Craig Lloyd is a smarthome expert with nearly ten years of professional writing experience. His work has been published by iFixit, Lifehacker, Digital Trends, Slashgear, and GottaBeMobile. Read more.
If you’re thinking about jumping into the NAS game and are shopping around for high-capacity hard drives, not just any hard drive will do. Here’s what you need to know.
It’s easy to think that all hard drives are equal, save for the form factor and connection type. However, there’s a difference between the work your hard drive does in your computer versus the workload of a NAS hard drive. A drive in your computer may only read and write data for a couple hours at a time, while a NAS drive may read and write data for weeks on end, or even longer. This is why it’s important that you get the right hard drive for the job, and that goes doubly for drives you stick in a NAS. Let’s a take a deeper dive.
NAS Hard Drives Are Built Specifically for a NAS Environment
The environment inside of a NAS box is much different than a typical desktop or laptop computer. When you pack in a handful of sweaty hard drives close together, several things happen: there’s more vibration, more heat, and a lot more action going on in general.
To cope with this, NAS hard drives usually have better vibration tolerance and produce less heat than regular hard drives, thanks to slightly-slower spindle speeds and reduced seek noise.
Furthermore, NAS hard drives come with specialized firmware that’s specific for use in a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) setup. RAID allows you to spread out data across multiple drives (depending on which RAID setup you go with), while your NAS see all these drives as just a single storage pool.
In short, the firmware on a regular desktop hard drive will force it to continuously try and recover a piece of data if a sector on that drive goes bad, which can result in timeouts. A NAS hard drive, on the other hand, won’t keep trying and trying. Instead, it simply reports an error so that the RAID controller can get the needed data from a different hard drive in the RAID setup.
Can I Still Use a Regular Hard Drive in a NAS, Though?
One big factor that people can notice right away about NAS hard drives is that they’re slightly pricier than their standard, non-NAS counterparts. This is thanks to the special features we just mentioned, as well as a beefier warranty that some manufacturers provide for NAS-specific drives (although you can score NAS hard drives for cheaper by “shucking” external hard drives). This may lead you to using regular hard drives for your NAS if you’re on a budget, which is completely understandable.
We’ll say this: hard drives made specifically for NAS boxes are still relatively new to the market, and they really didn’t become a thing until maybe five or six years ago. Before then, people just used regular hard drives in their NAS setups.
However, NAS hard drives are a real improvement. While you can technically use regular hard drives in a NAS setup if you really want to, you won’t get the same level of reliability and performance that you would when using hard drives specifically made for a NAS.
How Do I Spot a NAS Hard Drive?
So now that you know the differences between a regular hard drive and one that’s meant for a NAS, how exactly do you know which is which when you’re out shopping for drives?
Most of the time, manufacturers put the word “NAS” somewhere on the packaging and on the hard drive itself, but usually the model name will get higher preferential treatment, and it’ll be something unique to the manufacturer. Here are the model names from a few of the top hard drive manufacturers:
- Western Digital:WD Red
- Seagate:IronWolf
- Hitachi/HGST:Deskstar NAS
- Toshiba:N300
If you’re buying used, you might come across older models from the above companies with different names. Seagate’s older NAS hard drives, for example, just went by the name “NAS HDD” instead of IronWolf. Western Digital also had some older NAS drives that went by “Caviar RAID Edition” and “WD RE.”
As far as which model is the best, you honestly can just play a game of Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe to pick one. However, it’s at least worth knowing the failure rates of each hard drive manufacturer. BackBlaze kept track of their own hard drive failure rates and showed that Seagate was the worst offender. Of course, no matter the brand, any hard drive can fail at any moment for any number of reasons. I’ve personally never had a Seagate drive fail on me, whereas I have had a Western Digital drive fail.
Your mileage will vary as well, which is why your NAS should run in a RAID setup to keep things up and running should a drive fail at any point. Oh, and of course, you should still keep things backed up.
Si está pensando en lanzarse al juego NAS y está buscando discos duros de alta capacidad, no cualquier disco duro será suficiente. Esto es lo que necesita saber.
Es fácil pensar que todos los discos duros son iguales, salvo por el factor de forma y el tipo de conexión. Sin embargo, existe una diferencia entre el trabajo que realiza su disco duro en su computadora y la carga de trabajo de un disco duro NAS. Es posible que una unidad en su computadora solo lea y escriba datos durante un par de horas a la vez, mientras que una unidad NAS puede leer y escribir datos durante semanas o incluso más. Por eso es importante que obtenga el disco duro adecuado para el trabajo, y eso se aplica doblemente a las unidades que coloca en un NAS. Profundicemos.
