blech!!! Synology, Terra-Master and the paid 3rd party NAS OS option UnRaid that I know of let people combine different size discs (SSD or HDD) in a RAID array without that penalty (e.g.: Terra-Master calls it TRAID)
• 3.) RAID arrays can take a lengthy time to ‘build’ (themselves), especially if you have multiple very large HDDs.

So, a DAS (direct attached storage) device can hold multiple discs in one ‘box’ as JBOD (Just A Bunch Of Discs) or a RAID array (looks like one huge disc), accessible to your Mac that is directly attached to it via USB or Thunderbolt capable. Great! And if you only own one computer and have no need for smart phones, tablets or other computers (e.g.: a MacBook on the go) to access content on that DAS and maybe backup some content to it, and you don’t care to let other users have some space on it with their own accounts limited by restrictions you set. And if it’s got HDDs making clicking noises, etc., maybe you’d like to keep it somewhere else in the house besides your desk.

 

[drrich2]

If only there was a way to get the benefits of a DAS yet bypass the limitations, so it could be kept anywhere, accessed by multiple devices (e.g.: different computers, smart phones, tablets, etc.), share content (e.g.: files, stream videos) or offer some storage space (e.g.: for photos or backing up content) for family members and grant access to co-workers to collaborate on projects with you.

There is…a NAS (network attached storage). Not all NAS are equally endowed to operate as content servers (e.g.: I’ve heard Ubiquiti’s first NAS device was mainly about storage, not acting as a server), but many are good at it.

One fly in the ointment; NAS connect to your router, and from there most connect to your computer via ethernet or wirelessly, and data transfer speed tends to be well short of external Thunderbolt 3, 4 or 5 SSD drives. This can be driven by port (e.g.: whether the NAS, router or your computer has a 1, 2.5, 5 or 10-gigabit ethernet port), wireless network speed, the speed of your drives (e.g.: SSDs way faster than HDDs) and how the device allocates PCI-e lanes to the drive bays for your disc. Even a more expensive NAS with Thunderbolt ports may not match a Thunderbolt DAS in data transfer speed.

Speaking of which, the processer the vendor put in your NAS determined how many PCIe lanes it had to work with, and these had to be divided amongst the drive bays and some other functions. Whether an SSD, for example, has access to 1, 2 or 4 PCIe lanes has a say in bottlenecking its speed.

A NAS is not a client device; it is a computer in its own right, with a motherboard, RAM and an operating system (e.g.: perhaps a derivative of Linux). While you probably access and operate it via your Mac (e.g.: an app. or web browser interface) or a smartphone app., it’s an independent computer. For this reason, while your NAS may have a USB-C port (e.g.: 10-Gbps speed), you can’t just connect it to your Mac via USB-C cable and ‘go,’ since USB-C assumes the Mac is the host and the other device the client, and with a Mac and a NAS you have 2 hosts. Thunderbolt can navigate this hurdle, but you likely still don’t hit the transfer speeds of a similar Thunderbolt DAS.

See Why can't I connect to my NAS via USB (Dec. 2025) by NASCompares.

 

[drrich2]

Thunderbolt On NAS; Does It Matter?​

Sorta/kinda/maybe? Most computers connect to a NAS via WiFi or ethernet (typically with your Internet router in-between). But what about your NAS’ USB-C (and if it has them, Thunderbolt) ports? You can’t use USB-C as a substitute for ethernet to cable connect your NAS to your computer, but if your NAS supports using Thunderbolt this way, you might. Will this help you? Is it worth buying a more expensive NAS to get Thunderbolt ports?

It’s complicated and depends on where the bottle neck is amongst some different factors in your data transfer chain. If you have Gen. 4 NVMe SSDs, they are not the bottle neck – each one supports more than Thunderbolt 4 speeds. If you have multiple (especially higher performance) HDDs in a RAID array (so together in parallel pouring data transfer to/from your computer)…you’ll have to add it up. Even if you have an all SSD drive, you are limited by your NAS design. The CPU in your NAS has a limited number of PCIe lanes which designers allocate to a range of functions (not just the drive bays). And which Gen. PCIe lanes are used matters.

So the UGreen NASync 480T Plus has 4 SSD bays and the CPU provides around 20 PCIe lanes, of which the 1st 2 SSD slots are served by PCIe 4 x4 but the latter 2 slots by PCIe 3 x2 (NAS Compares discusses the reasoning). Theoretically, slot 1 & 2 SSDs could hit over 7.8 GB/s but slot 3 & 4 SSDs just under 2 GB/s.

UGreen’s NASync DXP480T Plus (all SSD-based) NAS has 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, and other offerings with a Thunderbolt 4 port. YouTube influencer Pizzles Tech Time March. 2025 put out HUGE UGREEN UPDATE! Thunderbolt Support Finally Here?! In a nutshell, he had a DXP 6800 Pro and UGreen issued an update that enabled direct Thunderbolt connection to your Mac or PC. He mentioned 20-gigabit/second connection and getting about 1.2-gigabits/second maximum so even if he had 3 network connections and aggregated them he still didn’t get over ‘like 1.2-gigabits/second.’ He noted 10.2 GBPS (big B) = 1,200 MBPS (I think an error; in a comment he said he misspoke and said gigabit instead of gigabyte but updated the graphic; a quick check via online calculator says 10-gigabits (little b) = 1,250-megabytes (big B).

