Best Home NAS NZ

A NAS is the closest thing to a fireproof filing cabinet for your photos, backups and media library. Here's what's worth buying in NZ right now.

Do you actually need a NAS?

Cloud storage is fine until your internet drops out, a subscription price rises, or you need to move terabytes of video footage in a hurry. A NAS (network-attached storage) box sits on your home network, backs up every device automatically, and can double as a Plex media server so your TV streams from your own drive instead of buying storage twice. If you've got more than one computer, a growing photo library, or you're sick of paying for cloud storage tiers, a NAS usually pays for itself within a couple of years.

Best overall: Synology DS224+

The Synology DS224+ costs around $549 (diskless) at PB Tech and remains the safest first NAS for most households. Synology's DSM software is the most polished in the category — backups, photo management and remote access all work without touching a command line. Add two 4TB drives (roughly $180 each at Mighty Ape) and you've got a mirrored 4TB setup for well under $1,000 all in.

Best for Plex and media: QNAP TS-264

QNAP's TS-264 sits around $699 diskless and includes hardware transcoding that handles multiple simultaneous Plex streams more smoothly than the Synology equivalent. If your main use case is a home media server for the whole family rather than pure backup, this is the better spend.

Best budget entry: Ugreen NASync DXP2800

Ugreen is the newest serious player in home NAS and its NASync DXP2800 undercuts Synology and QNAP at around $479 diskless from Mighty Ape. The software is less mature but has improved a lot through 2025-26 updates, and the hardware — including 2.5GbE networking as standard — punches above its price.

How much storage do you actually need

For photo and document backups across a family of four, 4TB usable (in a mirrored two-bay setup, that means two 4TB drives) covers most households for years. If you're storing a movie collection or shooting 4K video regularly, look at 8TB+ drives or a four-bay unit like the Synology DS423+ (around $799 diskless at PB Tech) so you can expand later without starting over.

Two-bay vs four-bay

• Two-bay units are cheaper and fine for simple mirrored backups — if one drive fails, your data survives on the other.
• Four-bay units support better redundancy (RAID 5/6) and let you mix drive sizes as you grow, at a higher upfront cost.
• Buy drives rated for NAS use (Seagate IronWolf, WD Red Plus) rather than standard desktop drives — they're built for 24/7 operation.

Don't forget the drives

NAS enclosures are sold diskless in NZ almost universally, so budget separately for drives. A pair of WD Red Plus 4TB drives runs about $360 total at PB Tech, while Seagate IronWolf 8TB units are closer to $320 each. Factor this into your total cost before comparing NAS enclosure prices alone.