Can a Nas Hard Drive Be Used in a Desktop

If y'all're thinking well-nigh jumping into the NAS game and are shopping around for high-chapters hard drives, non only whatsoever hard drive volition do. Here's what you need to know.

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It's piece of cake to think that all hard drives are equal, save for the form factor and connection type. Nevertheless, there's a difference between the work your hard drive does in your computer versus the workload of a NAS difficult bulldoze. A drive in your computer may merely 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 fifty-fifty longer. This is why it'due south important that yous get the right difficult drive for the job, and that goes doubly for drives you stick in a NAS. Let's a take a deeper swoop.

NAS Hard Drives Are Congenital Specifically for a NAS Environs

The environment inside of a NAS box is much different than a typical desktop or laptop reckoner. When you pack in a scattering of sweaty hard drives close together, several things happen: there's more vibration, more than 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 apply in a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) setup. RAID allows you to spread out information across multiple drives (depending on which RAID setup you get 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 attempt 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, information technology simply reports an error so that the RAID controller can get the needed information from a different hard drive in the RAID setup.

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Can I Notwithstanding Use a Regular Hard Bulldoze in a NAS, Though?

1 big cistron that people can discover right away about NAS difficult drives is that they're slightly pricier than their standard, non-NAS counterparts. This is thanks to the special features we just mentioned, besides as a beefier warranty that some manufacturers provide for NAS-specific drives (although you can score NAS hard drives for cheaper by "shucking" external difficult 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 fabricated specifically for NAS boxes are still relatively new to the market, and they actually didn't become a thing until perchance five or half-dozen years ago. Before then, people just used regular difficult drives in their NAS setups.

However, NAS hard drives are a real improvement. While yous can technically employ 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 difficult drive and one that'due south meant for a NAS, how exactly do y'all know which is which when you're out shopping for drives?

Well-nigh of the fourth dimension, 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 difficult drive manufacturers:

• Western Digital: WD Red
• Seagate: IronWolf
• Hitachi/HGST: Deskstar NAS
• Toshiba: N300

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If you lot're buying used, you lot might come across older models from the in a higher place companies with dissimilar names. Seagate'south older NAS hard drives, for instance, just went by the proper noun "NAS HDD" instead of IronWolf. Western Digital too had some older NAS drives that went by "Caviar RAID Edition" and "WD RE."

As far as which model is the best, you lot honestly can just play a game of Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe to pick ane. However, information technology's at least worth knowing the failure rates of each hard drive manufacturer. BackBlaze kept track of their own difficult drive failure rates and showed that Seagate was the worst offender. Of grade, no matter the brand, any difficult drive tin neglect at any moment for whatsoever number of reasons. I've personally never had a Seagate drive fail on me, whereas I take had a Western Digital drive fail.

Your mileage volition vary too, which is why your NAS should run in a RAID setup to proceed things up and running should a bulldoze fail at any indicate. Oh, and of class, you should still keep things backed up.

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Source: https://www.howtogeek.com/345131/how-to-select-hard-drives-for-your-home-nas/

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