 

[drrich2]

On UGreen’s product page on the DXP480T Plus under reviews, user (I’ll use the names they gave for themselves) reviews included Chris Conniff 12/7/25 reported moving 100-GB of data in 70-seconds (1.43 GB/s) to a MacBook Pro over Thunderbolt, and David 7/22/25 reported 7.36 GB/s transfer to MacBook Pro direct networked via TB4 (note: either there’s an error in units or more to the story; TB4 supports up to 40-Gbps (little b, bits), which is 5 GBps (big b, bytes), and real world performance is typically lower, so how did he get 7.36 GB/s?). For comparison, Other World Computing’s site claims for its 2-terabyte OWC Express 1M2 USB4 drive (equivalent to Thunderbolt 3 & 4 speeds), a DAS (not NAS) device, speeds over 3,800 MB/s (big B – bytes, not bits), and with Apple Silicone processor Macs (M1, 2, 3 or 4) real world speed 3,189 MB/s (big B), which would be 3.2 GB/s. That’s around 4 times the speed of 10-Gbps ethernet.

Practical Note: a lot of people use non-Thunderbolt 10-Gbps USB-C external SSDs (DAS, not NAS) with their Macs and are happy with the performance. Depending on what you do with your NAS, even if Thunderbolt is much faster, it may not matter much to you.

In the real world, most NAS devices connect to your main desktop computer via ethernet or WiFi. Speeds are often fine for most tasks, including working with video, and even gigabit ethernet is fast, depending your workflow; take care what speeds you can expect from a given setup. Some NAS have workaround tricks, such as letting you add a couple of SSDs for read/write cache to a mainly HDD-based NAS (e.g.: UGreen NASync DXP4800 Plus) and some NAS have Thunderbolt 4 ports (but make sure the NAS supports direct connection to your computer and check how fast they function in the real world!). Thunderbolt cables are expensive and limited to fairly short lengths (ethernet cables are much cheaper and can be far longer), and your NAS needs an ethernet connection to your router, so unless your personal computer and router are close, a Thunderbolt connection may not be practical.

 

[drrich2]

Don’t Believe The Hype!​

Before I get into NAS vendors and varied product offerings, and even what you can use it for, let’s get some inflated expectations out of the way. A NAS isn’t the same as a directly attached external storage drive (whether RAID or not), and while it offers a great deal of storage, it’s still not the same. Key example – it’s recommended you not put your Apple Photos Library on a NAS. You can do that on a regular external SSD device (DAS). But you can do Apple Time Machine backups to a NAS. Bombich’s popular Carbon Copy Cloner can backup to a NAS, but with a number of caveats. Their 2024 article I want to back up my data to network attached storage (NAS) goes into it, but to summarize some high points, backups on a NAS are not compatible with Migration Assistant and don’t support backup versioning, backup to a NAS is slow, not all data can be backed up (e.g.: some NAS use ‘archaic Windows naming conventions’ that prevent copying some files), some files take more space on a NAS and Bombich recommends using the NAS for a secondary backup.

You can back your photos up to an app. on a NAS; it just won’t be the literal Apple Photos library. A given NAS may offer a fine photos app. (perhaps with A.I. for content recognition), and you might set the NAS up with NAS app.s on your families’ iPhones, for example, so everybody’s iPhone ‘camera rolls’ (photo collection) automatically backup to the NAS. And you might like to maintain a large photo collection on the NAS for your computers, smart phones and tablets to access remotely from anywhere.

The NAS is still ‘good,’ it’s just different.

The next ‘don’t drink the Kool-Aid’ claim about NAS is ‘buy once, cry once,’ the argument a NAS is a one-time big expense vs. paying large subscription costs of high-capacity online cloud storage from vendors. Yes, multi-terabyte cloud storage from vendors such as Apple and Google is very expensive for the average Joe, and with a NAS you buy the components, set it up and are largely free of subscription concerns! And this gets mentioned in some YouTube reviews. So, what’s the problem? A NAS is a one-time cost permanent solution, right?

 

[drrich2]

No!!! A NAS is a computer, and computers eventually wear out or get outdated. Will the NAS that’s powerful and handles everything today still satisfy you in 10-years? What if then connectivity standards are much faster and NAS app.s demand more processor power? One thing SSDs and HDDs have in common is limited life expectancy – it varies widely, and they’re expected to last several years, but even with some RAID redundancy, I suspect after 6 or 7-years you’ll get a bit nervous about potential drive failures. My newbie’s wild guess is that you the home generalist user might use it around 8 to 10-years? Perhaps it’ll serve as the backup device for your next NAS. YouTube influencer ExplainingComputers from late 2024 has Storage Media Life Expectancy: SSDs, HDDS & More!

The 3rd over-hyped ‘read the fine print’ exception to NAS is that you then own your own private ‘cloud’ and can skip 3rd party commercial cloud services like Apple, Google, Microsoft (One Drive), etc. The truth? Not so fast!It’s true your NAS can serve some cloud functions, and economically offer far more storage to your varied devices.

Apple’s iCloud services and Mac and iOS device Apple Software (e.g.: Mail, Messages, Photos) are designed to work together pretty seamlessly and offer synchronization across Apple devices. So your Mac, iPhone and iPad Messenger app. show you the same texts and IMAP e-mails. I imagine Microsoft tightly integrated One Drive into their Microsoft Office offerings, and Google has its own suite of app.s and Google Drive. All 3 companies offer paid higher-capacity cloud service subscriptions. Why would they facilitate your use of a private NAS to cut them out of lucrative revenue streams?

None of this means you can’t set your NAS up as an e-mail server, or at least move your large archive of old e-mails to the NAS so you can clear out some cloud storage space. It does mean you likely need to research app. options, and likely face a ‘learning curve’ plus it won’t be such a seamless experience compared to Apple’s iCloud. But does that matter when you’re never going to pay Apple for high-capacity iCloud storage? Then it’s not the NAS vs. a big expensive iCloud tier, it’s the NAS vs. the iCloud 5-gigabyte free tier or a cheap paid tier.

