Matthias Karner

Digitalization & IT leader. Avid reader. Engineering PhD. Productivity enthusiast.

5 minute read

Where do you store your digital life?

Are you on Team Cloud, or are you juggling USB sticks, old laptops, and external hard drives? Or maybe you’re already using a NAS.

For a long time, I definitely belonged to the second group. | image | |:–:| | Photo by Maxim Berg on Unsplash |

Cloud storage always felt too expensive, and the idea of paying a monthly fee just to store my own data never sat right with me. I kept thinking about getting a NAS, but I couldn’t justify the time or the money. I didn’t feel like I had enough “important” data to make it worthwhile.

My essential documents were backed up on a few redundant drives, and my photos were spread across phones, old computers, and random hard disks. Not perfect, but good enough for the time.

That changed when I became a dad.

Suddenly, those photos became priceless. I wanted one thing: absolute certainty that the pictures of my child were safe. That moment pushed me to rethink my entire setup. And since I wanted a smooth and reliable workflow, the choice narrowed down to just two options:

  • Cloud storage
  • A NAS

I went with the NAS.

During Black Week 2025, I finally bought one. The journey (choosing the right model, setting everything up, …) took some time, but it turned out to be much easier than I had expected.

In this post, I’ll walk you through how I chose my NAS and how I set it up, along with the lessons I learned along the way.

How much storage do you need?

This is the essential question.

But it’s not just “How much storage do you need right now?”

A better question is: How much storage will you need in the coming years?

When I went through my devices, USB sticks, and old hard drives, I realized I wasn’t using that much space. I’m not a photographer or videographer, so most of my data came from old media libraries (leftovers from the pre‑streaming era).

My photos and documents only took up a few hundred gigabytes.

Still, when planning a NAS, I kept going back and forth between a 2‑bay and a 4‑bay system. I knew I wanted redundancy, so RAID was a must. RAID 1 felt a bit limiting because you only get half the usable storage. RAID 5 or 6 sounded more appealing, but those require at least 3 drives.

After weighing my options, I chose a 2‑bay NAS with two 16 TB drives. That gave me enough room to grow, and RAID 1 was acceptable (if not optimal).

However, if I were dealing with lots of photos or videos a 4‑bay model would have been the better (even more future-proof) choice. Especially since you can start with three drives in RAID 5 and expand later.

So before you buy a NAS, ask yourself two things:

  1. How much storage do I need today?
  2. How fast will that grow over the next few years?

Don’t overthink the far future. You’ll probably upgrade to newer NAS hardware in 5-10 years anyway.

The vendor question

For years, the default recommendation for home and small‑business NAS systems has been Synology. And for good reason: they’re reliable and well battle-tested.

But over the last few years, a new player has shaken up the market: Ugreen.

After comparing both in detail, I ended up choosing Ugreen.

Here’s why:

  • More powerful hardware for a lower price
  • No vendor lock-in on hard drives
  • Modern, well‑designed NAS models like the DXP2800 (2 bay) and DXP4800 (4 bay)

These devices don’t just offer classic drive bays. They also include M.2 NVMe slots, which means:

  • faster cache or storage options
  • the ability to run containers or apps (without much noise)

If you want to do more than just store files (like running services or simple home‑server tasks) these models are a great hybrid solution.

If you only need pure storage DH2300 (or its 4 bay counterpart) are more cost-effective options.

Of course, there are other brands like QNAP or Western Digital, but right now the two most compelling choices for home users in my opinion are Synology and Ugreen.

The set-up

The setup turned out to be far less time‑consuming and tedious than I expected. I imagined spending several evenings at my desk until everything was configured, but in reality, it only took two evenings.

On the first evening, I spent about an hour getting the NAS up and running. The rest of the evening was just tracking down all my scattered data across old drives and copying everything to the NAS.

The second evening was dedicated to connecting all my devices (and my family’s devices) to the system.

And that was it.

I can only speak for Ugreen, but the process was incredibly straightforward. Not just because I work in IT: anyone who is at least a bit tech‑savvy should be able to handle it without much trouble.

The bonus

A few weeks later, I started exploring more advanced features. I installed a couple of containers on an NVMe M.2 drive (keeping things fast and quiet) and set up automatic syncs so various devices could back up their data to the NAS.

On top of that, I created an additional backup to a separate hard drive: so the NAS itself is also backed up.

The cost-question

Yes, a NAS isn’t cheap, but over time it will save money compared to cloud services. My setup costs were 270 EUR for the NAS itself, and with the two 16 TB drives the total came to 1.050 EUR.

Comparing this to cloud storage isn’t straightforward, as I wouldn’t have purchased 16 TB of cloud storage right away: more likely I would have started with 2 TB and increased it over the next few years. For simplicity, I’ll compare it to a 5 TB plan.

With Google Drive, 5 TB costs 250 EUR per year, so after a little more than four years the NAS will have paid for itself.

Life with a NAS

Let me start with the most important part: peace of mind.

Before I had a NAS, my data crossed my mind every few days. Are all backups up to date? Did I save this new PDF in all three places? What if one of my old drives suddenly dies?

It was a constant low-level worry. It was never urgent, but always there.

Now? I barely think about it.

Everything is set up, automated and stored in one central place. I’m running RAID for extra safety plus additional backups of the NAS itself. My system takes care of everything in the background.

And every time I take a photo, I know my phone will automatically upload it to the NAS as soon as I’m back on Wi‑Fi. This means: the worst-case scenario is losing at most a single day’s worth of pictures if I ever lose my phone.

That’s what life with a NAS feels like: less thinking, less worrying, and more confidence that your digital memories are safe.

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