Best Hard Drive for NAS UK 2026

SMR drives can cripple RAID rebuild performance. Choose IronWolf, WD Red Plus, or other NAS-certified CMR models.

Best value hard drives right now

#	Product	Capacity	Price	Per TB
★	Seagate EXOS X24 24TB Interne Festplatte 3.5 Zoll SATA 3 Gbit/s 512 MB, ST24000NM000C (Renewed)	24TB	£567.20	£23.63/TB
2	Seagate BarraCuda 8TB, Internal Hard Drive, 3.5 Inch, SATA, 6GB/s,, 5.400 RPM, 256MB Cache, for Computer Desktop PC, FFP (ST8000DMZ04)	8TB	£190.06	£23.76/TB
3	Seagate Enterprise 3.5" 18000 GB 7200 RPM 18 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM SATA ST18000NM00J (Renewed)	18TB	£450.00	£25.00/TB
4	MaxDigitalData (MD6000GSA12872E) 6TB 7200RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5-inch Internal Hard Drive (Enterprise Grade) - 3 Years Warranty (Renewed)	6TB	£149.99	£25.00/TB
5	MDD (MDD10TSATA25672NAS) 10TB 7200RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5inch Internal NAS Hard Drive (Renewed)	10TB	£251.43	£25.14/TB

4TB— Entry-level NAS

£28.00/TB

£112.00

Good starting point for a 2-bay NAS if you are unsure how much space you need.

8TB— Home media servers

£23.76/TB

£190.06

Sweet spot for Plex and family storage — strong £/TB.

12TB— Large libraries

£31.25/TB

£375.00

Excellent £/TB for 4K Plex and growing archives.

Frequently asked questions

Use a CMR drive rated for 24/7 operation — e.g. Seagate IronWolf, WD Red Plus, or Toshiba N300. Avoid SMR in RAID arrays.

You can short-term, but desktop drives wear faster under always-on use and lack vibration compensation for multi-bay enclosures.

CMR writes data in fixed tracks. SMR overlaps tracks for higher density but slows heavily during RAID rebuilds — avoid SMR for NAS.

A 2-bay NAS with RAID 1 mirrors two drives. 4+ bays often use RAID 5/6 for capacity plus redundancy.