I really want a NAS, but it’s out of the question for me — here’s why

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I really want a NAS . The idea of buying a new piece of tech I can set up and play with gets me uber excited. But it’s not just about novelty. A NAS would get me off those subscription plans for cloud storage where I’m basically just renting digital real estate and where — depending on the provider — privacy is questionable to say the least.

A NAS makes sense in many ways, but there are also several reasons why it doesn’t. Those reasons outweigh all the positives I’ve mentioned, meaning that a NAS is out of the question for me — at least for now. Here’s why.

A NAS can be expensive. So much so that I can’t justify the cost, mainly because I don’t have enough data to store on it. My colleague wrote a post about how much data you actually need to have for a NAS to make financial sense, and the answer was at least 2TB .

While I have plenty of photos, videos, and all sorts of business documents I store in the cloud, I’m not nearly a quarter there at the moment. I’m working with less than 400GB of data, making the switch from cloud storage to a NAS irrational from a financial perspective.

As an example, a Google One plan with 400GB of storage goes for just $50 per year. If I set up my NAS, I’d have to futureproof it and add in more storage, and the total bill would easily exceed $500. That means the NAS would pay for itself in 10 years or more, which is a long time. Lots of things can happen in that time, including Google bumping up storage on each of its plans, pushing the financial breaking point even further into the future. As an example, Google’s $20 One AI Pro plan’s storage was increased overnight from 2TB to 5TB for no extra charge.

What’s more, Google’s $50 per year plan also includes higher usage limits for Gemini , adds Gemini to Gmail, which most people use, and offers a few extra perks. Google obviously isn’t the only cloud storage provider out there, so there are plenty of options to choose from. Some are a bit more expensive, others a bit cheaper, but in any case, I don’t see any financial logic in switching from the cloud to a NAS for me at this very moment.

Using any cloud storage solution comes with at least a certain amount of maintenance. Take Google Photos as an example. If you have thousands of images and keep adding new ones like most people do, you have to sort them into albums, delete the ones you took and don’t like, and perhaps even use the editing tools built into Photos to make your favorite ones stand out more.