eRacks Systems Tech Blog
Open Source Experts Since 1999
We Re-Verified Every NAS Default Against the 2026 Drive Shortage. Here’s What Changed.
The 2026 drive and memory shortage has quietly broken a lot of storage price lists. Drives that vendors still advertise as standard are backorder-only at every national retailer. Memory prices moved 50 percent in a quarter. A configurator that hasn’t been re-checked against real supply this year is, politely, fiction.
So we re-verified our entire NAS line: every default component, checked against multiple named suppliers, for both price and actual in-stock availability. Here is what changed, and what it means if you’re shopping for storage this summer.
The 30TB drive problem
Our large NAS models used to default to the 30TB Seagate IronWolf Pro. It’s a fine drive, and it has become effectively unobtainable: backorder-only at the one national supplier still listing it, dropped from Seagate’s own current lineup, unavailable everywhere else we checked. Continuing to default to it would mean quoting systems we could not ship this week.
The fix: our high-capacity systems now default to the 24TB IronWolf Pro, in stock at multiple national retailers at about $35 per terabyte, and we added the 32TB IronWolf Pro, also in stock, at the top of the ladder at nearly the same cost per terabyte. Every drive in our NAS configurators remains CMR (conventional magnetic recording); we do not use shingled SMR drives, whose write performance collapses during the sustained writes of a RAID rebuild, exactly when you can least afford it.
ZFS RAIDZ2, now the default everywhere
Every eRacks storage system, from the 1U four-bay NAS4 to the petabyte-class NAS100, now defaults to a ZFS RAIDZ2 pool: dual parity, meaning any two drives can fail without losing data. RAIDZ3 (triple parity) and striped mirrors (the performance-first layout) are right there in the dropdown, and traditional hardware RAID remains available for shops that require it, just never as a silent default.
Under every pool is an IT-mode HBA (a host bus adapter that passes drives directly to the operating system), because ZFS wants to see raw drives to do its end-to-end checksumming and self-healing. If you’re deciding between RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3, and mirrors, our free ZFS layout guide works through the math.
Prices that match what parts cost
Component costs moved, so prices moved: mid-size and large models are repriced to current reality (the NAS12 now starts at $8,995, the NAS72 at $25,995), and every price in the configurator reflects a component list we verified we can buy this week. The entry line held: the NAS4 still starts at $1,995 and the NAS6 at $2,995, now with 16GB of DDR5 standard and ECC memory available as an upgrade.
This is the same discipline we described on our refreshed Components We Use page: new parts only, authorized US distribution, multi-source price-and-availability checks before anything gets quoted, and a 72-hour burn-in before anything ships.
Browse the re-verified line at eracks.com/products/rackmount-nas-servers, or ask us to spec one for your workload, a human answers.
joe July 9th, 2026
Tags: CMR, drive shortage, IronWolf Pro, IT-mode HBA, NAS, RAIDZ2, supply chain, transparent pricing, TrueNAS, ZFS
eRacks Expands NAS Lineup: 11 Models, 4 Bays to 100 Bays, From $1,995
eRacks Open Source Systems has expanded its rackmount NAS server lineup to 11 models, spanning from the 4-bay NAS4 at $1,995 to the 100-bay NAS100 at $29,995. The expansion targets the accelerating cost pressure of cloud storage subscriptions versus on-premise alternatives, with full Linux, ZFS, TrueNAS, and Ceph support across the entire range – and zero per-TB licensing fees.
The math behind on-premise NAS in 2026
Storing 100 terabytes on Amazon S3 costs roughly $27,600 per year in standard-tier fees. The same 100 TB sitting on an eRacks NAS24 – 24 bays, ~480 TB raw capacity – is a one-time $8,995 purchase. Payback is under four months.
Then there are egress fees. A single 100 TB pull from AWS to your office costs around $9,000 just to get your own data back. Cloud storage made sense when the data was small. At terabyte and petabyte scale, the math has flipped.