 

[drrich2]

Why You May Want One​

By now getting a NAS may sound fringe to you, an expensive side-hobby for well-moneyed people who like to tinker with neat techie gadgets. And yeah, you can ‘get your nerd on’ and tie it into your home security camera system, store video your cameras generate, use Plex server capability or an app. called JellyFin to compile your home ripped DVD movie collection into a private little ‘Netflix knock-off’ streaming service, run virtual machines, customize varied technical settings, build your own NAS from an old tower PC with multiple empty drive bay slots, etc.

But you don’t have to do any of that. It has practical mainstream functionality of use to general home users, such as photo and other file backup, computer backup, serving photos and other files (like your own personal DropBox, only enormous and no subscription), can be accessible just on your home network or also via the Internet, and it’s multi-platform – Macs, Windows PCs, iOS and Android devices, all can benefit from an in-home NAS system.

You may enjoy high-capacity storage for your files, automated backup of photos and some other content from multiple devices, hosting a photo library of its own accessible wherever you are, possibly host some personal videos to serve wherever, and access your files from any device most anywhere.

 

[drrich2]

SSD vs. HDD​

Before we talk brands, how many bays, etc., there’s a big topic to wrestle with – do you want HDDs (the main choice), SSDs or a mix (e.g.: a hybrid approach, where HDDs are your main storage pool but one or two SSDs act as read/write cache to speed things up)?

Whichever you choose, do you use standard ‘off the shelf’ consumer-grade products intended for personal computers, etc., or theoretically more durable versions targeting NAS or enterprise use (e.g.: Seagate’s Iron Wolf line)?

Hard disc drives are the mainstream choice for a host of reasons. They are much cheaper per gigabyte (until late 2025 I’d have guessed SSDs cost around 2-1/2 – 3x’s as much for a storage size) and can be had in huge sizes (e.g.: up to 30 terabytes). By the time you figure in the cost of the base NAS unit, drives to put in it, possibly a UPS (uninterruptable power supply) to protect it from sudden shutoff during operations if the power goes out, a NAS is expensive. If you’re not rolling in money, an HDD-based system makes sense. But it’s not all upside.

HDDs have moving parts; SSDs do not. You don’t want to jostle a device with an internal HDD on and active, as you could damage it. HDDs for a NAS look close to the size of a small to medium-sized paperback book; an NVMe SSD is roughly the size of a stick of gum (but a little thicker). So a HDD NAS tends to be larger/bulkier and a SSD NAS much smaller. HDDs make noise; it’s hard to judge online and from reviews how much, but 3 or 4 HDDs running in the same unit can probably be heard. HDDs spin up, and sometimes make ‘clicking’ noises. Many years ago (pre-SSD) when personal computers relied on HDDs (and turning on a computer sounded like a tiny plane preparing for take-off), this was normal. Today, when we’re spoiled by the silence of Apple Silicon-based Macs, it’s a distraction. An SSD-based unit may have fans for cooling, but should run a lot quieter. SSDs are more power efficient than HDDs, so if the electric bill concerns you, check out device power consumption.

 

[drrich2]

So an all-SSD NAS is compelling if you want small/compact, quiet, low power consumption and less risk when moving it around (e.g.: if you take it with you traveling), and you don’t need the huge capacities of HDD NAS, but you will pay a hefty premium.

With DAS the speed advantage of SSDs is compelling; with NAS the issue is a lot murkier. With a DAS device, a typical Thunderbolt 3 or 4 connection to an external SSD tends to offer speeds around 3,200+/- MBps (TB 3 and 4 theoretically can hit 40 Gbps (5,000 MBps), but real-world speeds tend to be slower), whereas USB-C 3.2 or gigabit ethernet offer 10 Gbps (1,250 MBps theoretical; real world speeds slower (maybe 800 – 900 MBps?)).

The speed of your external NAS device is a synergy of how many drives (HDD or SSD) are in simultaneous use, how fast individual drives are (note: with NVMe SSDs, you may find PCIe Gen. 3, 4 or 5; 4 supports data transfer rates roughly around Thunderbolt 5 class, and Gen. 5 near double that…which I doubt any current NAS will let you make full use of; as of late 2025, I see no point in blowing the extra money on a Gen. 5 NVMe over a Gen. 4), how many PCIe lanes are dedicated to each drive, what level of ethernet port your NAS and router support (e.g.: if your NAS has a 10-gigabit port but your router has a 2.5-gigabit connection, and your Mac has a 1-gigabit port, you can’t surpass 1-gigabit speeds) if you connect your Mac via ethernet or what speed WiFi (e.g.: 6, 6E, 7) your router and computer support. The slowest link in the data chain sets your speed.

In a ‘have your cake and eat it, too’ play, some NAS units are sold mainly relying on HDDs for storage capacity but offer some NVMe slots for SSDs that you can make a separate storage pool (e.g.: if you wanted your NAS to have 4-terabytes SSD storage and 24-terabytes HDD storage) or make the SSD read and/or write cache to speed those functions. The UGreen NASync DXP4800 Plus is such a product – 4 SATA HDD bays & 2 M.2 NVMe SSD bays. YouTube influencer SpaceRex in early 2025 put out Do you NEED an SSD Cache? – Complete Guide to SSD caching on Synology NAS. Regarding how large a SSD cache you should get, he said it’s a lot smaller than you think – 500 gigs will service most people (even video editors); he recommended you use a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) and an SSD that supports power loss protection (in theory, if your other device sends data to the NAS and it initially goes to your SSD assigned as ‘write cache,’ and a power outage abruptly cuts power before that data is then written from your SSD to the HDD RAID storage, you could lose that data yet the NAS device might think it was successfully written before the outage (i.e.: the NAS may not understand the data only hit the cache and was lost rather than finally getting written to the HDD storage)).

