What a NAS Really Costs Over Five Years

In short:

• Hardware is roughly $1,095–1,255 upfront, as of August 2026 — the NAS itself, two drives, and an optional UPS. That’s notably higher than it would have been a year ago, because of an ongoing hard drive shortage explained below.
• Electricity is small — $25–50 a year for a typical 2-bay setup running continuously.
• Drive failure is a real but modest risk — published data puts it at roughly a 1-in-8 chance across two drives over five years.
• Averaged out, that’s about $20–25 a month — before counting your own time, which is a separate, non-dollar cost.
• Whether that beats paying by the gigabyte depends on how much you store — the crossover point is a specific, calculable number, not a guess.

Most NAS cost articles quote the purchase price and stop there. That number is real, but it’s also the smallest and least interesting part of the actual five-year picture — it undercounts electricity, and it treats drive failure as either “won’t happen to me” or “definitely will,” when it’s neither. This guide works through the full picture, with sourced numbers at every step, to a single monthly figure you can actually hold up against other options.

The one-time cost: hardware

The baseline setup from this cluster’s main guide, priced again here for the full breakdown — as a shopping list with live search links, since a pinned product page is exactly the kind of link that goes out of stock:

Item	Typical price, August 2026	Shop
2-bay NAS (Synology DS225+, diskless — the current model; it replaced the DS224+ in 2025 with identical hardware plus a faster network port)	$365	Search Newegg
Two 4TB NAS-rated drives (e.g. Seagate IronWolf)	~$300–370 each, ~$650–740 total	Search Newegg
UPS (optional)	$80–150	Protects against power-cut corruption
Total	~$1,095–1,255	One-time

Prices last checked against multiple retailers 2026-08-23; expect drift, and given the shortage below, expect it more in one direction than the other for a while. This is a mid-tier configuration, not the floor or the ceiling. A single-bay NAS can bring the enclosure cost under $250 at the cost of no redundancy; larger drives buy more headroom if audio isn’t the only thing going on the box, at a further premium under current conditions.

Why hard drive prices jumped

That drive line isn’t a typo or an unusually bad retailer. A 4TB NAS drive that cost roughly $95 in early 2025 runs $300 or more as of this writing. The cause is well documented: Western Digital and Seagate have reportedly committed most of their 2026 hard drive production to AI data center customers, leaving a shrinking supply for everyone else. Industry trade prices rose another 10% quarter-over-quarter in Q2 2026 alone, and reporting on the shortage doesn’t expect meaningful relief before late 2026 at the earliest. This is a real, current market condition, not a one-off bad quote — if you’re reading this later than August 2026, it’s worth checking whether it’s eased before trusting the numbers below.

One number worth being explicit about: two 4TB drives in the standard mirrored (RAID 1) configuration give you 4TB of usable storage, not 8. The second drive is a live copy of the first, not additional capacity — that’s what makes a single drive failure survivable without data loss. Every capacity figure in this guide already accounts for that; if you see a “2× 4TB = 8TB” number elsewhere, it’s describing raw capacity before redundancy, not what you can actually store.

A spare PC instead of a purpose-built NAS changes this math, but not necessarily in the direction people expect. The hardware cost can be near zero if you already own the machine — but a typical desktop draws meaningfully more power at idle than a NAS built for 24/7 operation, which can erase some or all of the upfront savings within a year or two, and it doesn’t come with the drive-swap tooling that makes a failed-drive replacement a five-minute job instead of an afternoon one.

The recurring cost: electricity

Smaller than most people assume, and unaffected by the drive shortage above. Synology’s own published power figures for the DS224+ — hardware-identical to the DS225+ — put it at roughly 4–15 watts depending on load. Two spinning drives add more on top — real-world two-disk setups tend to land around 15–30 watts running continuously. At the US average residential rate of about $0.184/kWh (August 2026):

20W average × 8,760 hours/year = 175 kWh/year
175 kWh × $0.184/kWh ≈ $32/year

Call it $25–50 a year to account for regional rate differences and actual usage patterns — a real cost, but not the one driving this budget.