The lineup at a glance
| Model | Bays | Form Factor | Price (starting) | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NAS4 | 4 | 1U or desktop | $1,995 | Branch office, dev team |
| NAS6 | 6 | 1U | $2,995 | Small office, light backup |
| NAS8 | 8 | 2U | $4,995 | SMB primary file server |
| NAS12 | 12 | 2U | $5,995 | SMB with growth headroom |
| NAS16 | 16 | 3U | $6,995 | Mid-tier file + backup |
| NAS24 | 24 | 4U | $8,995 | Mid-enterprise (the bestseller) |
| NAS36 | 36 | 4U | $10,995 | Mid-large workloads, scale-out node |
| NAS50 | 50 | 4U top-load | $14,995 | Media production, surveillance |
| NAS60 | 60 | 4U top-load | $19,995 | High-density archive, large backup |
| NAS72 | 72 | 4U top-load | $24,995 | Broadcast, large-scale archive |
| NAS100 | 100 | 4U top-load | $29,995 | Petabyte-class, Ceph nodes |
Plus a parallel all-flash NAS lineup for performance-tier workloads: FLASH10 ($5,995), FLASH20 ($9,895), FLASH24 ($8,995), FLASH48 ($15,995), and FLASH72 ($19,985) – all-NVMe arrays for database backends, AI training datasets, virtualization storage, and any workload that needs IOPS rather than raw capacity.
Open source the whole way down
Every eRacks NAS ships with full Linux – not a locked appliance OS – and supports your choice of:
- ZFS with ECC RAM for data integrity
- TrueNAS Scale for the friendly web UI experience
- Ceph for clustered scale-out
- MinIO for S3-compatible object storage
- Nextcloud for private cloud file sharing
- OpenMediaVault for the lightweight option
- Proxmox if you want NAS + VMs in one box
No vendor licenses. No per-TB fees. Full root access. You own the OS, you own the data, you own the hardware.
Hardware standards across the line
ECC RAM as standard. Hot-swap drive bays throughout. Redundant power supply options on NAS12 and above. NVMe SSD caching on larger models for accelerated reads. 25 GbE networking on demand for AI training workloads, video production pipelines, and large-scale backup.
The lineup also scales without chassis replacement. A NAS50 shipping with 24 drives today expands to 50 as needs grow – no forklift upgrade required.
When does it pay off?
For most organizations storing more than 5 TB of business data, on-premise NAS is cheaper than cloud subscriptions in year one. For HIPAA-aligned healthcare deployments, law firms protecting privileged data, or any organization with data sovereignty requirements, on-premise is not just cheaper – it is the right architecture.
Custom-built since 1999
eRacks Open Source Systems has designed, built, and shipped custom Linux servers since 1999. Every system is configured to order, burn-in tested before shipping, and supported directly by engineers who built it. No call centers, no upsell scripts, no per-feature licensing.
Get a quote
The full NAS lineup is at eracks.com/products/rackmount-nas-servers. Contact us for a custom quote sized to your specific capacity, performance, and software-stack requirements.
joe April 29th, 2026
Posted In: Backups, Linux, NAS24, NAS50, NAS72, Storage
Tags: backup, Best-Practices, Cloud Storage Server, eRacks/NAS24, eRacks/NAS50, NAS, NAS24, NAS72, near-line storage, Storage, Storage Server
From 144TB to 2.6PB: The 2026 Storage Market and Why On-Premise NAS Is Back
The data storage market in 2026 is doing something unusual: it’s both growing fast and getting cheaper per terabyte at the same time. Global storage requirements are projected to nearly double by 2029, hitting roughly 20,000 exabytes. The NAS hardware market alone is forecast to grow from $55B today to $173B+ by 2034 – a 15.5% CAGR. And while all that’s happening, 30TB+ enterprise SATA drives have become genuinely mainstream, with retail prices that put petabyte-scale on-premise storage within reach of mid-sized organizations for the first time.
Meanwhile, the cloud-storage decade is hitting a wall. Egress fees on AWS, Azure and GCP have only gone up. Ransomware losses keep climbing. Healthcare, legal, finance, and government buyers are all asking the same question they used to leave for the IT department: where, exactly, is our data? The answer “somewhere in us-east-1” doesn’t satisfy a HIPAA auditor, a SOC 2 attestation, or a court order anymore.
The on-premise comeback is a hardware story
For years, the argument against running storage in your own rack was capex vs opex – “cloud is cheaper because you don’t buy hardware.” That math has flipped for any organization storing more than a few hundred TB. A 36-bay NAS loaded with 24TB drives gives you nearly a petabyte of raw storage for the price of about 8-10 months of equivalent S3 storage at production-tier rates – and the hardware keeps working for 5-7 years after that.
Three things made it flip:
- HDD prices at historic lows. 28TB and 30TB enterprise drives now sell for under $20/TB. A decade ago, that was 2TB-drive territory.
- ZFS and modern Linux file systems matured. ZFS in particular – with built-in checksumming, snapshots, replication, and dedup – has become the default storage layer for serious on-premise deployments. No vendor lock-in, no licensing tax.