 

[drrich2]

A Word on Speeds & Performance.​

It is maddeningly annoying vendors and reviews don’t stick to one data transfer speed unit (never mind burst vs. sustained transfer speeds, read vs. write speeds, the drop-off when an SSD with cache has that cache exceeded, and sequential vs. random data access). Some units are more commonly applied to some technologies but not others, so your WiFi internet plan might say 400 or 500 Mbps (my cable service just tested ~ 473 Mbps download, ~ 11 Mbps upload), your ethernet adapter/port say 1 Gbps and your Thunderbolt 3 drive claim speeds up to 40 Gbps (but when you read Thunderbolt 3 SSD reviews you see tested speeds around 3,400 MBps). And HDDs will be in the low hundreds MBps. Both HDDs and SSDs may offer some cache, which can speed performance till it fills up.

Vendors may report in ‘bits per second’ or ‘Bytes per second.’ They depict bits with ‘b’ and Bytes with ‘B.’ 1 Byte = 8 bits (not even a convenient factor of 10 conversion).

1 Gigabit per Second (Gbps) = 1,000 Megabits per Second (Mbps) = 125 Megabytes per Second (MBps).

1 Gigabit (little b) = 125 Megabytes (big B). So, theoretically, a 10-Gbps ethernet or USB-C port could transfer 1,250-megabytes/second.

USB 3.2 speeds: 5, 10 or 20 Gbps (note: the USB-C Gen. 3.2 2x2 standard with 20-Gbps relies on a 2-lane technology not supported by Macs, such as the Samsung T9 series external SSDs). With a Mac, the typical non-Thunderbolt USB-C external SSD drive is likely to be 10-Gbps.

Thunderbolt 3 & 4: Up to 40-Gbps.

Typical real-world data transfer speed for a 10-Gbps USB-C (USB 3.2) external SSD (DAS): perhaps around 1,000 MBps (varies).

Typical real-world speed for an external Thunderbolt 3 SSD (DAS): around 3,400 Mbps.

Typical HDDs data transfer speeds (sustained): around 80 – 200 MBps (480 – 1,600 Mbps). HDDs often report rotational speed (5,400 or 7,200 rpm) prominently rather than data transfer speed, from what I recall. A quick online search summarization claimed 5,400 RPM drives tend to be around 75 MB/s, 7,200 RPM drives around 100-160 MB/s and some high-performance/enterprise drives might hit around 200 MB/s.

If you really want to venture into the woods of performance, you can delve into topics like access time/response time, random access, etc. (Wikipedia has a page on it). And while we often discuss transfer speed like it’s fixed, there’s often a modest difference between Read and Write speeds.

As of Dec. 16, 2025, Seagate’s website lists a Seagate Iron Wolf 7,200 rpm 16-terabyte NAS drive (MSRP $524.99) as having sustained data rates up to 180 MB/s and burst speeds of 6 Gb/s. Note: pay attention to the big B (MB/s) and little b (Gb/s); that’s not a typo. by me, it’s bytes (big B) vs. bits (little b).

 

[drrich2]

The practical realities of NAS design do a lot to level the playing field between HDDs (far slower) and SSDs (far faster) by a combination of parallel work (helping HDDs, when multiple drives in a RAID array send data in parallel) and bottlenecking (restricting SSDs due to limited PCIe lanes allotted to each disc), and WiFi speed limits or perhaps the ethernet limit (e.g.: if your computer or router only support 1 gigabit ethernet).

Extra note: a HDD has a head that has to move to where the data to be read or written in. Particularly when you’ve got multiple HDDs in a RAID array working together, they can do well for ‘sequential’ read and write functions (where a large file is in one location) but are much slower going after a lot of small files (‘random’ reads and writes of data in multiple locations). SSDs are very good at both sequential and random read/write. So even if you choose a NAS with multiple HDDs in a RAID array, you may still want to add smaller NVMe SSDs for read/write cache of frequently accessed data. See SpaceRex – Synology NVMe Caching: UPDATED Guide for DSM 7.3; he explained (8:50 in video) adding an SSD cache doesn’t improve performance of sequential reads or writes (with the example of copying a 5-terabyte movie to it), whereas with a bunch of applications running and many people accessing a ‘whole lot of random files’ it’ll make it ‘a lot snappier.’ He gives a nice discussion about Read vs. Write cache (and pinning BTRFS metadata) usefulness and what you may benefit from.

 

[drrich2]

Do You Need NAS-specific Drives?​

The assumption seems to be drives in a NAS will bear a heavier averaged workload over time, resulting in a higher risk for shortened life expectancy. The good news is you can find drives made for more demanding duty burdens in the hope they last a long time; the bad news is they tend to cost more money. My research indicated with HDDs it is advisable to get such drives; with SSDs there was some push but it didn’t seem as great, and the much higher prices put me off. HDDs appropriate for NAS include Seagate Iron Wolf, Iron Wolf Pro and Exos, and Western Digital Red Plus and Red Pro.

With SSDs, 2 specifications of interest:

• TBW (Total Bytes Written): The endurance rating that indicates the total amount of data that can be written to the drive over its lifetime before reliability might be impacted.
• DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day): Derived from the TBW and warranty period. A DWPD of 0.1 means on average you can write 0.1 times the SSD’s total capacity (400-gigabytes for a 4-terabyte drive) to the drive every day for 5-years (if that’s the limited warranty period).
• DWPD = (TBW (in terabytes) x 1,000) /(365 days x number of years warranty x SSD capacity in GB).

So, for a Crucial 4-TB P310 with TBW 800TB & a 5-year warranty, we get (800 x 1,000) / (365 x 5 x 4,000) = 0.109589…so, about 0.11. Amazon price on Dec. 22, 2025: $344.99 (no sale).

