Why I still recommend Synology's DS225+ NAS - even if it can't replace your cloud storage

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Almost every NAS or external hard drive review these days will tell you having your own storage box at home is a guaranteed way to save money as you'll be able to kiss your cloud storage subscriptions goodbye. I've written similar reviews myself, but I'm doing my best to back that up with receipts this time.

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The thing is, it's getting harder to say that a NAS (or a large external hard drive, for that matter) makes sense. For those who do need big storage, the Synology DS225+ can be a great idea, but it's hard to recommend. 

Why is it hard to recommend a NAS?

Bottom line: spiraling storage costs. And AI is to blame. Specifically: AI data centers acquiring all the components for themselves.

A lot has been written about how RAM prices have gone through the roof thanks to overwhelming demand from data centers that can make use of a thousand laptops' worth of RAM in a single rack. This, in turn, has pushed up the price of everything that relies on RAM, from smartphones and computers to the humble Raspberry Pi.

But it's not just RAM that's in crazy demand, the same is true for hard drives. AI companies are buying them up at an unprecedented rate. Earlier this year, hard drive maker Western Digital reported that it had "pretty much sold out" of hard drives, with 89% of its revenue coming from cloud/hyperscaler customers (read: data centers) with the consumer market accounting for only 5%.

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It's a similar story from other hard drive manufacturers. As with RAM, this demand from AI data centers is pushing up the cost of drives. In the four months up to January 2026, prices were up an average of 46% as reported by Tom's Hardware editor Stephen Warwick. He noted at the time that a 4TB Seagate IronWolf and 24TB Seagate BarraCuda cost $99 and $499, respectively. Now, they'd be closer to $220 and $750 -- if you can even find them.

At the time of writing, the cheapest 4TB NAS drive I found from a reputable outlet was the Western Digital Red Plus, at $195. The sweet spot in terms of price per terabyte is the 8TB Seagate BarraCuda, which you can pick up for $280. 

This means that even the smallest dual-drive NAS kitted out with two 4TB drives and using RAID 1 mirroring (which means that the two drives give you 4TB of usable space), will set you back at least $400. Start putting a serious number of drives into a box -- especially NAS-grade CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) drives -- and the math gets ugly fast.

Note: There are two different types of drives that you'll come across in your search for suitable drives -- CMR and SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). Without getting into the nitty-gritty technical differences, SMR drives will be cheaper, but you always want to go for CMR drives for NAS units; otherwise, you'll run into problems. Don't believe me? Back in 2020, Western Digital got caught up in a scandal when it shipped SMR drives inside WD Red drives for NAS use. This resulted in multiple class-action suits and settlements that included the court demanding that the company make its labeling clear.

Compare these stratospheric price increases with cloud storage prices. Both iCloud and Dropbox will give you 2TB for $9.99 a month, and that's cloud storage accessible 24/7 from anywhere you have a connection. You're paying for it to be managed by someone else so there's essentially no learning curve, and the scope for user-initiated data-loss is minimal.

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But there's another huge advantage to cloud storage: data resilience. Even with the best possible NAS, you're one fire, flood, or theft away from losing your data. There's an old military adage that's equally applicable for backup: "two is one, and one is none." 

What this means is that if you only have one copy of something, you have a single point of failure waiting to bite you. For a proper, reliable backup, you need to follow the 3-2-1 principle -- three copies, two media types, and one that's offsite. Since offsite invariably means cloud, most people with a NAS will still need cloud storage.

Who needs a NAS? It's complicated

So, outside of the deep pockets of AI data center moguls, who are NAS boxes economically viable for? My take has changed over the past year. If you'd asked me back in early 2025, I'd have said that a NAS was for everyone, especially those with a data hoarding habit who didn't want to be nickel and dimed every month.

Nowadays, my answer is more complicated. I'd say you need a specific reason -- scale, speed, privacy/control, or sunk-cost hardware -- and that a NAS is definitely not for people who are chasing a subscription-cancellation fantasy.

The move from 1GbE to 2.5GbE is a worthy upgrade and will, for some, justify an upgrade from an earlier Synology.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET

So, maybe you're someone with a LOT of data. You have seriously hefty photo and video libraries, big home media collections, or you have multiple devices that all need backing up in one place. I'm talking data well in excess of the 2TB you'd get for $9.99 a month. Even with the currently hugely inflated prices being asked for hard drives, if you factor the hardware costs over several years, a NAS is still the better option.