Los discos duros NAS están diseñados específicamente para un entorno NAS
El entorno dentro de una caja NAS es muy diferente al de una computadora de escritorio o portátil típica. Cuando guardas un puñado de discos duros sudorosos muy juntos, suceden varias cosas: hay más vibración, más calor y mucha más acción en general.
Para hacer frente a esto, los discos duros NAS suelen tener una mejor tolerancia a la vibración y producen menos calor que los discos duros normales, gracias a velocidades de eje ligeramente más lentas y ruido de búsqueda reducido.
Además, los discos duros NAS vienen con firmware especializado que es específico para su uso en un Matriz redundante de discos independientes (RAID) configuración. RAID le permite distribuir datos en varias unidades (dependiendo de la configuración de RAID que elija), mientras que su NAS ve todas estas unidades como un solo grupo de almacenamiento.
En resumen, el firmware de un disco duro de escritorio normal lo obligará a intentar continuamente recuperar una parte de los datos si un sector de esa unidad falla, lo que puede provocar tiempos de espera. Un disco duro NAS, por otro lado, no seguirá intentándolo y tratando. En su lugar, simplemente informa un error para que el controlador RAID pueda obtener los datos necesarios de un disco duro diferente en la configuración RAID.
¿Puedo seguir usando un disco duro normal en un NAS?
Un factor importante que la gente puede notar de inmediato sobre los discos duros NAS es que son un poco más caros que sus contrapartes estándar que no son NAS. Esto se debe a las características especiales que acabamos de mencionar, así como a una garantía más sólida que algunos fabricantes ofrecen para unidades específicas de NAS (aunque puede obtener discos duros NAS por más “Desmontar” discos duros externos ). Esto puede llevarlo a usar discos duros normales para su NAS si tiene un presupuesto limitado, lo cual es completamente comprensible.
Diremos esto: los discos duros fabricados específicamente para cajas NAS son todavía relativamente nuevos en el mercado, y realmente no se convirtieron en algo hasta hace cinco o seis años. Antes, la gente solo usaba discos duros normales en sus configuraciones NAS.
Sin embargo, los discos duros NAS son una mejora real. Mientras tu poder técnicamente use discos duros normales en una configuración NAS si realmente lo desea, no obtendrá el mismo nivel de confiabilidad y rendimiento que obtendría al usar discos duros diseñados específicamente para un NAS.
¿Cómo identifico un disco duro NAS?
Entonces, ahora que conoce las diferencias entre un disco duro normal y uno diseñado para NAS, ¿cómo sabe exactamente cuál es cuál cuando está comprando unidades?
La mayoría de las veces, los fabricantes ponen la palabra “NAS” en algún lugar del paquete y en el disco duro, pero por lo general el nombre del modelo recibirá un trato preferencial más alto y será algo exclusivo del fabricante. Estos son los nombres de los modelos de algunos de los principales fabricantes de discos duros:
- Occidente digital:WD rojo
- Seagate:IronWolf
- Hitachi / HGST:Deskstar NAS
- Toshiba:N300
Si está comprando usado, es posible que se encuentre con modelos más antiguos de las empresas anteriores con diferentes nombres. Los discos duros NAS más antiguos de Seagate, por ejemplo, simplemente se llamaban “NAS HDD” en lugar de IronWolf. Western Digital también tenía algunas unidades NAS más antiguas que se llamaban “Caviar RAID Edition” y “WD RE”.
En cuanto a qué modelo es el mejor, honestamente puedes jugar un juego de Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe para elegir uno. Sin embargo, al menos vale la pena conocer las tasas de falla de cada fabricante de discos duros. BackBlaze realizó un seguimiento de sus propias tasas de falla de disco duro y mostró que Seagate fue el peor infractor . Por supuesto, sin importar la marca, cualquier disco duro puede fallar en cualquier momento por varias razones. Personalmente, nunca me ha fallado una unidad Seagate, mientras que una unidad Western Digital ha fallado.
Su kilometraje también variará, por lo que su NAS debe ejecutarse en una configuración RAID para mantener las cosas en funcionamiento en caso de que una unidad falle en algún momento. Ah, y por supuesto, debes mantener las cosas respaldadas.
NAS Hard Drives – Before You Buy
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How do you pick the right Hard Disk Drive for the job? Aren’t all Hard Drives the same? Doesn’t the Cloud remove the need for local storage?
These are just three of the questions I set out to answer as I explored upgrading the local storage here at Tubb Towers. My trusty 2 Terabyte (TB) Network Attached Storage (NAS) had faithfully served me for many years hosting files for my business, media (movies, music and photographs) for the home and backups of other critical data — but even 2TB was beginning to look a little too-small for my requirements.