For a Samsung 4-TB 990 Pro (Pascal + VI 1TB) (a PCIe Gen. 4) with TBW 2,400 & a 5-year warranty, we get…the same resort as the 4-TB 990 Evo Plus, below. Amazon price on Dec. 22, 2025: $419.99 (no sale).

For a Samsung 4-TB 990 Evo Plus (note: it’s PCIe Gen. 5!) with TBW 2,400 TBW & 5-year warranty, we get (2,400 x 1,000) / (365 x 5 x 4,000) = 0.328767… so, about 0.33.

For Seagate 4-TB FireCuda 530 (it’s PCIe Gen. 4), has a TBW 5,100 (wow!), 5-year warranty, and DWPD = 0.69863… so, about 0.7. Dec. 22, 2025 Amazon didn’t have it, but the cheapest featured offer new was by Memory-Warehouse…$549.99.

YouTube influencer DIGIBITE July 2025 put out SSD vs HDD in Your NAS – What Should You Use in 2025? and made interesting observations, such as SSDs can achieve full SATA speeds (~ 500 megabytes/second) vs. HDDs around 200-250 in some cases 300, that HDDS below 6-terabytes tend to be quiet, and for SSDs he recommended look at the DWPD score (above 0.7 is considered a very good SSD that won’t wear out very quickly) – and mentioned WD Red, Seagate Iron Wolf or FireCuda and Samsung 850X series. He mentioned this page on NASCompares – NVME M.2 List With Endurace – DWPD/ MTBF.

 

[drrich2]

Online checking suggests it’s easier to find TBW than DWPD for SSDs. A related concept is what type of NAND is used, with TLC (Triple Level Cell) superior to QLC (Quad. Level Cell) for endurance/durability. For example, the 1-terabyte Crucial P310 with QLC has a TBW 220TB vs. the 1-terabyte Samsung Evo 990 Plus with TLC and TBW 600TB (both with 5-year warranties).

I ultimately went with a 2025 Black Friday season special and bought 2 Crucial P310 4TB SSDs, PCIe Gen. 4 NVMEs with an endurance rating of 800-terabytes TBW (and unfortunately a DWPD of 0.1). It’s DRAM-less rated for up to 7,100 MB/s read & 6,000 MB/s writes (both sequential), though in my Terra-Master F8 NAS I expect speeds nowhere near those. The P310 is considered a good value option amongst NVME SSDs. I bought mine for $239.99 apiece (+ tax); as of Dec. 16th, 2025, Amazon had it for $344.99 (the A.I. industry demand for materials has driven the price of RAM and SSDs way up fast, plus we’re now past Black Friday/Cyber Monday).

For comparison, as of Dec. 17, 2025 Microcenter offered the Lexar NM790 4TB TLC NAND Flash PCIe Gen 4 (not 5!) x4 NVMe M.2 Internal SSD for $709.99, noted for read speeds 7,400 MBps, write speeds 6,500 MB/s and Endurance of 3,000 TBW (5-year limited warranty). TechPowerUp noted it had a DWPD of 0.4 (and described the TBW as a typical value for consumer SSDs). So, the TBW is nearly 4x’s and the DWPD 4x’s the Crucial P310 I bought, but the drive is roughly double the cost and DWPD still doesn’t hit the 0.7+ threshold.

I’m a home user hobbyist anticipating fairly light NAS use; a professional videographer might choose the more expensive SSDs. With RAID redundancy, an argument could be made for using 1 or 2 higher endurance-rated (and pricey!) SSDs and budget SSDs for the remainder.

With 8 SSD bays to play with, instead of 2 4-TB drives in a RAID I with 4-terabytes usable space, I could’ve used 4 2-TB drives in a RAID 5 and had 6-terabytes usable space; either way I could have up to 1 SSD fail without data loss. The former approach left 6 bays empty, the latter would leave 4 empty, but what are the odds I’ll ever go past 4 SSDs in this device?

A key question was whether to skip the F8 to go to the F8 Plus (base 16-gig RAM instead of 8, more powerful CPU) or UGreen NASync DXP480T Plus (only 4 SSD slots but 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports and a more powerful CPU). The Intel N95 processor (4-core, 4-thread) provides limited PCIe lanes so each of the 8 SSD M.2 slots are ‘downgraded’ to Gen. 3 x1 lanes, which NAS Compares noted are around 800 – 1,000 MBps so that’s what I’ll be limited to on each slot. But that lowers temperature and power consumption, and the F8 only has a 10-gigabit ethernet connection (not Thunderbolt 4), so I think even one SSD probably comes close to saturating it. What good would it do if my 2 NVMe SSDs transferred data much faster if it then faced that bottleneck? It’s like having a NASCAR vehicle on a public highway with a speed limit of 45-mph. I did not skip and settled for the F8; my reasoning in 3 words – ‘Money. Good enough.’

 

[drrich2]

Weighing Brand Features & Relative Strengths​

Not so long ago, if you asked about NAS for home users, the leading recommendation might’ve been Synology. They weren’t the only game in town – QNAP, Terra-Master and Asustor had developed product lines and software platforms; each like Synology had its own proprietary operating system (some NAS systems let you install a 3rd party alternative like TrueNAS or UnRAID). And the argument might’ve gone like this – a NAS is an overall package deal with value derived from hardware (e.g.: power of CPU, amount of RAM, speed of ethernet included, number of drive bays at a price point) and maturity and polish of the software platform (e.g.: the OS and platform-specific app.s in terms of range of features and ‘polish’). Your advisor may think you can beat Synology on hardware at a price point, but their hardware is good enough and their software platform compelling. It’s been a ‘safe’ choice.