The cost people forget: drive failure

This is the part most cost breakdowns skip entirely, because it’s not a bill that arrives on a schedule — it’s a probability. Backblaze, which has published hard drive reliability data from its own fleet of hundreds of thousands of drives since 2013, reported a 2025 annualized failure rate (AFR) of 1.36%, with the most recent quarter (Q1 2026) at 1.24%.

Applied to two drives over five years, here’s the actual math:

Annual survival probability per drive ≈ 98.7%
5-year survival probability per drive ≈ 0.987⁵ ≈ 93.7%
5-year failure probability per drive ≈ 6.3%
Probability at least one of two drives fails in 5 years
  ≈ 1 − (0.937)² ≈ 12.2%

So: roughly a 1-in-8 chance you’ll need to buy at least one replacement drive — at today’s elevated prices, call it ~$300–370 — sometime in five years, purely from statistical failure — before counting accidental damage, power surges, or simple bad luck with a specific unit. Worth two honest caveats: Backblaze’s fleet is enterprise-scale, running in a data center under different conditions than a home NAS, so this number is the best public data available, not a perfect match for your specific setup. And in practice, many self-hosters replace a drive proactively around year 4–5 regardless of whether it’s failed, simply because drives are cheapest to replace on your own schedule, not the drive’s — though at current prices, that instinct is more expensive to act on than it used to be.

Put together: what does it actually cost per month?

Averaging the one-time hardware cost, the statistically-expected drive replacement, and five years of electricity into a single monthly figure:

	5-year total	Per month
Hardware (NAS + 2 drives + UPS, midpoint)	~$1,175	—
Expected drive replacement (12.2% × ~$348)	~$42	—
Electricity (5 years, midpoint $37/yr)	~$185	—
Total	~$1,400	~$23/month

That’s the number worth comparing against any alternative — not the $1,095–1,255 sticker price, which undercounts the real five-year picture, and not a scary worst-case either. It’s also a genuinely different number than this same calculation would have produced a year ago, almost entirely because of the drive shortage above — worth remembering if you’re comparing this figure against an older article or your own memory of NAS pricing.

How does that compare to paying by the gigabyte?

This is where the answer genuinely depends on how much you store, and it’s worth working out the actual crossover point rather than asserting one option wins.

own.audio’s planned pricing (not yet available — currently in development) is a flat $0.05 per GB per month, with no tiers. At that rate, the NAS’s ~$23/month amortized cost equals:

$23 / month ÷ $0.05 / GB / month ≈ 460 GB

Below roughly 460 GB of actual library size, paying by the gigabyte costs less in raw dollars than owning the hardware to store it yourself. Above that line, the NAS’s fixed cost is spread across more storage and comes out cheaper. That crossover point is meaningfully higher than it would be in a normal drive-pricing year — the shortage above pushes it up by roughly 150 GB compared to 2025 hardware prices, which is a real, current-events reason a NAS needs a bigger library to pay for itself right now than it did a year ago. For scale: a large audiobook collection (hundreds of books) typically runs tens to a couple hundred gigabytes; a serious ripped-CD music collection can run into the terabytes. Where your actual library sits on that range is the real answer to “which is cheaper” — not a general rule either way.

What this number doesn’t include

Money isn’t the whole cost, and pretending otherwise would undercut the point of working out real numbers in the first place:

• Your own time. Setup, updates, and troubleshooting take real hours — covered honestly, with a rough time budget, in this cluster’s main guide.
• The cost of skipping backups. None of the numbers above include an offsite backup copy. Skip that step and the real risk isn’t the ~$300+ cost of a replacement drive at today’s prices — it’s losing the library entirely if something worse than a single drive failure happens.
• Opportunity cost, if this isn’t something you enjoy. For someone who finds NAS maintenance genuinely interesting, the hours are close to free. For someone who doesn’t, they’re a real cost this article can’t price for you.
• What happens at year five. This guide covers one five-year window, not an indefinite one. Drives approaching the end of their typical service life are worth planning to replace on your own schedule around this point, which is a real cost that recurs — the number above is a fair five-year average, not a one-time payment that makes the topic closed forever.