I'm building a small system to use mostly as a Plex server, music/midi audio player and file backup from other systems. I'm going to use Windows 8.1 installed on a small SSD and probably a single 2TB HDD for storage to start with. The system will likely be on 24/7 but is probably only be used/accessed sporadically. The question is: Is it worth spending the premium on a NAS specific HDD or would any old drive be fine given the level of usage? I'm trying to spend as little as possible, so I'm basically looking a cost/benefit rather than what is ideal.
Having had some non-NAS drives die recently, I would advocate using NAS drives. For the extra warranty, potential increased life, and reduction of potential headaches, I'd say go for it.
The NAS drives are more reliable when regularly accessed and when in an enclosure with a number of other drives (vibrations and whatnot - some NAS drives are rated differently with regards to the number of drives you are using in one system. WD Reds I believe are 5 - 8 drives? Would have to check). I'm not sure getting one for your use case is necessary. However, the NAS drives do come with extra warranty and will probably last longer. I've only ever had one hard drive fail on me (famous last words here) and I've always used bog standard consumer drives. Even my NAS has two WD greens in it.
If you're going to pay extra, I would say might as well go for the SE or RE 'enterprise' series if you're looking at WD drives. They don't cost that much more if at all than the NAS Red series at least in the US. For other brands, I don't think it makes any difference really. I use Seagates primarily and haven't had any issues with them. Toshiba have been fine for me as well. I would also go for 4TB instead. The price jump isn't that big and having extra room can't hurt.
I've had three WD greens die recently, despite swearing by them for years. One was even dead when it came out of its wrapping!
I had the same dilemma regarding cost, eventually went for the RED WD drives simply for the extra warranty. Which has already proven useful when one started developing errors after the first year. Mine is a FreeNAS build mainly used for Plex too.
im running 4 x 2tb here all non nas drives (couple barracudas couple greens) had not issues here with any of them.
I think it's all down to personal preferences, all drives can fail. For me the fact that WD reds are warrantied for 5 years makes me feel happier. In my main media storage I have the following: 2 X 6Tb WD Reds 2 X 3Tb WD Reds My white box san / nas has 3 x WD Greens and I have some 3tb Toshiba drives kicking around. I accept that drive will fail so the storage box uses stable bit drive pool and there are 4 copies of files that I cant afford to loose (about 100gb of photos and docs). The rest of the data on that box is my movie collect which I have bluray/ dad's at my parents place in storage. The San /nas is running synology so it's tolerant for up to one drive failure, but again nothing production on this box, all testing stuff so I won't loose any sleep over loosing it. Summary, all drives can fail. So go with what ur wallet is happiest with and make sure u back up anything u can't afford to loose.
The benefit of a NAS drive for single drive use is negligible. Anyone who says otherwise is miss informed and has been indoctrinated by Seagate/wd marketing speel. A NAS drive has raid drop out features and energy management along with the a greater structural tolerance to cope with vibration and gyroscopic waves caused by numerous drives in close proximity. It's tested to withstand a more hash environment (NAS boxs gets warm) so as long as your running a single drive and it's well ventilated or able to run cool, don't buy a NAS drive. Ps, as an official distributor for Seagate it's my job to know and in 99/100 applications the benefits do not outweigh the outlay.
Thank for the help. Probably going for a standard drive with a 2 year warranty unless I see a very good deal on a NAS drive. - I already have a 2TB external HD I'm going to do regular full backups to so losing the drive would be annoying not catastrophic. After 2 years I'd probably be looking at a reasonably priced replacement anyway. - I figure Windows will power down the drives after a period of inactivity, something that I read is not necessarily a good thing for drives designed for 24/7 use but I guess may help standard drives and save power. - It's only only a single drive system, so as mentioned above, a lot of the features on a NAS orientated drive would be superfluous to me. - I'm tight and reckless
I know my response is late to the party but..... I have 2 x Netgear NAS's both with 4x 3TB drives running RAID5. I've had 8x 3TB Barracudas 4 of which have all died after 2 years the other 4 are still going, but I suspect not for much longer. I am replacing them with WD Red's as they break. Last time 2 died at the same time on the same NAS that buggered a couple of things up!
Yeah, exactly. I bought 4x3TB Reds and used them in RAID6 on OMV. If I were to buy them nowadays though, I'd go with HGST Deskstar NAS drives, as I keep hearing they are more reliable.
i'm not quite sure that i'd count a DOA drive as being a drive 'dying' as such, as it could simply be that it was dropped by the retailer or the postmen & women decided to play volleyball with the package or something. Even if it were a fault with the manufacturing, buy enough drives over time & at some point you're increasingly likely to get hit with the infant mortality stick at some point - as whilst most of the initial bathtub curve failure rate will be picked up by the manufacturer prior to shipping out, there will always be some that slip through & reach retail. Well i recently had two new (from different suppliers - & one drive was noticeably older than the other) 4TB WD Reds fail very quickly - after initialising, formatting & copying data on, there were 1000s of errors picked up on a raid card, to the point of them being kicked off - but it's just life & the replacements worked perfectly; touch wood of course. imho, the much bigger problem is if any drives you use lots of start failing en masse within the warranty period - which i had with the 7200.11s (& their RMA replacements from Seagate) going back in time - as whilst some drives will always fail early & it's just bad luck (hence the need for backup(s)), too many & it becomes impossible to safely use any of them.
I think the WD Red drives offer very good value. I wouldn't really recommend the Seagate 7200.14 or WD Green series - I've picked up a few and had some minor problems - both can be noisy (chirping - parking heads when idling) and the price difference between Seagates and WD Reds isn't huge. Between the Seagate and WD Green, the Seagate edges it, though.
