Seagate Exos Drives For Long Term Storage?

DKTW · February 18, 2022

Hello, I recently built a Nas using regular consumer drives which I plan to use until they burn out before upgrading to proper Nas drives, but I have 2 questions.

1. Can I continue to use regular consumer drives for my Nas after the ones I already have in it die as they are far cheaper and do Nas drives really provide much benefits over regular drives.

And

2. I want to make a complete backup of my Nas and store these hard drives off site so I want to purchase 2 18tb drives but the Seagate exos enterprise drives are by far the cheapest on amazon for 18tb by atleast 200 dollars so I was just wondering is there any real difference or reason why I shouldn't use these for long term storage? Or if they happen to be much louder than other consumer drives, my main worry is that they aren't built to hold data whole being powered off for long periods of time as once I fill them up I plan to just leave them off and stored in a safe place until I need them incase the drives in my Nas ever die.

I'm only worried because I know on the website for them they talk about then being built for certain environmental conditions which obviously means 24/7 operation and being constantly plugged in which kind of has me worried.

If anyone on the forum is an expert on these kinds of things I'd really appreciate the help

jaslion · February 18, 2022

1. As long as you get decent drives sure but often nas level drives are the same price

2. Depends how long these drives will be left cold and not checked for data errors as bitrot will set in. This is why other mediums than hard drives are used for cold storage.

YoungBlade · February 18, 2022

The main benefits of NAS drives are that they are designed to be used in enclosures with other drives, their firmware is usually designed to work well with RAID, and they have better warranties. Hard drives vibrate as they spin and those vibrations can disrupt the operation of other drives, so NAS drives are better designed to handle those vibrations. Because NAS drives tend to be used with RAID, the firmware on the drives is designed to optimize things like writing parity data. They also typically come with longer and higher quality warranties. For example, Seagate's IronWolf Pro drives include a data recovery service with the warranty.

As far as storing hard drives is concerned, there shouldn't be any reason why Exos drives can't store data when turned off. A hard drive is made up of platters that store data via magnetism. This requires no power to work, and simply giving the drive power doesn't actually help keep the data on there. Bit rot - the process by which the bits slowly lose their magnetic charge over time - will happen as long as the data on the drive has not actually been re-written. However, this process takes many years - as in 8+ years - so this shouldn't be much of a concern. SSDs, on the other hand, should be powered on a few times a year, as their storage method does require power to keep working.