Note: There are exceptions. Some NAS vendors sell products without their own software platform, which you might buy cheaper and install TrueNAS on, for example. As a newbie I wanted a ready-made ‘package deal’ with a brand ecosystem, so I’m not focusing on those or the DIY route where you build your own (e.g.: convert a tower PC into a NAS). I also chose to forego the option of turning my M4 Pro Mac Mini into a server (YouTube influencer Geoff Fagien discussed that option in early 2025 – Turn Your M4 Mac Mini into a Powerful File Sharing Server! Step-by-Step Guide).

Then Synology did something that alienated many users, and while that policy was later revoked some ill will endures. For a time, Synology NAS using HDDs starting with 2025 NAS Plus series units required Synology-approved HDDs for full functionality (Tom’s Hardware has an article on that). Judging from what I’ve seen in online postings, a number of people viewed this as trying to lock in users and make more money via Synology-branded HDDs; Synology’s explanation was different, but some consumers moved on and don’t plan to go back. And this was while the plucky up and comer UGreen’s NAS line was the darling of multiple YouTube tech reviewers and UGreen and Terra-Master both got praise for their maturing software platforms (particular UGreen’s NAS smartphone app.).

Everyone’s priorities, work flow and decision tree is an individual thing. I opted for an SSD-only enclosure (small, silent, lower power consumption), keeping to a budget was very much an issue, and this led me to units by Asustor (but the units in my price range started with 4-gig RAM, which seemed a little skimpy), UGreen (but their SDD-only NASync DSP480T Plus was expensive with only 4 SSD bays albeit 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports) and Terra-Master (the F4 only had 4 SSD bays, the F8 Plus had 8 but cost too much, and the F8…had 8 bays and New Egg undercut competitor prices with a roughly $450 deal I jumped on). For me, the F8 was the ‘Goldilocks option,’ cheap enough but not lacking anything I insisted on, and Terra-Master has propriety TRAID that lets you mix different size drives in a RAID pool (without treating all as if they were the size of the smallest – Synology and UnRAID can also do this). What if 8-terabyte Gen. 4 NVMEs are on a killer sale in a couple of years? Hey, I can dream…

 

[drrich2]

Had I opted for a HDD-based NAS, I would’ve been torn between the UGreen NASync DXP2800 (cheaper, but with only 2 HDD bays I’d need to use RAID I permanently and so only have half my storage available) or a DXP NASync 4800 Plus (there was a non-Plus, but the Plus sounded like the more compelling value). But if I bought one of these, I’d end up buying a couple of NVMe SSDs for read/write cache, so I’d feel the need to get a UPS up front, and all that would add to cost. UGreen has gotten a lot of praise for the improved polished software platform, but Terra-Master’s TOS 6 is considered a big improvement over TOS 5, and 7 is due out soon.

The brand that seemed closest to Synology in my newbie inference (from online discussions) was QNAP, but I never ran across one of their units compelling to me so as to study them closely. They are a big name.

Special Case: There is a major brand that’s a recent entrant to the NAS market but has an extensive tech. ecosystem and strong reputation amongst prosumers – Ubiquiti. I had a little exposure to some of their other equipment many years ago, and see them discussed fairly often. In a nutshell, they had a reputation for quality gear (some the knowledgeable prosumer could highly customize) and good pricing but one serious caveat – they aimed for the prosumer and professional market, not the home user newbie needing a lot of ‘hand-holding’ such as very simple, step-by-step directions the average Joe could follow. The impression I inferred from all this was ‘Ubiquiti…the gear you need if you already know what you’re doing and how to do it.’ So, not for me.

But lately I see they released routers and get discussed more, and I got the sense from online discussion they may have some products a bit less demanding of user sophistication. Their initial offering was the UNAS Pro (discussed by YouTube influencer WunderTech – UniFi Drive vs Everyone – Is this the Best NAS in 2025? – he had some strong praise, but noted it was technically less feature-rich than just about any other option out there, it was a NAS and NAS only, whereas other pre-built NAS have been slowly evolving into home servers. He noted if you need your NAS to be a server (running applications on it, Docker containers, etc.), this probably isn’t the best option for you). That said, for the hardware (e.g.: 7 drive bays!), exceptionally good price and strong brand, it was right for some people! And if you’re got other Ubiquiti gear, it might work for you.

 

[drrich2]

If you’re enough of a NAS newbie to follow me this far, I doubt you wish to forego the option to use your NAS as a home server and run varied app.s and Docker containers (for installing some app.s), or opt for a DIY approach unless you’re very ‘techie’ and love tech. ‘challenges’/projects, or one of the cheaper pre-built NAS without its own OS platform (e.g.: so you download TrueNAS or an alternative). I assume you want a brand name ready-made NAS, probably with a branded OS/software ecosystem. If so, I think your choices look like this:

• 1.) Synology vs. everybody else (e.g.: QNAP, Asustor, Terra-Master, UGreen).
• 2.) How do you weigh the value of the reassuringly reputable mature Synology platform (many app.s, reputation for ‘polish’) against what may be the superior hardware offerings by competitors (e.g.: more powerful CPUs, 10-gig ethernet vs. slower, etc.)? If you anticipate being a basic mainstream home user, is a Synology NAS’s software going to do anything you want to do that a UGreen with better hardware at a similar price point can’t? And does a competitor’s superior hardware offer more ‘future proofing’ in terms of power over future years?
• 3.) Do you resent Synology’s effort at HDD lock-in enough to forego their product line as a ‘vote with your dollars’ protest? I got the impression QNAP may also have a very mature software platform, so if you’re otherwise drawn to Synology, check into QNAP.
• 4.) Do you have an unusual ‘Goldilocks’ target, like I did with the Terra-Master F8, that not all vendors have a matching product for? If so, you may narrow your search greatly. Before I resolved to get a NAS-only device on a tight budget (but compared to the F4 the F8 included heat sinks to attach to SSDs, offered 10 vs. 5 gigabit ethernet and 4 extra SSD bays), I had my eye set on the UGreen line.
• 5.) How much ‘future proofing’ and full-featured tech. are you ready to pay for, in case you might need or want it later? Do you insist on 10-gigabit ethernet? What is a Thunderbolt port worth to you? With a 2-bay HDD unit you’ll likely use RAID I; you need 3 discs for RAID 5 and 4 discs for RAID 6. Do you need to budget money for another device to back the NAS up onto? How much will all those drives cost? You gonna get a UPS? A couple of SSDs for read/write cache?
• 6.) Do you want or need massive capacity (e.g.: for a large video library)? If so, you want a mainly HDD-based NAS, not a solely SSD NAS. And maybe at least 4 HDD drive bays.
• 7.) If you want a solely SSD-based NAS, you face the bitter choice of taking a long-term reliability gamble with lower DWPD mainstream consumer-targeted NVMe or paying a lot more money for a higher DWPD option.
• 8.) If you are technically astute and want to build your own NAS, do you want to repurpose an old PC you have laying around or bought cheap, or buy new hardware? You can find hardware made for DIY NAS projects – check out PC Magazine’s review of the SilverStone CS383, described as a high end NAS tower enclosure (with 8 drive bays).