So when the folks at Western Digital reached out to me to see if I was interested in trying out their new 8TB WD Red NAS Hard Drive, I jumped at the chance!
WD Red vs Desktop Hard Drives
The first thing to be aware of is that all Hard Drives are not the same. The Hard Drive that is installed in your standard laptop or desktop PC is often designed and tested to be intermittently running for 8-12 hours a day. When I say intermittently, I mean that you’re not using the hard disk continuously. The drive is expecting to be powered down for long periods of time — while you go off to lunch, when you shutdown your PC at the end of the day, or when you’re distracted by the latest videos of cats doing funny things on your Smartphone for long-periods of time.
That’s fine for standard users, but for power-users (such as designers, architects, creatives, photographers, etc) who hammer their hard drive all day, every day, a standard Hard Disk drive is going to start to feel the strain.
And when you’re picking a hard drive to fit inside a server or NAS device, then you need to look for a Hard Drive that is built to be able to run 24x7x365.
It’s in these scenarios for power-users, servers and NAS devices that the WD Red range comes in.
The WD Red range is built for reliability. It has features to reduce excessive vibration and noise in a NAS or RAID environment, and comes with premium support and a 3-year warranty out of the box. I’m always stressing to business professionals that to buy cheaper consumer electronics to use for work purposes is a false-economy. Where you can, always buy business-grade products and services.
The bottom line here is, don’t use standard Desktop Hard Disk Drives in your servers or NAS devices. Instead use a drive that is specifically designed for this purpose instead.
The Cloud vs Local Storage
When I shared with my Facebook and Twitter community that I was looking to replace my NAS, one of the most frequent questions was “Why don’t you use the Cloud instead?”.
To be clear, I’m a *huge* fan of the Cloud. I’m currently typing this article on a Google Chromebook that works almost wholly in the Cloud, and all of my business and personal digital life is stored in the Cloud via Google Drive and Dropbox.
Yet, when it comes to the vast amounts of home media data I collect such as movies, I prefer to store my data locally on a NAS-device that sits on my network.
True, the media on this NAS is still backed up to the Cloud (via Crashplan) and is available for streaming over the ‘net too (via Plex), but that same data stored on Google Drive or Dropbox is too big to be stored in standard free accounts and would therefore incur a monthly expense when stored wholly in the Cloud. This is where the hybrid solution of storing locally and making available via the Cloud works best.
There’s also the bandwidth considerations of storing huge amounts of data solely in the Cloud. While my 200mb home Broadband connection makes streaming and downloading large amounts of data easy, it still struggles when you try to transfer terabytes worth of data in bulk.
Any IT Professionals reading this will know that having client’s data backed up in the Cloud is great, but there’s nothing like a local file store for peace of mind and speed when it comes to restoring terabytes worth of data.
Using the WD Red HDD in a NAS
I combined a 8TB WD Red Hard Disk Drive (HDD) in a Synology DiskStation DS115 Network Attached Storage device.
The WD Red HDD runs NASware 3.0 — so it’s built for optimum NAS compatibility, and I had no problem fitting it into the single-bay Synology DiskStation.
I’ve seen the WD Red fitted in an 8-bay NAS device, meaning up to 64TB of storage. That’s a lot — but then I thought that 2TB was a lot in the NAS I bought a few years ago. Times change!
Remember, I was backing this device up to the Cloud via Crashplan, but if I was running this setup in an office environment then I’d be tempted to go for a mirrored HDD setup in a NAS. The cost of such a device increases, but reliability and recovery-time is often more important in a business environment.
Once installed and setup, the WD Red was snappy at retrieving data and the Synology NAS was feature rich in making my data easily available both across the network and securely across the Internet.
Western Digital also make available a free copy of Acronis True Image WD Edition backup software, to enable you to easily clone a disk.
Conclusion
Not all Hard Drives are made the same, and even with the huge amount of cheap storage space available in the Cloud, local storage space is still required for power-users.
If you’re a home user with an extensive media library of movies, music and photographs, or a business which values reliability over economy when providing storage in your servers or NAS devices, then the WD Red range, backed by business-grade support and warranty, is a no-brainer choice over the standard desktop Hard Disk Drive alternatives.
I partnered with the brand to write this article but every word is mine.
Choosing a NAS might be complex but there are a few things you can do to simplify the choice
When Benjamin Franklin said “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes” he could have added running out of disk space and hard drive crashes. Thankfully, although we’re stuck with death and taxes, there is a way through the problem of storage.
