Pick a 4-Bay NAS With Room to Grow

Why 4-bay is the sweet spot

Four bays is where home NAS makes the most sense. With four drives you can run RAID5 or Synology's SHR, which uses the equivalent of one drive for protection and leaves the other three as usable space. That means you lose only around a quarter of your raw capacity to redundancy, compared with half on a 2-bay mirror, so you get far more storage per pound while still surviving a single drive failure.

A 4-bay also has the headroom to do everything a home throws at it: back up every device, hold a growing photo and video library, run Plex, and host a small home lab or container or two. The popular Intel models add a graphics engine for hardware transcoding and NVMe slots for caching, which keeps the box responsive as the library grows.

Crucially, four bays give you room to grow. You can start with two or three drives and add more later, expanding the volume without rebuilding from scratch on platforms that support it.

Best 4-bay NAS by need

How much to budget

Plan the enclosure and drives as a single cost, because four NAS drives can easily cost as much as the box itself, or more at higher capacities. The listed price is for an empty appliance, so add your chosen drives to reach a true figure.

Fit NAS-rated CMR drives such as Seagate IronWolf, WD Red Plus or Toshiba N300, and consider Seagate Exos for the lowest price per terabyte when you want large capacities. Avoid SMR drives like the old WD Red EFAX in RAID. You can populate all four bays at once or start with two or three and expand later, which spreads the cost.

Because four-bay arrays lose only about a quarter to redundancy, your money buys more usable space than on a 2-bay. A sensible build with three or four mid-to-high-capacity drives in SHR or RAID5 gives a large, protected pool that should last years.

Value 4-bay or premium 4-bay