The best 5-bay and 6-bay NAS in Canada
By Ryan Fournier · Reviewed by Claire Bergeron · Updated Five or six bays is worth it for one reason above all: double fault tolerance becomes economical. With five drives, SHR-2 or RAID 6 survives two simultaneous failures while giving up only about a third of your capacity — the ratio that does not add up on four bays. The Synology DS1525+ is the pick of this tier in Canada: five bays, ECC, SHR-2 and a 10-gigabit upgrade slot. The six-bay UGREEN DXP6800 Pro is the Intel-i5 flagship when it is in stock.
5-bay and 6-bay picks, by capability and live CAD price
| DS1525+ | DXP6800 Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Live price (Amazon.ca) | CA$1,651 | US$1100US |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen V1500B (4 cores, 8 threads) | Intel Core i5-1235U (10 cores, 12 threads) |
| Bays | 5 | 6 |
| RAM | 32 GB max, ECC | 64 GB max |
| M.2 NVMe | 2 × M.2 | 2 × M.2 |
| Network | 2 × 2.5GbE, expandable to 10GbE with the E10G22-T1-Mini | 2 × 10GbE (link-aggregable to 20 Gbit/s) |
| Plex transcode | No iGPU — software only, not for 4K | 4K HDR via Intel Quick Sync |
| Third-party drives | HDDs open; NVMe locked | Any NAS drive |
Rows marked US are not currently stocked on Amazon.ca — the price shown is the live Amazon.com (US) listing in US dollars. It ships to Canada, but budget for the exchange rate, any duty and brokerage, and a cross-border return path before comparing it with a Canadian price.
The verdict: which should you buy?
The real reason to go past four bays
It is not usually about raw capacity — four 24 TB drives already hold a lot. The genuine driver is fault tolerance economics. On a four-bay RAID 6 or SHR-2, you surrender half your drives to redundancy, which stings. On five drives, SHR-2/RAID 6 costs you two drives out of five — about a third — so double fault tolerance finally makes financial sense. That matters as drives get bigger: a 20 TB+ drive takes many hours, sometimes days, to rebuild, and a second drive failing mid-rebuild is a real risk that single-parity RAID 5/SHR does not survive. Five and six bays are how you buy out of that risk. Model it in the RAID calculator to see the usable-capacity trade at each level.
The honest Canadian stock picture
This tier is thinner on Amazon.ca than the two- and four-bay classes, so the table above is deliberately short and honest. The DS1525+ is reliably stocked and priced live; the six-bay DXP6800 Pro and QNAP's larger boxes move in and out, and where a model is not currently listed we show no price rather than invent one. If you want six bays and nothing is in stock, two sensible paths: wait for the DXP6800 Pro to return, or step into a DIY build — a six-bay-plus TrueNAS or Unraid box is often better value at this size and lets you choose exactly the CPU, networking and noise level you want.
Drives and networking scale up too
Two things change at this size. First, the drives are the bigger cost — five or six 16–24 TB drives dwarf the enclosure price, so plan them carefully by CA$/TB and consider Pro-class or enterprise drives whose higher workload rating suits a busy multi-drive array (and whose noise you can tolerate in a basement). Second, at five or six fast drives a single 2.5-gigabit port becomes the bottleneck for sequential work, which is exactly why the 10GbE upgrade path on the DS1525+ and the dual 10GbE on the DXP6800 Pro matter here in a way they do not on a two-bay. Size the whole thing in the drive-count calculator first.
What this costs in Canada
The prices in the table above are live from Amazon.ca in Canadian dollars, so there is no exchange-rate guesswork. That matters more than usual for NAS boxes: the same model carries a wide, moving spread across Amazon.ca, Best Buy, Canada Computers, Newegg.ca and Memory Express — a two-minute cross-check before you buy is worth real money on a $600–$1,600 purchase.
Importing the enclosure from Amazon.com rarely wins once you add exchange, duty, brokerage and a harder warranty path. The honest metric is total landed cost plus how easy an RMA is — and a NAS you will run for years is exactly the device where local warranty support pays for itself.
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Frequently asked questions
Is a 5-bay or 6-bay NAS worth it?
Mainly for fault tolerance economics. On five drives, SHR-2 or RAID 6 gives double fault tolerance while costing only about a third of capacity, versus half on a four-bay — worth it as large drives make multi-day rebuilds and second-drive failures a real risk. If four large drives and single redundancy cover you, stay at four bays.
What is the best 5-bay NAS in Canada?
The Synology DS1525+ — five bays, ECC RAM, SHR-2 for two-drive fault tolerance, and a 10GbE upgrade slot the four-bay DS925+ lacks. It is reliably in stock on Amazon.ca and is the sensible step up from a full four-bay NAS.
Are there many 6-bay NAS options in Canada?
Fewer than two- and four-bay models. The UGREEN DXP6800 Pro is the standout six-bay when in stock, but availability on Amazon.ca comes and goes. If nothing is listed, waiting or a DIY TrueNAS/Unraid build is often the better value at this size.
Do I need 10GbE on a 5-bay or 6-bay NAS?
It becomes worthwhile here. With five or six fast drives, a single 2.5-gigabit port bottlenecks sequential transfers, so the DS1525+'s 10GbE upgrade slot and the DXP6800 Pro's dual 10GbE let the array's speed actually reach your computer. On a two-bay it rarely matters; at this size it often does.
Ryan Fournier covers home-server hardware and efficiency at nasdrives.ca: the right power supply, the UPS, and what a NAS actually draws running around the clock, priced against Canadian hydro rates.
Reviewed by Claire Bergeron, Editor-in-chief