Best 4-Bay NAS UK 2026: Top Picks for Home Storage

Best 4-bay NAS by budget

Only one true 4-bay appliance is currently in stock, so we have set it against the closest smaller alternatives for context.

Which should you pick

Why the 4-bay field looks the way it does

Four-bay NAS units sit in an awkward middle ground. They are the sweet spot for anyone running RAID5 or RAID6 with real capacity headroom, since a four-drive RAID5 array gives you the storage of three drives with one drive's worth of parity protection, and RAID6 stretches that to two-drive fault tolerance if you can spare the space. Synology's SHR does something similar but more flexibly across mixed drive sizes. The problem for you as a buyer right now is that the strongest 4-bay hardware, such as the UGREEN DXP4800 Plus with its 10GbE port and Pentium Gold chip, or the TerraMaster F4-425 Plus with three M.2 slots and 5GbE, simply is not showing in the current appliance stock list, even though the specs exist and are well documented elsewhere.

That leaves the Asustor Drivestor 4 Gen 2 AS1204T as the only true 4-bay box you can actually buy from this list today. It is not the fastest chip in the class and its 1GB of RAM is on the thin side for running many containers or virtual machines, but it does the core job: four open drive bays, RAID5/6 support through Asustor's own ADM software, and 2.5GbE networking that will comfortably saturate a decent home broadband connection and then some for local transfers. If your ambitions run to heavier transcoding workloads or ECC memory for a small business file server, you are better served checking back once models like the QNAP TS-464 or Synology DS925+ appear in stock, since neither Synology chip here does hardware transcoding on current DSM regardless of price, and only the UGREEN and TerraMaster 4-bay units in this comparison list actually support it.

An honest stock caveat