 

[drrich2]

Advice on which NAS to get when people and use cases vary widely in this rapidly evolving market may age badly and fast, and I'm a newbie going off online reviews by others, so for late 2025, I suggest (take this with a grain of salt!) the UGreen NASync DXP4800 Plus (it has significant upgrades over the 4800) for many people. Disclaimer: I don’t own one! Here’s my thinking. Solely SSD storage is too expensive for most and too small for some, multiple HDDs in a RAID compensate somewhat for slow HDD speeds, you can use SSD read/write cache to speed things up, it’s got 10-Gb ethernet, 10-Gbps USB-C, an SD card reader, 4 HDD bays make RAID 5 (at least 3 discs, 1 redundant) or 6 (at least 4 discs, 2 redundant) possible (if you want RAID 6, I’d get something with more than 4 bays!) and it’s powerful enough for Plex/Jellyfin transcoding video.

If you want Thunderbolt 4 ports and/or 6 HDD bays so RAID 6 leaves you 4-disc usable capacity with 2-disc redundancy, consider the DXP6800 Pro (Dec. 17, 2025 roughly $1,020 at 15% off on Amazon).

As of Dec. 17, 2025 at 15% off the 4800 Plus is roughly $595 on Amazon, Seagate IronWolf 12 TB HDDs roughly $270 apiece (so ~ $810 for 3 in a RAID 5 array with 24-TB usable storage), Crucial P310 500-GB NVMe M.2 SSDs roughly $62 apiece (so $124 for 2) and a UGreen NAS UPS roughly $110. So, with free shipping, your system with 24-TB usable storage comes in around $1,640 + tax. Buy during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Week holiday season (UGreen NAS’ were 20% off last time, and I think Seagate had some deals), and even with tax in the U.S. maybe $1,500, give or take? Add $500+ if you opt for a DXP6800 Pro, so $2,000 - $2,100?

 

[drrich2]

A Note on Backup Strategy​

Despite RAID other than RAID 0 offering inherent redundancy, many consider the need for backup beyond relying on that. This reflects that a major device failure could in theory ruin your RAID array (not just a single disc failure), or perhaps a couple of discs (e.g.: if you use RAID I or 5) fail in short order (e.g.: HDD failures if the unit gets jostled or falls while active, a power surge, or 2 discs bought together that both came from a bad batch). Even if the file is on both your Mac and the NAS, a house fire can take out both.

Another scenario is that you want an earlier version of your file. Say you have an important term paper or other document (e.g.: a will) on your RAID I NAS, and the file gets corrupted. Congratulations; you have 2 copies of your corrupted file, one on each mirrored disc! Or maybe you accidently deleted part of a document then it got saved, but you want that deleted content back. This is where Apple Time Machine excels; some NAS software can also save sequential timed versions. Decide if you want this type of backup.

Your data is never perfectly safe; there’s always nuclear war, or you could die and there’s no accessing files from the afterlife (that we know of).

A popular recommendation is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, at least 3 copies of your data (original + 2 backups), on at least 2 different storage types (e.g.: your computer, external drive, NAS, a cloud service) with at least one offsite location (in case of that fire or theft). Great – if you’re willing and able to pay big money for very large subscription cloud storage (e.g.: Backblaze) or an offsite NAS (e.g.: home or office, or a friend or parents’ home). I’m not. But you can buy a single HDD-based external USB drive with, oh, say, a 16-terabyte HDD at a good price around Black Friday/Cyber Monday in the U.S., and if you’ve got more data than that, you likely aren’t taking advice from me.

 

[drrich2]

Resources​

There are many resources to self-educate on NAS-related topics. Here are some I found particularly helpful.

NASCompares – a YouTube channel with a lot of free and some paid member content. They have some written review content. Some content of note:

• 5 Mistakes New NAS Buyers Always Make – Discusses noise (metal cases are better for heat dissipation but worse for noise), HDDs above 8-terabytes tend to be noisier, that compared to M.2 (NVMe), SATA SSDs produce less heat (so NAS fans may not have to run as hard and make as much noise), what upgrading RAM and adding SSD read/write cache does, and the issue of more smaller vs. fewer larger drives.
• Terramaster NAS Setup Guide 1 (Build, Pools, Volumes, Software) 2024 – a nice walk-through; I found it and particularly Guide 2 useful.

SpaceRex – a YouTube reviewer with a plain-spoken, practical, easily digestible educational style. 2023 COMPLETE BEGINNER’S GUIDE for Synology NAS – 2023 DSM 7.2. Some advice not exclusive to Synology users. 2025 COMPLETE UGREEN setup guide – Everything you need to know.

