Mechanical HDD recommendations

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bmeagle

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Hi all, time to upgrade my desktop and replace a dead drive in my htpc.
I've been reading up on these NAS type drives. I'm looking for something with higher reliability, absolute speed is not the most important. Seagate ironwolf or ironwolf pro or wd red?
 
As far as I know NAS type drives are only for always on or mass storage devices and easily degrade in machines that are not always powered on. If you have the money there is always WD Black.
 
I understand that NAS drives have a higher mechanical integrity, ie extra spindle support, better vibration mitigation and higher vibration tolerance.
Unfortunately guys like backblaze don't buy and test all drives.
 
The downside of using a NAS drive is the firmware does not retry or retries less times to read an unreadable sector because it expects to default to RAID.
 
The major source of wear for mechanical HDDs is repeated start-ups. If you can permanently have the drive on (requires a setting in your OS too such that the drive is never stopped even when not used for a few minutes) then life spans can be astronomical.

I've had very good performance with surveilance HDDs for my NAS (in RAID 5)
 
Agreed, the downside or a surveillance HDD is the firmware optimisation for sequential reading and writing when a typical NAS application probably does more random reading and writing, there will be a slight performance disadvantage.
I intend to pair the wd red with a ssd, so the slightly slower speed of the wd red won't bother me as the os will reside on the the ssd.
 
agentrfr said:
The major source of wear for mechanical HDDs is repeated start-ups. If you can permanently have the drive on (requires a setting in your OS too such that the drive is never stopped even when not used for a few minutes) then life spans can be astronomical.

I've had very good performance with surveilance HDDs for my NAS (in RAID 5)
Click to expand...

Supposedly, this is my WD black drive.

86f554e494.png
 
Would you consider getting an actual NAS setup with something like a Pi and an external dock? Then you can have the SSD in the HTPC and not have to worry about it
 
Very good point, I actually have a NAS just sitting off in the safe...
Using gigabit lan that would be the ideal combination, ie use my NAS as an actual NAS and not as an offline backup.
Think I should rather use a portable HDD for offline locked up backup.
 
Toshiba.

You can't go wrong. Forget about the NAS kak and save your money.

X300 all the way.
 
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