QNAP TS-264 Drive Compatibility Guide 2026 (UK)

Best drives for the TS-264

With just two bays to fill, every drive choice counts. Here are three sensible options at different budgets, all well within the 24TB per-bay ceiling.

Which drive should you fit

What fits the TS-264

The TS-264 has two 3.5in SATA bays, each supporting drives up to 24TB, giving a maximum raw capacity of 48TB across the unit. Any CMR (conventional magnetic recording) SATA hard drive from this list will work, since QNAP's drive policy on this model is open rather than locked to a compatibility list. That means enterprise drives such as the Seagate Exos X16 or X18, and the Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC530/HC550 range, are just as valid as consumer NAS drives like the IronWolf or IronWolf Pro. With only two bays, most people run RAID1 for mirrored redundancy, though Basic, JBOD and RAID0 are also supported if you want maximum capacity or don't need protection against drive failure. The Celeron N5095 quad-core processor handles two SATA drives comfortably regardless of which model you pick, so performance differences between drives on this list come down to cache size and rotational speed rather than any bottleneck in the NAS itself.

The TS-264 also includes two M.2 NVMe slots, which can be used either as SSD cache to speed up access to frequently used files on the SATA bays, or configured as a separate all-flash storage pool for demanding workloads such as virtual machines or databases. Because the M.2 slots are independent of the two 3.5in bays, you can mix and match freely: two large SATA HDDs for bulk storage plus two NVMe SSDs for cache or fast storage, all within the same chassis. There's no drive-locking on the M.2 side either, so standard M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs from any reputable manufacturer will work, provided they meet basic thermal and power requirements. If you're using the NVMe slots purely for cache, a modest capacity SSD (250GB to 500GB) is usually sufficient; if you're building a dedicated flash storage pool, you'll want to match capacity to your workload.

A word of caution on SMR drives