The best NAS for Ollama in Canada

Most NAS boxes that can run Ollama at all ship with 8 or 16 GB in a single stick. That is the worst of both worlds for local AI: small models only, at half bandwidth. The cheapest meaningful upgrade is a matching second stick, which fills the second memory channel and doubles both capacity and speed at once. Soldered-memory boxes (the ARM NAS units, the UGREEN iDX line, the Minisforum N5 MAX) cannot be upgraded, so buy the RAM you will need on day one.

One exception: chips with a single memory channel, like the Intel N100 in UGREEN’s DXP2800, gain capacity but no speed from more RAM. Published N100 results range from about 5 to 15 tokens a second on a 3B model, so on those boxes Ollama is a small-model tool.

• Low-power Intel and ARM (N100, Celeron, RK3588): Llama 3.2 3B, Qwen3 4B or Gemma 3 4B. Expect a few words a second, and minutes of waiting on long prompts.
• Intel Core and Pentium with DDR5: 4B to 8B models; filling both channels is what turns 8B from slow to usable. No published LLM measurements exist for these NAS chips, so our ranges are wide.
• AMD Ryzen with a Radeon iGPU (Minisforum N5 Pro and N5 AIR): 8B at a comfortable reading speed with two sticks, and the mixture-of-experts gpt-oss 20B surprisingly fast because only 3.6B of its parameters are active per word.
• Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Minisforum N5 MAX): up to Llama 3.3 70B, which fits in 64 GB and runs at about 5 tokens a second, the same as published measurements on that chip.

Ollama is the engine; Open WebUI is the interface, a self-hosted chat app built to run entirely offline that talks to Ollama. Both run as containers, so any NAS with a real container platform (Synology Container Manager, UGREEN Docker, QNAP Container Station, TerraMaster) can host them. Open WebUI adds user accounts, chat history and document upload, and it all stays on your network.

If you want 8B-class models answering faster than you read and you do not already need a new NAS, a separate box is often the better buy: keep the NAS for storage and point Open WebUI at an Ollama server on a Ryzen mini PC. A discrete GPU with its own VRAM beats every NAS here on speed; a few AI NAS units (the Minisforum N5 Pro and N5 AIR with a PCIe slot and OCuLink, the UGREEN iDX6011 Pro with PCIe x8) can take one, which we do not model. Our calculator covers the built-in graphics and memory only.