TechPowerUp – an online tech. review site with an extensive detailed listing of SSDs (with spec.s) amongst its many reviews. YouTube Channel.

WunderTech – very knowledgeable discussion on NAS topics.

Jimmy Tries World – good content on a range of tech. topics, noted here for his 2023 I Built a NAS: One Year Later. EVERYTHING I Learned and the Mistakes. Nice discussion aimed at newbies to NAS to walk you through the decisions you need to make. He noted multiple HDDs in RAID are faster but don’t solve the HDD speed issues with latency and random read and write performance and how this impacts video editing (and other demanding work) from a NAS, and how he changed his setup to deal with it.

Patrick Rambles – No More Expensive Apple Storage! – UGREEN NAS. Discussion of how a NAS can be useful to you (discussed with a 2-bay unit).

DIGIBITE - SSD vs HDD in Your NAS – What Should You Use in 2025?

 

[drrich2]

I intended to offer a review of the Terra-Master F8 SSD NAS (not the Plus version), which I now have, but I'm finding getting into it daunting enough that I'm going slow and not ready to offer a substantial overview. A few things I have run across:

1.) Registration of a Terra-Master Account online required I let it send my a confirmation code to my e-mail address. Multiple tries with my '@Mac' (I've had it way before 'iCloud') failed (yes, I checked my junk folder), but using my @gmail e-mail address worked fine. No idea why.

2.) Unwrapped and had it awhile before trying to set it up. Could not find a sticker on it anywhere with a serial number for warranty registration; very aggravating. E-mailed Terra-Master support for aid, exchanged a number of e-mails (seemed to me they just read the latest e-mail in the string of exchanges), but eventually somebody sent me a photo showing a sticker near the edge of the motherboard that had the serial # on it. I'd taken a photo of the motherboard after installing my 2 NVMe SSDs, so I didn't even have to re-open the NAS. So that got worked out.

3.) My format choice (I think it was the automatic setup choice) was BTRFS. It was easy in theory to set up users (e.g.: family members), though getting some data to 'take' took some finagling, but I can't set a storage quota for their accounts because it indicates that only for Fat4.

4.) When you attach the included black plastic (I think) heat sinks to the NVMe SSDs, the included black rubber bands need to be stretched slowly (they can break) and don't stretch far, so having someone else hold the SSD while you get it over the end would be handy. Somebody online warned take the thin plastic sheet off both sides of the little sticky pad that goes between SSD and heat sink; glad somebody mentioned that, and it matters which side of the SSD you put the pad on (I went online so someone showed me).

5.) On both Safari and Chrome, I've got a Favorites/Book Mark for the NAS (tab shows label TOS 6.0). At some point in my messing around, Safari would no longer pull it up, just a white page. Then I messed with it in Chrome and Chrome warned me it was an insecure connection - I said connect anyway. So that worked. Somehow, don't recall how, I ended up getting Safari to do much the same. Both work now. Couldn't tell you how I did it.
Late Edit: I consulted my notes in case this happens to anyone else. My notes between the dotted lines:
--------
Christmas Eve around 10 p.m., got e-mail from Terra-Master where SN was and got registered. Now Safari isn’t pulling up the NAS in browser but Chrome still does. I had also shut Safari down and reopened it in the interim.

Couldn’t get to my NAS in Safari or Fire Fox; could in Chrome, but neither Safari nor Chrome let me log into my Terra-Master account online. Ultimately, I did this in Safari - Access with a Browser: in the browser bar, enter http://tnas.online/<an I.D. # specific to my NAS, not shown here for security reasons> and it told me the connection was not secure, but I said visit the site anyway, and now Safari can access my NAS again, as before. Poked around TNAS Mobile app. on my iPhone, but didn’t change anything I recall (except set it to come back on after power outages). Then I added their no-reply e-mail address to my Contacts to get Apple Mail to white list it, and not sure if that’s what did the trick, but logging onto Terramaster account online (my device, products, my orders, warranty registration, help) then immediately worked, showing my device. And it works on Chrome. Never got a verification code and didn’t change my password.

Next day, Dec. 27, we had a morning blackout; the F8 didn’t come back on till I hit the power button that evening.
--------

My next project is to install the mobile app. on our kid's iPhone (if I can wrest it away from her for a little while), and set it to back up her Camera Roll of photos and videos. From there, I may set up a Photos folder of favorites in my account (I've got an admin. account and one with me just as a family member). I don't need to back my Mac up onto it; I've got Carbon Copy Cloner and a directly attached drive for that.

In a nutshell, as a klutzy newbie, my very limited experience so far is this NAS is not an example where phrases like 'it just works' and 'plug and play' or 'it's magic' come to mind. There's a learning curve here, and I'm far from on top of it.

 

[drrich2]

So there you have my effort to make senes of the home user NAS world! Any of the rest of you who use NAS or are just curious about them, got any observations, advice, different opinions than mine or my errors to point out? I hope this turns into a discussion threads that helps some people.

 

[Capeto]

I shucked two 18TB hard drives from some externals that were on sale at Best Buy a year or two ago, put them into a Synology enclosure, upgraded its RAM, and it's been humming along neatly ever since. I've been using it mostly for Plex (movies, TV, music) and as a Homebridge hub thing, basically enabling smart but non-Homekit devices to be controlled via Homekit and iOS's Home app.

I've been using the RAID configuration with redundancy. I've dealt with losing data and rebuilding libraries in the past and I am now at a point in my life where I'm much busier and have less free time than I did back in those days, so I'll take an ounce of prevention.

 

[MitzEclipse]

I wish Apple just made the time capsule again. Was simple and didn’t have to faff with different hardware and maintenance. Just worked.

Now with the next Mac OS, time capsules are no longer supported so need to find an alternative.

Thanks for sharing the NAS learns!