Originally published at woitzik.dev
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A NAS is the single most important piece of hardware in any homelab. I learned this the hard way when a Proxmox host's NVMe died without a verified backup — the incident I wrote about in Backup & Restore: The Test You Never Verified. Since then, I run the 3-2-1 rule religiously: three copies of critical data, on two different media types, with one offsite. A NAS is the backbone of that strategy.
But the NAS market in 2026 is crowded. Synology still dominates mindshare, QNAP competes on features, Terramaster fights on price, and UGREEN is the new player trying to disrupt both. This comparison is based on real deployment experience and hands-on testing — not spec sheet comparisons.
TL;DR — The Picks
