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NAS enclosures ranked by price per bay

Every network-attached storage (NAS) box on Amazon.co.uk — Synology, UGREEN, QNAP, TerraMaster, Asustor and more — ranked by price per drive bay, the fair way to compare a 2-bay with an 8-bay. Most are sold diskless; the fill it column works out the cost of filling each one with today's best-value NAS drives.

10 products · prices from Amazon.co.uk via Keepa, refreshed daily ·
Bays Brand Sort Fill with
ProductBaysPrice£/bayDrivesRatingFill it
QNAP TS-431K 4 Bay Desktop NAS Enclosure
Annapurna1GB RAM
4£444.50£111.13Diskless★ 4.4 (205)4 × 8TB
£1,199.96 in drives
Asustor Lockerstor 8 AS6508T 8 Bay NAS Enclosure
8GB RAM
8£1,059.00£132.38Diskless★ 4.1 (32)8 × 8TB
£2,399.92 in drives
Asustor AS5304T 4 Bay NAS
2.5GbE4GB RAM
4£601.35£150.34Diskless★ 4.4 (489)4 × 8TB
£1,199.96 in drives
QNAP TS-451+-8G 4 Bay Desktop High-performance NAS Enclosure
Celeron8GB RAM
4£799.95£199.99Diskless★ 4.1 (85)4 × 8TB
£1,199.96 in drives
QNAP TS-253BE-4G 2 Bay Desktop NAS Enclosure
Celeron4GB RAM
2£624.04£312.02Diskless★ 4.2 (90)2 × 8TB
£599.98 in drives
QNAP TS-251+-8G
8GB RAM
2£737.36£368.68Diskless★ 4.1 (85)2 × 8TB
£599.98 in drives
Synology DX517 5 Bay Desktop Network Attached Storage Expansion Enclosure
Expansion unit
5£520.99£104.20Diskless★ 4.7 (567)–
Synology RX418 4 Bay NAS Rack Expansion Enclosure
Expansion unit
4£547.40£136.85Diskless★ 4.0 (10)–
Synology RackStation RS3618XS
Expansion unit1GbE
12£3,369.35£280.78Diskless★ 5.0 (1)–
QNAP High-capacity TL SATA JBOD not only can expand NAS storage
Expansion unit
–£1,973.83–Diskless★ 5.0 (2)–
Nothing matches those filters — try widening them.

How to read this table

£/bay is the price divided by the number of drive bays, so a £300 four-bay NAS (£75/bay) is better value for growth than a £200 two-bay (£100/bay). Fill it adds the cost of filling every bay with today's cheapest drive of the chosen size from our NAS drive rankings — change the size above the table. Units sold with drives are listed after the diskless ones, because their price already includes storage.

Beyond bays, the things that matter most are the CPU (Intel/AMD models handle Plex transcoding and Docker far better than ARM/Realtek), RAM, and network speed: a 2.5GbE port is roughly two and a half times faster than gigabit for big file copies. Not sure whether you need a NAS at all? Read NAS vs DAS, then choose drives with our NAS drive guide.

Frequently asked questions

What is a NAS?

A NAS (network-attached storage) is a small always-on computer full of drives that sits on your home or office network. Every device on the network can store files on it, stream from it and back up to it, and most run apps such as Plex, photo backup and Docker.

Why rank NAS boxes by price per bay?

Bays decide how much storage a NAS can hold and how it can protect it. Dividing the price by the number of bays lets you compare a 2-bay box with a 4- or 8-bay one fairly. CPU, RAM and network speed then decide how fast it is.

Do NAS enclosures come with drives?

Most are sold diskless, so you choose the drives. Some, such as Buffalo LinkStation or Synology BeeStation, include them; those show the capacity in the Drives column and are listed after the diskless units.

Which drives should I put in a NAS?

Use CMR drives made for 24/7 use: Seagate IronWolf, WD Red Plus or Pro, Toshiba N300, or enterprise drives such as Exos at larger sizes. Our NAS drive hub ranks them all by price per terabyte.