Best NAS Drives for the Synology DS925+ (2026)

Best drives for the DS925+ by budget

Three sensible ways to fill four bays in this NAS, from cost-conscious to maximum headroom.

Which should you pick

Why drive choice matters more on this NAS

The DS925+ pairs a capable AMD Ryzen V1500B CPU with only 4GB of ECC RAM as standard, and it leans on its two 2.5GbE ports for network throughput rather than any GPU-assisted media features. In practice that means the bottleneck in daily use is rarely the drives themselves, it is RAM for caching and metadata under heavy multi-user load. Given that, your drive priority should be reliability and consistent write behaviour during rebuilds, not chasing the fastest spinning disk on the shelf.

Synology restricts third-party drives on this model to a validated list, and while many Seagate IronWolf, IronWolf Pro, and WD Red or enterprise drives work fine in practice, you should check the current list against your exact model number before ordering. CMR (conventional magnetic recording) is essential here, avoid any SMR drives entirely, they will cripple RAID rebuild times and can time out during resilvering on SHR or RAID6.

With two M.2 NVMe slots, you can offload read/write caching from the spinning disks, which takes pressure off your HDD selection for random I/O-heavy workloads like Time Machine backups or busy Synology Photos libraries. That said, the NVMe slots on the DS925+ can only be used for cache or as a separate storage pool, not to replace the four main bays, so your core capacity and resilience decisions still rest entirely on the drives you put in those four bays.

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