NAS or Seedbox for Your Media Library? We Priced Both in 2026

The short answer

If you want less than about 10 TB, rent. If you want more than about 20 TB and you mostly watch at home, buy the NAS. Everything below is the arithmetic behind that sentence, done with prices we looked up today rather than prices we remember.

People argue this one with feelings. It's a money question with two or three numbers in it, so let's just do the numbers.

What a NAS costs right now

These are real retail prices from a Dutch shop on 18 September 2026, including VAT. Your country will be within a few percent.

Two things jump out. The box is the cheap part. And drives cost roughly the same per terabyte whichever size you pick: the 8 TB works out at EUR 47 per TB, the 12 TB at EUR 44. There's no clever size that saves you money, so buy the biggest ones you can afford and fill fewer bays.

The electricity bill is smaller than people say

This is the part of the argument that always gets exaggerated, including by us, so here it is properly.

Synology publishes power figures for every box. The DS225+ draws 16.98 W in access and 6.08 W with the disks asleep. Run it flat out, 24 hours a day, all year: 16.98 W times 8,760 hours is 148.7 kWh. Eurostat puts the EU household average at EUR 0.2896 per kWh for the second half of 2025. That's EUR 43 a year. About EUR 3.59 a month.

The 4-bay DS425+ draws 28.25 W in access, so 247.5 kWh, or EUR 72 a year, EUR 5.97 a month.

So no, a NAS does not cost you EUR 15 a month to run. It costs about the same as a coffee. The real cost of a NAS is the drives, and the real cost of a seedbox is the rent. Compare those.

Build A: 8 TB usable

The sensible small build is a 2-bay box with two 8 TB drives in RAID 1. That gives you 8 TB usable, and one drive can die without taking the library with it.

Twenty-six months. Just over two years before the NAS is the cheaper option, and that assumes nothing fails and you never buy a bigger drive.

It looks worse for the NAS at the small end. Our Appbox Lite is EUR 5 a month for 500 GB, and Appbox +3 is EUR 14 a month for 3 TB. Against EUR 14 a month you would be waiting about five years for a small NAS to pay for itself, by which time you'd want new drives anyway.

Build B: 36 TB usable

Now flip it. Four 12 TB drives in a DS425+, RAID 5, gives you 36 TB usable.

Here the NAS wins, and it isn't close. Over three years it's cheaper, and it holds twice as much, because our biggest Appbox is 18 TB and a 4-bay NAS isn't. If you're archiving 30 TB of film scans or a decade of home video, buy the NAS. We'd rather tell you that than sell you the wrong thing.

The crossover sits somewhere between the two builds. Around 10 TB it's a coin toss on money alone, and the tiebreaker is the next section.

Money isn't the whole question. Getting the files out is.

A NAS is storage that sits behind your home internet connection. That matters more than the hardware does.

Plex's own server settings ask you for your upload speed, and the server deliberately uses only 80 percent of whatever you tell it, because streams have variable bitrates and the rest of your house still needs the line. Plex's own optimised presets are 8 Mbps for a 1080p TV version and 4 Mbps for a 720p mobile one. So a 20 Mbps upload gives Plex about 16 Mbps to work with: two 1080p viewers, and nothing left over. Direct-playing an untouched 4K file needs several times that.

Check your own upload before you buy anything. Most people find they have a fast download and a thin upload, and the thin one is the one that carries your library to your sister's TV.

Torrent seeding has the same problem in a different shape. Everything you seed leaves through that same upload, at the same time as everyone is trying to watch something. On a seedbox it leaves through a 10 Gbit port in a data centre, and every Appbox plan is unmetered, so seeding costs you nothing and slows nothing down at home.

There's a third thing the price table misses: the NAS has to transcode. Most consumer boxes do it on the CPU, which is fine for a 1080p stream and not fine for 4K. Our 4K transcoding guide goes through where the wall actually is.

RAID is not a backup

Worth saying because it catches people who've just spent EUR 1,100. RAID 1 and RAID 5 survive a drive dying. They do not survive the flat flooding, the box being stolen, you deleting the wrong folder, or ransomware walking your shares. Those are the things that actually lose libraries.

If you buy the NAS, budget for somewhere the data also lives. If you rent, the same rule applies from the other direction: keep the irreplaceable things in two places. Our rclone guide covers pushing a copy off to cloud storage on a schedule.

Most people should run both

The split that works is boring and effective. The seedbox does the downloading, the automation and the streaming, because it has the bandwidth and it's awake at 4am. The NAS at home holds the archive of things you've finished with, because bulk storage you rarely read is exactly what cheap spinning drives are for. rclone moves finished files from one to the other on a cron job and you stop thinking about it.

You pay for a small Appbox instead of a big one, and you buy drives instead of a second NAS. It's cheaper than either pure approach at most library sizes.

How to decide in one minute

• Under 5 TB, and you want it working tonight: rent. A NAS can't pay for itself at that size before the drives age out.
• You stream to people outside your house: rent, or run both. Your upload speed is the whole ballgame and buying a faster NAS doesn't change it.
• You want 20 TB or more and you watch at home: buy. The numbers are clearly on your side and they stay there.
• You seed a lot: rent, or run both. Seeding from home costs you the bandwidth your household is using.
• You like owning things and tinkering: buy, and know you're paying about EUR 600 for the privilege over the first two years. That's a reasonable thing to pay for.

If you land on renting, Appbox Lite is EUR 5 a month for 500 GB and every Appbox plan is unmetered, so you can start small and move up when the library does. If you're new to the idea, what a seedbox is is the place to start, and the seedbox vs NAS page has the short version of this comparison.