- Cloud egress is the new vendor lock. Pulling 100TB out of S3 to migrate workloads costs more than the hardware that would store it locally for 5 years.
The eRacks NAS lineup
Our rackmount NAS line covers everything from a small workgroup file server to true petabyte-scale storage chassis. All ship with real Ubuntu Linux (your choice of file system – ZFS, XFS, or Btrfs), enterprise components (ECC RAM, redundant power supplies, hot-swap bays), and zero proprietary management software. The OS is yours, the data is yours, the hardware is yours.
| Model | Form | Bays | Max Raw | Starting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NAS4 | 1U | 4 | 144TB | $1,895 |
| NAS6 | 2U | 6 | 180TB | $2,795 |
| NAS8 | 2U | 8 | 240TB+ | $3,695 |
| NAS12 | 2U | 12 | 360TB | $4,695 |
| NAS16 | 3U | 16+2 | 288TB | $6,595 |
| NAS24 | 4U | 24 | 720TB | $8,995 |
| NAS36 | 4U | 36 | ~1PB | $10,495 |
| NAS50 | 9U | 50 | 1.3PB | $13,595 |
| NAS60 | 4U | 60 | ~2PB | $15,995 |
| NAS72 | 4U | 72 | 1.5PB+ | $19,995 |
| NAS100 | 4U | 102 | 2.6PB | $24,995 |
Starting prices are barebones (chassis, motherboard, PSU); add drives, RAM, OS choice at configuration. Custom builds welcome.
What you actually run on it
Because we don’t ship a proprietary OS, you get to pick the storage stack that matches your workload. Common combinations our customers deploy:
- File systems: ZFS (default for most deployments), XFS, Btrfs
- NAS / file sharing: TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, Samba, NFS, iSCSI
- Distributed storage: Ceph, BeeGFS, MooseFS, LizardFS – for multi-node clusters and HPC workloads
- Object storage: MinIO (S3-compatible) – increasingly popular as a local target for AI/ML training datasets
- Private cloud: NextCloud, Seafile, OwnCloud, Proxmox VE, CloudStack
- Backup & sync: Bacula, BorgBackup, restic, rsync, Duplicati
Pre-installed and tested before shipping, or shipped bare for you to provision however you like – your call at order time.
Who’s actually buying these in 2026
Six segments dominate our NAS pipeline this year:
- SMBs and mid-market IT trying to escape per-GB cloud bills that have crept past the cost of hardware ownership
- Media and production companies with growing 4K/8K video libraries (one production house can fill a 720TB NAS24 in a year)
- Healthcare and medical practices with HIPAA and patient-data sovereignty requirements that rule out major cloud providers
- Legal firms archiving case files, depositions, and discovery materials that simply cannot leave the building
- AI/ML teams needing local high-speed datasets for training – typically pairing a NAS24 or NAS36 with our AI server line for the GPU compute side
- MSPs and IT consultancies building private cloud infrastructure for clients who want SaaS economics without surrendering data ownership
What we don’t do
We don’t build consumer NAS appliances. There’s no fancy iOS app to manage your photos. We don’t license a proprietary OS or lock you into a vendor ecosystem. If you want a four-bay desktop box with a slick web UI for your home media collection, we’re not your shop – and that’s fine, lots of good vendors serve that market.
What we do build: enterprise rackmount storage on standard Linux, configurable to your exact spec, that you fully own and can replace any component on. The same approach we’ve taken since 1999.
Get the configuration right
Drive count, RAID level, networking (10/25/100GbE), RAM (1GB per TB is the rule of thumb for ZFS), and OS choice all matter. Reply to this post or hit our contact page with rough requirements and we’ll spec it for you – usually same day.
joe April 8th, 2026
Posted In: Backups, Linux, Open Source, Rackmount Servers, servers, Storage
Tags: backup, ceph, Cloud Storage Server, eRacks, eRacks signature service, eRacks/NAS24, eRacks/NAS36, eRacks/NAS50, MooseFS, NAS, NAS24, NAS36, NAS50, NAS72, Privacy, Rackmount, sata
8TB Western Digital Red and RedPro now available
8TB WD Red and RedPro drives are now available in the dropdowns on all eRacks NAS Systems, and are available on select other eRacks systems, and of course all eRacks systems by custom quote –
If you don’t see it on the system you want, just ask & we’ll quote you!
j
joe December 3rd, 2016
Posted In: Backups, NAS24, NAS36, NAS50, NAS72, servers