Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
READ NEXT