Inclusion boundary
We include turnkey desktop or tower NAS products sold new in the United States for personal, family, creator, homelab, or self-service small-team use. Consumer all-flash appliances and storage-included configurations can qualify.
Rackmount systems, expansion shelves, DAS, used or recertified stock, OEM-only products, and generic barebones that require a separately maintained NAS operating system are excluded.
Exact hard-drive identity
A drive must be a current manufacturer-positioned 3.5-inch SATA NAS HDD with an exact retail MPN. Desktop, surveillance, datacenter-only, SAS, and solid-state drives do not share this catalog.
Source order
Official product page → official specification sheet → official compatibility list → exact US new-condition product page. Search results and merchant category pages are discovery tools, never publishable purchase links.
Merchant and affiliate coverage
We search an evidence-bounded roster of US-facing merchants with public affiliate or creator programs, then retain only exact direct product pages. Manufacturer stores without a defensible affiliate program may remain as useful non-affiliate purchase options.
Clean URLs are stored independently from program metadata. Affiliate-program availability does not prove account approval, SKU-level commission eligibility, seller identity, stock, or warranty coverage.
Transparent calculations
NAS value uses the lowest published checked price divided by primary bay count; HDD value uses the same price rule divided by decimal terabytes. Bundle comparisons show the lowest checked split-store total and, when available, the lowest checked one-store total. A dated editorial reference is used only when no publishable Offer price exists.
Equal-drive one-disk-redundancy planning uses $(n - 1) × drive capacity$. It is an approximation before filesystem overhead. RAID is never described as a backup.
Refresh cadence
Exact Offer pages are monitored every day. A price or availability value is published only when the exact product identity and unambiguous structured evidence both pass; blocked, malformed, or ambiguous pages retain their previous verified value and date instead of receiving a false fresh timestamp.
Seller and condition evidence keeps its own last successful verification date. Compatibility is reviewed every 90 days and core specifications every 180 days. Retired records move to lifecycle history rather than silently disappearing.