NAS Starter Kits: Complete Setups at €500, €1000, €2000
· Last verified July 2026
Choosing a first NAS gets overwhelming fast, because most guides hand you forty options and leave you to assemble the pieces yourself. This post does the opposite: it gives you three complete, self-contained kits (device, drives and a UPS in each) at roughly €500, €1000 and €2000, and it explains what you gain and what you give up as you move up. Pick the tier that matches your budget, buy the parts, and you have a working, protected NAS without a research spiral.
How the budgets are split
Before the lists, it helps to understand where the money goes, because that ratio is what separates a balanced build from a lopsided one. As a rough rule the device and the drives each take a bit under half the budget, and the UPS claims the remaining slice: often only 10 to 15 percent, but it's the part beginners skip and later regret. A NAS that costs €1000 with €900 of hardware and no power protection is a worse buy than the same box with a €90 UPS in front of it, because a single power cut during a write can corrupt the filesystem or abort a rebuild.
The drive prices below use our own maintained street-price table, last reviewed on 29 April 2026, so treat them as approximate figures that drift with the market: a 4 TB NAS drive sits around €85 and an 8 TB around €165, for example, and you can sanity-check any configuration against the RAID calculator. Device prices move even more, so this guide talks in ranges (an entry 2-bay is roughly €150-250, a capable 4-bay €350-550) rather than pretending to quote a single number that will be wrong next month. If you want the full reasoning behind matching drives to bays and use case, the how many drives do you really need guide is the companion to this one.
The €500 kit: a safe first 2-bay
At this budget the goal is a NAS that is genuinely protected against a single drive dying, not the largest pile of storage you can assemble. That means a 2-bay box with two matched drives running as a RAID 1 mirror, which writes the same data to both disks so the array survives one failure. You give up half your raw capacity to the mirror (two 4 TB drives give you about 4 TB usable), but for a first NAS holding photos, documents, a Mac Time Machine target and a small media library, that trade is exactly right.
The reasoning is simple once you see the numbers: an entry 2-bay device is roughly €150-250, two 4 TB NAS drives add about €170, and a small 600 VA UPS lands under €100, which keeps the whole kit near €500. If you'd rather have 8 TB usable, step the drives up to two 8 TB units for around €330 and let the total drift toward €650; that's the single most worthwhile upgrade inside this tier, because doubling capacity now saves you a full drive-swap migration in two years. The one thing you cannot do on a 2-bay is add a third drive later, so if you already suspect you'll outgrow it, read the best 2-bay NAS guide before you commit and consider starting one tier up.
Run this kit as RAID 1 and treat it as redundancy, not backup: a mirror copies an accidental deletion or ransomware to both disks instantly. You still need a second copy somewhere else, which is why the which RAID level decision and a real backup plan matter even on the smallest NAS. For a 2-bay the honest verdict is that RAID 1 plus one 4 TB spare bay of headroom is the sweet spot for a first-time buyer.
The €1000 kit: a 4-bay you can grow into
Doubling the budget doesn't just buy more drives: it buys headroom and a growth path, which is the real reason to jump to four bays. A 4-bay lets you run parity RAID that wastes only one drive instead of half of them, so once you fill three or four bays you keep far more of your raw capacity than a mirror ever could. It also typically brings a faster processor and a 2.5 GbE network port, so the box keeps up with more users and heavier tasks like a household Plex server.
The math works out cleanly around this budget: a capable 4-bay is roughly €350-550, two 8 TB drives add about €330, and a pure sine-wave UPS in the €150-200 range rounds it out near €1000. Starting with two of the four bays populated is a deliberate choice: you get a working mirror today and slot in two more identical drives when you need the space, at which point you convert to RAID 5 (or Synology's SHR) for roughly 24 TB usable across four 8 TB drives. Do keep in mind that growing an array in place is slower and a little riskier than filling it from day one, so if the budget stretches, buying all four drives together is the calmer path; the NAS buying guide covers the platform trade-offs behind each device pick.