Then there are those who need access to their data or don't want it anywhere near a third party -- think video editors working with lots of footage, or anyone in a privacy-sensitive line of work. Even for those people for whom a NAS is still right, it's almost always a "NAS-plus-cloud" solution, not a "NAS-instead-of-cloud."

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And it's not just pricing that's putting me off from recommending NAS boxes; the vendors themselves are making it difficult. For example, last year, Synology tried to lock customers into using Synology-validated hard drives. This user-hostile policy was reversed, but only after a backlash, and it remains in place for M.2 drives in NAS boxes that have the appropriate slot. 

Synology also removed both H.264 and H.265 hardware transcoding used for media streaming on hardware physically capable of supporting the feature, shifting the workload to client devices and saving expensive licensing fees for codecs. So much for "you bought it, you own it." At least cloud service providers can only raise prices on you. 

So with all this in mind, and assuming that you are someone who needs a NAS, what unit do I suggest? Well, the Synology DS225+.

Wait, what? Synology?

Yes. Despite the nonsense with drive lock-in and removing the transcoding feature (I'm not walking back on any of that), Synology makes great NAS units. The DiskStation Manager software is, without doubt, the best NAS software I've come across. It turns the NAS box from a Linux server that needs a lot of handholding into a versatile, easy-to-use appliance that you can control locally or remotely, no matter whether you're sitting at a computer, smartphone, or tablet.

Synology's DiskStation Manager is powerful yet easy to use -- and the new AI assistant makes it even easier to use!

Synology/ZDNET

The latest DiskStation Manager 7.4 has a built-in AI assistant to help you diagnose and troubleshoot issues quickly and easily. Plus, Synology has a long software and security patch lifecycle that is usually five years or more -- way longer than those of budget competitors, and long enough for the cost-of-ownership math to look good. It also has an active security bug bounty program, which is exactly what I want to see on an internet-facing device housing my data. 

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I'm also a big fan of Synology's SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) disk management system because not only has it proved to be robust, but it also lets you mix and match drive sizes and expand a volume by swapping drives one at a time rather than requiring that you start with a matched set from day one.

Why the DS225+?

First, a 2-bay NAS is the sweet spot in terms of data storage. Yes, 4-bay units and those with more bays are very nice and give you an enormous level of data resilience, but the costs are high, and they encourage rampant data hoarding. If two 24TB drives (the largest that the DS225+ supports) in a RAID 1 setup aren't enough, you probably need to take a close look at why you need so much data.

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The DS225+ is also a good choice thanks to its 2.5GbE port, capable of supporting the unit's 280 MB/s read and 210 MB/s write speeds. This Ethernet port is a massive upgrade over the DS224+'s 1GbE port, which limited its transfer speeds to about 110 MB/s. For this alone, I was more than happy to stomach the $360 to upgrade from older DS220+ and DS224+ 2-bay Synology units.

It's as simple as moving the drives from one unit to the other. And don't worry about fitting drives into a DS225+. If you're using 3.5-inch drives, the process is totally tool-free, and all you need for 2.5-inch drives is a screwdriver. It's about as simple as drive fitting gets and is consistent with how Synology's Plus-series trays have worked for years.

Totally tool-free for 3.5-inch hard drives.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET

You do have to live with a few compromises, however. First: the Intel Celeron J4125 processor dates back to 2019 and definitely isn't the fastest around for this kind of application. The unit ships with only 2GB of RAM, though this can be upgraded to 6GB -- but remember what I said about the cost of RAM these days. And while the 2.5GbE network port is good enough for most people, especially on a 2-bay NAS, there's no way to add a faster Ethernet port.

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That said, I can't say that I really care about the hardware spec. It does what I need it to do, and for the price it's more than acceptable. I've tested two DS225+ units over the past few weeks, and I've been nothing but impressed by them. Don't get me wrong, I still vividly remember the drive-lock debacle of 2025 and how transcoding was canned, but despite that, it's a super NAS box.

ZDNET's buying advice

While the base Synology DS225+ is $360, expect the complete NAS to be a lot more once you start adding hard drives into the mix. By the time you've thrown in a couple of 4TB Western Digital Red Plus NAS drives (which, yes, are CMR drives) for just shy of $200 each, the setup is already $760, but it's a package that should give you quite a few years of use.