Affiliate disclosure

HomeServerCalc.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Which links are affiliate links

Any link that goes to Amazon is an affiliate link, including product images, product names inside running text, the buttons on product cards, and the rows of the build lists on the complete builds. Outbound affiliate links carry rel="nofollow sponsored". Internal links to other pages on this site are not affiliate links and earn nothing.

If a product is genuinely not sold on Amazon, the link is a search rather than a product page. We do not fabricate a product listing to make a card look complete, because a wrong product link sends you to the wrong item and earns nothing anyway.

What we are paid for, and what we are not

We are paid a percentage of a qualifying order, at no additional cost to you. The price you pay is the same whether you arrive through a link here or type the address yourself.

We are not paid by any storage manufacturer to place a product, and no vendor reviews or approves anything published here before it goes live. We are not tied to Synology, QNAP, UGREEN, TerraMaster, Asustor, Western Digital, Seagate or Toshiba, which is the entire reason the RAID capacity calculator can compare their schemes side by side.

Where a paid arrangement ever exists, it is labelled on the page carrying it. There are none at the time of writing.

Why a commission does not change the recommendation

The obvious risk with commission-funded advice is that it pushes readers toward the expensive option. On this site the arithmetic pushes the other way often enough that it is worth showing.

• Every hardware guide says who should not buy the expert pick, and the reason is usually the same: at a fixed budget the money does more in drives than in a faster enclosure.
• The eight-bay guide tells a large share of its readers to buy a four-bay unit with bigger drives instead, which is a smaller order.
• The backup guide recommends rotating two cheap external drives rather than a second NAS for most households.
• Drive shucking is covered honestly, including the cases where the cheaper route is the right one.

Prices and availability

Prices shown on this site are the listing prices recorded when each product was last verified against Amazon's product API. Storage prices move quickly, and mechanical drives and NAND both ran well above their historical per-terabyte pricing at the time of verification. Treat every figure here as a snapshot for comparison rather than a quote, and confirm the current price on Amazon before ordering. Amazon's price at the moment of purchase is the price that applies.

Third-party programs

Beyond the Amazon Associates Program, this site may participate in other affiliate programs in future. Any such link is disclosed on the page carrying it and is covered by this policy.

Editorial independence and how to hold us to it

We do not test hardware in person and we say so on every page. Recommendations come from published manufacturer specifications, drive datasheets, published large-fleet reliability statistics and verified owner reviews. If a recommendation here looks like it was bought rather than reasoned, say so through the contact page and we will either show the reasoning or change the page.

Questions

Anything unclear about how this site earns money can be asked directly through the contact form. See also the privacy policy for how affiliate links interact with analytics, and the terms of service.