Home NAS storage options

[Topkek]

Is a WD red nessecary for a homr NAS? Or can I opt for a cheaper type of WD drive such as green?

[Wishiwasdead]

these are the best price / gb HHD out there and are very reliable...  

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

 

Storage: Seagate Barracuda 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($82.88 @ OutletPC) 

Total: $82.88

Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available

Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-01-06 08:05 EST-0500

[Wishiwasdead]

but to answer your question more directly no you dont need reds... any HDD will work

[EmeraldFlame]

It depends. If you're NAS is just JBOD any drive will work. If you're drive is using a RAID you will want drives optimized for that, which the WD Red's are. RAID optimized drives have some additional firmware tricks (TLER) that make them much more suited to the task. Without those firmware tweaks drives can have a tendency to randomly drop out of the array.

[Wishiwasdead]

It depends. If you're NAS is just JBOD any drive will work. If you're drive is using a RAID you will want drives optimized for that, which the WD Red's are. RAID optimized drives have some additional firmware tricks (TLER) that make them much more suited to the task. Without those firmware tweaks drives can have a tendency to randomly drop out of the array.

yes, but... the additional cost for most home NASs that just hold movies, music, pics... and some other random docs... may not be worth it...

 

you dont need 'official' NAS or enterprise grade HHDs... will they perform better / last longer / be more reliable? probably... will most home users see any real differences? probably not...  

 

personally i would love to have WD Red in my NAS that im actually currently building right now ... and if you can afford them great!!! but its just not worth the cost to me... 

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

Hey there Topkek,

 

The short answer is NO. 

 

NAS is considered any storage device connected to the network that is accessible over the network. For example a thumb drive connected to your router with some music that is configure to be accessible from other devices on the network or an external HDD connected to your computer and configured as a Shared Folder can also be considered a NAS.

 

NAS devices can work with all HDDs, regardless if they are NAS/RAID-class or not. It is recommended to use such drives, though, due to the additional features that they have (TLER and such). These features enable the drives to work much more stable and smooth with significantly lower chances of dropping out of RAID arrays or corrupting the data while in the NAS environment. This is why drives such as the WD Red are recommended for NAS setups.  

 

Feel free to ask if you happen to have questions,

 

Captain_WD.

[EmeraldFlame]

yes, but... the additional cost for most home NASs that just hold movies, music, pics... and some other random docs... may not be worth it...

 

you dont need 'official' NAS or enterprise grade HHDs... will they perform better / last longer / be more reliable? probably... will most home users see any real differences? probably not...  

By 'drop out of the array' I didn't mean fail. I mean that with a normal drive if response time is slower than the controller thinks it should be then it will assume the drive is failed and kick it from the array making all that data inaccessible and requires a reboot for the controller to find it again. When the drives drop out of the array like this they also have a very serious chance of corrupting data when they do so. Drives that are optimized for RAID and have TLER enabled can essentially tell the controller 'hey i'm taking longer than normal, but I got this, give me a sec' and it will keep them in the array instead of dropping them.

A home user would absolutely notice these issues when they are having to reboot their nas all the time and their data is getting corrupted left and right. Like I said if your nas is just a JBOD, it doesn't matter because there is no array to be kicked out of. But RAID should be using RAID optimized drives.