The Best NAS Hard Drives (2025) for storage

Need help figuring out which NAS hard drives are the best? This guide will help you choose the right one and find the best prices. You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking for hard drives to put in your Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. I’ve spent years reading through data sheets line by line to find the best NAS hard drives and pair them with different uses.

Different brands and sometimes even models of NAS drives have different specs. So, what works for your friend might not be the best thing for you. All of these NAS HDDs look the same, but they can be set up in different ways to meet the needs of different users. Keep reading until the end to find out how you should use the drives below and how to buy them.

Best NAS Hard Drives Comparison Table

Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB

Amazingly, it is possible to fit ten 2TB platters and 20 heads into a 3.5-inch drive. But Seagate was able to do this by using CMR technology and filling the drive with Helium instead of air. On the plus side, the new IronWolf Pro 20TB is 2TB bigger than the 18TB model, reads and writes about 25MB/s faster, and uses less power.

All of these benefits come at a price that is only slightly higher than the price of the 18TB option. So it’s clear that commercial and enterprise NAS should meet the needs of creative professionals and large businesses. The problem with this is that the maximum amount of work that can be done in a year is 300TB, which could be used up quickly by regular integrity testing, let alone actual use.

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Western Digital 3TB WD Red Plus

WD has been making storage solutions for computer for a long time, just like Seagate, and it has good drives for any NAS. We recommend at least 4TB, just like with the Seagate drives. The Red Plus hard drives from WD are made for use in NAS and can be put to work in systems with up to eight bays. WD drives are known to be of high quality and to last a long time.

They come with a three-year limited warranty and are backed by a strong brand in the storage market. Red is not the fastest hard drive series on the market, but you can make up for this by putting them in a RAID. There are 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, 10TB, 12TB, and 14TB versions of these drives.

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Seagate EXOS 20TB

The new IronWolf Pro 20TB will be joined by another Seagate drive with ten 2TB platters and a standard 3.5-inch size. The only major difference on the outside is that the EXOS comes in an SAS model as well as the standard SATA model. The EXOS drive is better than the IronWolf Pro because it can handle 550TB of work, while the IronWolf Pro can only handle 300TB.

The Western Digital UltraStar DC HC560 20TB and WD Gold 20TB have the same limits on how much work they can do. The EXOS 20TB is tuned for use in a data center. It is made for high-capacity servers, enterprise NAS systems, and large amounts of storage. Even though it costs more than the 18TB models, it is slightly faster and makes better use of rack space.

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Seagate IronWolf 18TB

The Seagate IronWolf 18TB is a great choice if you want a NAS hard drive with a lot of storage space. Not only is it reasonably priced for a drive this size, but it also has many of the same features as the high-end IronWolf Pro series mentioned above. The IronWolf is a great addition to any NAS system because it is made to last for a long time without making too much noise or shaking.

It also has the usual IronWolf Health Management System, which makes it easy to keep an eye on the drive and make sure all your data is safe. The speeds of 180MB/s aren’t the fastest in the business, but they’re pretty good considering how much the whole package costs. Seagate also says that this high-capacity drive has a mean time between failures of one million hours.

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Western Digital 1TB WD Red SA500

If you need fast file transfers, you might want to add a solid-state drive (SSD) to your NAS. The Western Digital Red SA500 is one of the best hard drives on the market. It has the reliability you’d expect from Western Digital and speeds of up to 560MB/s. In particular, you can expect to be able to read up to 560MB/s and write up to 530MB/s.

Those speeds are a lot faster than what a typical NAS hard drive can do, and they work well for large formats like 4K or 8K video files. Unfortunately, this model can only hold up to 2TB of data. But if you want to move files quickly and want a drive made to last (the Red SA500 has a five-year limited warranty), this is one of the best choices you have right now.

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Western Digital 1TB WD Gold

In enterprise servers and data centers, hundreds or even thousands of hard drives often spin at the same time, which is hard on any hard drive. But the WD Gold is made for situations like this, so it can easily handle smaller rackmount NAS servers with dozens of bays that medium-sized businesses set up in-house for team collaboration.

And it does all of that while improving on our choice HDD in some important ways. With higher storage options, the WD Gold gives you twice as much cache space, up to 2.5 million hours of mean time between failures (MTBF), and almost twice as much work you can do. These numbers show that Western Digital’s top-of-the-line hard drive works well as an enterprise hard drive and is a reliable choice, no matter what size NAS it’s used with.

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Toshiba N300 8TB

The entry-level hard drives from Toshiba work pretty well in small NAS enclosures. If you put a pair of these in your home office NAS, file transfers will never be slow again. Other brands skimp on the lower-end models, but Toshiba gives these drives a lot of cache memory, which helps the N300 reach transfer speeds of 230 MB/s or more across all storage sizes.

When it comes to storage modules, Toshiba is a brand you can trust. In fact, it is known for making white-label NAS HDDs for other popular brands, so you can’t go wrong with Toshiba. The only bad thing about the N300 is that it is awkwardly priced in the middle of two price ranges. You can get a similar drive or a slightly better one from Seagate for less money.

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FAQs

Which hard drive to use for NAS?

Western Digital and Seagate are the two biggest storage companies, and both have products that are almost exactly the same and are made with servers in mind.

Are NAS hard drives worth it?

If you need to get to files from more than one computer, you should think about getting a NAS. It is a place where multiple users can store files and work together on them. You can connect multiple workstations to a NAS to work on projects and finish them.

Why do NAS drives fail?

Power outage: If the power goes out or the voltage changes, the NAS could fail. If the power goes out or changes, the disk might not be able to connect to RAID. User error: If a user makes a mistake, like deleting files and folders by accident, NAS or RAID data can be lost. Overheating: NAS can fail if it gets too hot.

Is NAS good for long term storage?

If you buy a Synology NAS, you can have your own private cloud with a lot of storage space, full data privacy, and fast local file transfer speeds.