Network Attached Storage, or NAS, has moved from the enterprise to the SME and home. It’s now possible to buy a decent NAS for under $1000 including disks. But what do you look for?
Capacity
In simple terms, the more drives you can cram into a NAS the greater its potential storage capacity. In most cases, we suggest something with four or five bays like the Synonology DS-1511. Loaded up with a swag of 1TB or 2TB drives it offers plenty of capacity.
If your needs are more modest then a two-bay unit is also handy and won’t eat into the budget.
RAID levels
As most NAS units come with more than one hard disk (it’s possible to buy a device with a single disk that;s shared over a network) you need a way to get those drives to work together. The way those two or more hard disks work together is described through a standard called RAID, or a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.
Where a NAS device has two hard disks, the disks can either be configured to mirror each other, RAID1, or to look like a single, large hard disk, RAID0.
RAID0 offers improved performance but it comes at a cost. If either one of the two disks fails then all the data, spread over both disks is lost. Two 500GB hard drives in a RAID0 configuration will deliver about 1TB of available storage.
In a RAID1 configuration, two 500GB drives will provide a total of 500GB of storage. That’s because all the data is automatically written to both drives at the same time. There’s a performance hit but the result is that if one disk fails, you shouldn’t lose any data. It’s worth remembering that there are two types of hard disk – those that have failed and those that will fail.
With arrays of three or more disks, RAID5 comes into play. In a RAID5 array, the data is written to more than one disk but it’s done in such a way so that if one disk fails you won’t lose any data. In other words, it’s a bit of a cross between RAID0 and RAID1. RAID5 offers both performance improvements and hardware redundancy. A RAID5 array of four 1TB hard drives will deliver about 3TB of available storage.
RAID6 is similar to RAID5 but allows for two disks to be lost without any data loss. RAID10 is a hybrid RAID level that works like both RAID 1 and 0 together. Essentially, two RAID0 arrays are configured so that the data is written to both arrays at the same time.
There are several other RAID levels but these options are the most common and will serve the needs of the vast majority of people.
Choosing disks
Many NAS makers allow you to choose between buying a ready-to-go unit that’s loaded up with some drives or sell you an empty chassis. We’d suggest buying the empty chassis so that you can choose your preferred drives. Just one thing – not all drives are deemed compatible with all NAS devices. Most manufacturers maintain a compatibility list (such as this one for the Dlink DNS-1200-05).
One thing to be especially careful about is that many NAS devices won;t play well with “green” drives that automatically power down in event on inactivity. Some NAS will see this as a disk failure so check carefully before committing to your drive purchase.
Features
The features you’ll want will depend on what you’re planning to use the NAS for. If you’re running a multi-platform office then make sure that your chosen NAS can share files over the right protocols. If the intent is to make your NAS accessible from outside the LAN then Secure FTP might be worth considering.
Given that most homes seem to have an iPad, iPhone of iPod touch it may be worth ensuring that your NAS can support WebDAV as a file sharing protocol. so that your iOS devices can access and share data. A number of QNAP NAS devices support WebDAV .
One of the most common applications for a NAS is as media server. Many devices mow natively support iTunes sharing as well as UPnP and other media sharing systems such as Twonky Media Server.
There are also download managers, backup systems and lots of other applications that can come as part of a NAS. It’s worth thinking about all the potential “bonus” features you NAS might offer.
Affordable Storage Options
While solid-state drives (SSDs) have become increasingly popular (particularly for laptops) as they have expanded in size while coming down in price, hard-disk drives (HDDs) still offer the most storage capacity for the money. As such, they’re a great economical option, particularly for your home PC setup, where you won’t have to worry about potential jostling damaging the drive’s moving parts. Plus, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an SSD much bigger than 2 TB, while you can find HDDs 10 times that size. If you are a graphic arts professional or simply someone with a lot of multimedia files, you will be better off going with an HDD.
What to Consider
As a hard-disk drive is a fairly simple piece of machinery, there aren’t too many features to mull over. Of course, you want to consider capacity. For most users, a drive of 1 or 2 TB should suffice, but if you work with video files or other large media, then consider something larger; most of the drives listed below have 4 TB or larger options. Disk speed is another consideration as it will determine how quickly your files load, and no one likes waiting around. Harder to gauge, but equally important is reliability. Look for specs like workload rating and check out user reviews to make sure your hard drive is built to last.
How We Selected
We looked at a range of reviews from such reputable sources as Lifewire, TechRadar, and PCMag to find consensus on the best internal hard disk drives. (It soon became apparent that Western Digital and Seagate are responsible for the critics’ favorites.) The list below offers a number of capacities and price points to meet most needs and budgets.
