Best NAS for Video Editing of 2026

It's the largest and most expensive machine here, and that's the right place to start: this isn't the default pick, it's the one for a studio that has already outgrown four bays. Eight SATA bays plus two M.2 slots take it to a stated 272TB, and the Intel 150U with DDR5 memory — 8GB fitted, 96GB ceiling — has the headroom to serve several workstations at once.

Two Thunderbolt 4 ports are what nothing else on this list offers. They give you a fast external path for offloading cards or parking a scratch enclosure beside the box, while the dual 10GbE ports keep the rest of the room on the network. We were more struck by the SD 4.0 slot and the built-in 128GB SSD: both suggest a machine meant to sit at the center of a working studio rather than under a desk in a spare room.

What it costs you isn't only money. Eight bays means a drive bill to match, it's the heaviest thing here, and a full chassis of spinning disks is audible in a one-room studio. Set against that, the 3-year warranty matches the longest in this group, and 96GB of DDR5 is headroom the four-bay picks simply cannot offer.

Five bays today and 300TB later is the pitch, and it's a good one for a small post shop that expects to add editors rather than replace the box. Synology's figures for the DS1525+ are 1,181 MB/s and simultaneous multi-editor work, which puts it in the same conversation as the 10GbE UGREENs — with two more drive bays and a stated expansion path the four-bay enclosures don't have.

'10GbE ready' is doing some work in that sentence, though. The 10-gigabit port is an add-in card, so the real cost of entry is the chassis, the card and a switch that can feed it. Budget for all three and this is the most expandable five-bay machine here. Skip the card and the premium buys you bays and software rather than speed.

The software is what we keep coming back to. DSM gives you shared folders with real permissions, snapshots, Active Backup and an interface a producer can navigate without calling you, and the 3-year warranty with enterprise support covers the years you'll actually own the thing. For anyone whose files are other people's deadlines, that combination is worth more than the spec sheet suggests.

It ships with 2.5-gigabit ports, not 10, and that's the first thing to be honest about. On 2.5GbE you're working at a quarter of what a 10-gigabit link moves — fine for proxies, frustrating for native 4K. The fix is a 10GbE network card in the PCIe slot, and that upgrade path is the reason it stays on this list at all.

The four M.2 slots are what sold us. Populate them with NVMe drives and you get an all-flash working area for the project in front of you, with six SATA bays holding the camera originals and everything finished. That split is genuinely useful between jobs: current work on the fast tier, last quarter's on the spinning array, and you decide what lives where rather than copying between volumes.

The Celeron N5105 is the modest part of the spec sheet. It shares files, runs containers and keeps two or three editors working, but it isn't the machine for a roomful of people hitting the same timeline. For a small shop that wants a fast tier without paying all-flash money, that's a fair trade and a lot of storage for the outlay.

Not every suite needs a rack. If your setup is one desk, one workstation and a laptop for the road, a two-bay desktop sitting beside the monitor covers the job at a fraction of the footprint — and the TS-264 is the tidiest of those here, in a metal chassis that doesn't look like networking equipment.

The dual 2.5-gigabit ports are the useful part. Split them between two machines, or bond them, and you have a link two and a half times a gigabit connection — comfortable for proxy editing, card offloads and a Time Machine target. The M.2 slots take NVMe cache or a small SSD pool, the USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports move a card reader along at 10Gb/s, and 8GB of RAM is generous for a box this size.

Where it earns its place is the balance: small enough to live on a desk, quick enough on 2.5GbE for the way most freelancers actually work, and covered by a three-year warranty. We came away thinking of it as the NAS for someone who wants the job done without building a network project around it.

Fifty concurrent editors and 25-gigabit networking describe a different class of machine than anything else here. The DS1825+ is built for a facility where the NAS is infrastructure rather than a convenience: eight bays, expansion to a stated 360TB, and high-availability clustering with automated failover for the day a unit stops answering.

We looked at it the way a post supervisor would, asking how many people can hit the same volume before it complains. Synology's answer is 2,239 MB/s and support for 50-plus concurrent users, backed by a 3-year warranty and the enterprise support tier. That is a different proposition from the four-bay boxes, which are sized for a handful of machines in a single room.

It's also the narrowest recommendation on this page. The price sits at the top of the range here, and eight bays of enterprise storage is wasted on an editor who cuts alone with a second drive for backup. Buy it when the alternative is a server room and a support contract; if your team is you, a four-bay pick does the same work for a fraction of the outlay.