One note on the UPS: an Intel-based NAS with an efficient power supply is happier on a pure sine-wave unit than on the stepped-approximation waveform of the cheapest models, because a poorly-shaped waveform can make some active PFC supplies drop out at the moment of switchover. That's a small premium for peace of mind, and the best UPS for NAS guide walks through the VA sizing so you don't over- or under-buy. For this tier the verdict is a 4-bay with RAID 5 or SHR and a sine-wave UPS: the configuration most home users would be happy with for the next five years.
The €2000 kit: prosumer capacity with double parity
At the top tier the priorities shift from "enough storage" to a lot of storage you can trust for years, which changes both the drive count and the RAID level. Here you want four or more larger drives in a 4-to-6-bay box, running RAID 6 (or SHR-2) so the array survives two simultaneous drive failures. That second parity drive matters more than it sounds, because a rebuild on large modern drives runs long enough that the odds of a second drive stumbling mid-rebuild stop being negligible; the calculator's rebuild-risk numbers make that concrete.
The spend lands like this: a prosumer 4-bay is roughly €600-800 (a 6-bay more), four 10 TB drives add about €800, and a solid 1500 VA UPS is €150-200, which puts a well-balanced kit near €2000. Four 10 TB drives in RAID 6 give you around 20 TB usable while tolerating two failures, and if you choose the 6-bay you can either run six drives for more space or keep four active with a hot spare waiting to rebuild automatically. Whether a hot spare earns its keep over just buying a cold spare on the shelf is a genuine judgement call, and the hot spare vs cold spare guide lays out both sides.
For the more technical crowd, one detail worth knowing at this tier: RAID 6 and SHR-2 both carry a write penalty from computing two independent parity blocks, so a busy array of spinning drives will feel that on random writes more than a RAID 5 array would; it's a fair price for double-drive safety on large disks, but it's why all-flash pools and 10 GbE networking start to make sense once you're spending at this level. The verdict for the top tier is four or more larger drives in RAID 6 (or four plus a hot spare in a 6-bay) with a proper 1500 VA UPS, which is the setup that stops you thinking about your storage for years.
What to upgrade first, later
Whatever tier you start with, the parts of a NAS don't wear out or bottleneck evenly, so it helps to know the order in which upgrades actually pay off. The two changes that reliably matter most are capacity (larger or additional drives) and a real backup destination, because no RAID level protects you from deletion, ransomware or theft, only from a drive failing. Everything else is a distant third.
- Drives / capacity first. When the array crosses about 80 percent full, plan the next step before it fills completely: either swap to larger drives or add bays.
- An off-site backup second. A cloud target or a rotated external drive turns your NAS from a single point of failure into part of a real 3-2-1 plan.
- Networking third. Jump from 1 GbE to 2.5 GbE only once your drives can actually saturate it, which is usually a three-or-more-drive pool.
- RAM and extras last. More memory helps virtual machines and heavy container use, but most media-and-backup NAS never touch that ceiling.
If you build the €500 kit and later feel constrained, the cleanest move is rarely to swap the whole box; it's to add the backup you skipped and then grow capacity, following the migration steps in Synology vs Ugreen and the beginner-oriented NAS beginner guide. The concrete takeaway: spend your next hundred euros on backup or capacity before anything else, because those are the only two upgrades that change whether your data survives.
Recommendation
For most first-time buyers the €500 2-bay kit in RAID 1 is the honest recommendation: it's protected, quiet, cheap to run, and it covers photos, documents, backups and light media without fuss. Step up to the €1000 4-bay if you already know you'll pass roughly 8 TB of usable storage or you want the growth path into RAID 5 and a faster network, since that's the tier most households settle at for years. Reach for the €2000 4-to-6-bay kit in RAID 6 only if you genuinely store a lot and can't afford downtime: large libraries, a busy multi-user Plex server, or work files where a two-day outage is a real problem. Whichever tier you pick, keep the UPS in the cart: it's the smallest line item and the one that most reliably saves the rest.
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