Find the Cheapest 4TB NAS Drive Today

Who a 4TB NAS drive suits

4TB is an entry size, best for a 2-bay starter NAS doing backups, documents and a phone photo cloud rather than a large media library. It is the sensible first step if you are leaving Google Photos or iCloud and do not yet have terabytes of data.

4TB is light for Plex: a 4K film can be 40GB or more, so a 4TB pool fills quickly. It is fine for a modest library or as a starting point you grow later.

Where 4TB sits on the value curve

Small drives sit at the expensive end of the price-per-terabyte curve: a 4TB drive almost always costs more per terabyte than an 8TB to 12TB one. If your budget stretches, a single larger drive is usually better value, but 4TB keeps the upfront cost low for a first NAS.

At 4TB the value picks are WD Red Plus, Seagate IronWolf and Toshiba N300, which trade the lead on price per terabyte. The live table is sorted so the cheapest per terabyte is at the top.

Usable capacity from 4TB drives

The 4TB buying note

The main trap at 4TB is buying an SMR drive by mistake. This is exactly the capacity band where the old WD Red (EFAX) shingled models live, and cheap desktop drives are often SMR too. Stick to WD Red Plus, IronWolf or N300, which are all CMR, so a RAID rebuild stays fast and safe.

Available NAS-rated families at 4TB: At 4TB you have WD Red Plus, Seagate IronWolf and Toshiba N300, the mainstream NAS-rated CMR drives. Enterprise Exos and the Pro ranges exist at this size but rarely make sense here, as their value only shows at higher capacities.