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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.
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