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DIY NAS vs Synology: Which Is Cheaper?

Published: July 20, 2026

Live answer · Amazon.com

Pulling live prices…

📊 As of August 15, 2026, the typical CMR SATA HDD (4TB+) on Amazon.com is $45/TB or $0.045/GB, widest choice around $33.98/TB, with some as cheap as $25/TB across 337 live listings.

Sourced from real discussions on r/homelab, r/synology and r/DataHoarder, cross-checked against live PricePerGig listings.

DIY or Synology? Go DIY if you like tinkering and understanding how things work, along with having the time, space (DIY is almost always a physically larger setup) and are willing to ask a few questions or do a little research, it’s not difficult, but it does take a little more time. Synology is for you if time is short, it costs a little more but you’ll end up with a physically smaller, more ‘professional’ setup - although not necessarily more powerful, with DIY you may well end up with a full server setup, Synology are great and powerful enough for being a NAS and even a modest Plex server with a few other apps on. At the end of the day, the actual hard drives are the same, and that’s where your precious data is going, regardless of DIY or Synology, you’re going to need some large data drives, CMR too.

The table above shows live prices for CMR SATA drives of 4TB and up on your marketplace, and since drives are the biggest cost either way, that number matters whichever path you pick.

Where DIY wins: cost and control

Build your own and you control every penny.

You pick the case, the parts, and crucially your own drives at the best price per TB from the live table above. No markup, no locked-in ecosystem, no paying for software in the hardware price.

At low bay counts the gap is modest. But the more drives you want, the more a DIY box pulls ahead on cost, because prebuilt units charge a premium for every extra bay.

Free software like TrueNAS or Unraid runs the show, and it is genuinely excellent. You also get to upgrade and repair anything, forever, instead of being tied to one vendor.

Where prebuilt wins: it just works

I am not knocking Synology and friends, because convenience is worth real money to a lot of people.

A prebuilt arrives, you slot in drives, click through a friendly setup, and you have a working NAS in twenty minutes.

The software is polished, the apps are easy, support exists, and you never think about hardware compatibility. For someone who wants storage and sharing without becoming a part time sysadmin, that is a fair deal.

You pay a premium, but you buy back your weekend.

The honest cost picture

Let me lay it out plainly.

Either way, you still buy the drives, and at the best price per TB they are the same drives. The price difference is mostly the box and the software experience.

So the question is really, how much is your time and hassle worth?

How I would decide

A simple gut check.

The bottom line

A DIY NAS is cheaper, more flexible and more powerful for the money, especially at scale. A prebuilt Synology costs more but trades that for polished, effortless convenience.

Both run the same drives, so chase the best price per TB on the live table above regardless. Then pick DIY if you want value and control, or prebuilt if you happily pay a premium to skip the setup. Neither choice is wrong.

So your data is sitting on the same drives whether you go Synology or DIY. Synology offer a neat setup, physically smaller in most cases, although with a DIY setup you can always ‘add just one more drive’; even if it is left hanging out the side for a few months while you find the right bracket to hold it in the case properly (it will happen!).

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