Best 24TB NAS Drives UK 2026: Price per TB Guide
24TB NAS-rated CMR drives by price per TB
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The best-value 24TB NAS drive is the Seagate IronWolf Pro 24TB (ASIN B0CSP3H8Q9) at around £878.99, working out to roughly £36.62 per TB at last check on 24 July 2026. All the drives on this list are CMR, which is the only sensible choice at this capacity, so the decision comes down to price per TB, warranty, and workload rating. The IronWolf Pro undercuts the WD Purple Pro and Toshiba N300 Pro while offering a proper NAS warranty and rescue service, making it the rational default unless you specifically need enterprise firmware.
Best 24TB NAS drives
At 24TB you are firmly in serious multi-bay territory, so every drive here needs to be CMR with a NAS or enterprise workload rating. These three represent the honest spread from cheapest per TB to the most robust enterprise option.
Which 24TB drive should you buy
Choose the IronWolf Pro if
- You want the lowest £/TB on this list without dropping to a non-NAS drive
- You run a Synology or QNAP NAS with 2 to 8 bays and want IronWolf Health Management support
- You value the bundled Rescue Data Recovery Service as extra peace of mind
Choose the WD Ultrastar DC HC580 if
- You are building a larger pool (8+ bays) with heavy sustained read/write workloads
- You want enterprise-grade vibration tolerance and a higher sustained duty cycle
- You are comfortable paying roughly £68 more per drive for that extra headroom
Who actually needs 24TB, and why CMR matters here
24TB drives make sense once you are filling four or more bays and want real headroom, typically media servers with large 4K libraries, small business backup targets, or home labs running several VMs alongside file storage. In a 4-bay NAS with RAID 5 or SHR, four of these give you around 72TB of usable space, which is a serious amount of storage for most households or small offices. If you only need 8 to 16TB total, you are better off buying two smaller drives than overspending on capacity you will not touch for years.
Every drive on this list is CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording), and that is not a coincidence, it is a requirement. SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives write data in overlapping tracks to pack in more capacity cheaply, but this makes them dramatically slower during sustained writes and, more importantly, dangerous during RAID rebuilds. At 24TB, a rebuild can take the best part of a day even on CMR; on SMR it can take so long that a second drive fails before the array finishes rebuilding, turning a single-disk fault into total data loss. No reputable NAS vendor sells 24TB SMR drives for this reason, but always double-check the exact model number before buying, since manufacturers have quietly used SMR on lower-capacity drives in the same product family.
Rebuild risk at 24TB is real, plan around it
A 24TB CMR drive can take 24 to 48 hours to rebuild in a degraded RAID array, during which every other drive in the pool is under heavy load and more likely to reveal a latent fault. This is why NAS-rated drives with proper vibration tolerance and error recovery timeouts (like the IronWolf Pro and WD Red Pro here) matter more than raw speed. If you are running anything beyond two bays, budget for a hot spare or at least keep a cold spare drive on hand, and make sure your NAS OS supports scrubbing and SMART monitoring so problems surface before a rebuild is forced upon you.
24TB NAS drives, by price per TB
Prices are indicative — last checked 8 September 2026, from Amazon.co.uk. They are not live; check the current price on Amazon before buying. Best £/TB is the lowest at last check.
Frequently asked questions
Is the WD Red Pro 24TB worth the extra cost over the IronWolf Pro?
At around £1129.93 (£47.08/TB) versus the IronWolf Pro's £878.99 (£36.62/TB), the WD Red Pro is considerably more expensive for broadly similar NAS-focused specifications. Unless you have a specific compatibility reason to prefer WD firmware in your NAS, the IronWolf Pro is the better value pick at this capacity.
Should I avoid the Synology bundled NAS options on this list?
The Synology DS223 and DS423 bundles are NAS enclosures with drives included, not standalone hard drives, so their £/TB figures reflect enclosure cost too. They are worth considering only if you need the NAS unit itself; if you already own a NAS, buy the bare drives instead.
Can I mix the IronWolf Pro and WD Red Pro in the same array?
Technically yes, most RAID controllers do not care about brand, but it is not best practice. Different drives can have different firmware behaviour, error recovery timing, and performance characteristics, which can complicate troubleshooting. Stick to a single model per array where possible, and if you must mix, keep pairs matched by tier (NAS-rated with NAS-rated).
Is 24TB overkill for a 2-bay NAS?
For most home users, yes. Two 24TB drives in RAID 1 gives you 24TB usable, which is a lot for typical photo, document and media backup needs. Consider whether two 12TB or 16TB drives would suit better unless you specifically plan to fill that capacity within the drives' warranty period.
What is the practical difference between NAS-rated and enterprise drives like the Ultrastar HC580?
Enterprise drives like the WD Ultrastar HC580 are built for 24/7 datacentre duty cycles with higher sustained workload ratings, often better vibration tolerance in dense multi-bay chassis, and sometimes SAS interface options (though this particular model is SATA). For a typical home or small office NAS with under 8 bays, a NAS-rated drive like the IronWolf Pro is sufficient and better value; the enterprise premium only pays off at larger scale or heavier duty cycles.