Nas hard drive: why are they so special?

Choosing a good NAS hard drive is not an easy task. The most famous is the Western Digital Red or the new IronWolf from Seagate. In this little tutorial we show you how to choose the best one!

And is that hard drives are not exactly a new technology. They have existed in one form or another for more than 20 years in the consumer market, ever larger in capacity and smaller in physical design.

One of the biggest breakthroughs came a few years ago in the rise of Network Attached Storage (NAS), when two of the biggest HDD brands, Seagate and Western Digital, announced they would launch a series of hard drives adapted for NAS servers.. It is easy to think that all hard drives are the same, except for the form factor and connection type. However, there is a difference between the workload of a hard drive on your computer and the workload of a NAS hard drive. A drive on your PC can only read and write data for a couple of hours at a time, while a NAS drive can read and write data for weeks or even more.

Index of contents

What is a NAS?

A Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a network attached storage device that allows data to be stored and retrieved at a centralized point for authorized network users and multiple clients. NAS devices are flexible and expandable; what this implies is that as you need more storage capacity, you can add it to what you already have. A NAS device is like having a private cloud in the office. It's faster, less expensive, and offers all the benefits of an on-site public cloud, giving you full control.

On the other hand, outside of our digital home, in companies, the need for storage is much more critical. In addition to needing the space itself, the files need to be always available in a secure way. It can't be that a hard drive fails and much of your company's valuable data is lost. This is where HDDs dedicated to NAS come in.

NAS hard drive, is it safe?

We do not recommend using a normal hard drive in the RAID NAS array. Despite the fact that a NAS can be powered on for days at a time, normal hard drives are not designed to withstand heat, vibration, and read sporadic writing, instant spinning over LAN / internet, these drives are typically located in the form of RAID.

RAID means multiple drives are installed on one NAS device and are considered as 1 giant drive on its connected host device. Data is spread across multiple drives, and choosing the correct RAID can save data if a drive breaks or fails. However, RAID configuration only works if the drives in use are stable and desktop drives, such as Western Digital Blue or Seagate barracuda, are not designed for RAID 5 and more, so you could risk data loss from the beginning or have a RAID that works incredibly slow or inefficient because the drives are not designed to be working in a group.

NAS hard drive and its performance

It is not the strongest point of these discs, their transfer rates are similar to that of normal discs. For example, in the case of the WD Red, they are up to 210 MB / s with speeds per minute of 5400 rpm, in the Seagate Ironwolf it has the same speed of writing and reading, although these in particular are 7200 rpm. Each company has a dedicated technology which enables it to increase performance. Western Digital incorporates the IntelliPower technology, thanks to it, the hard disk adapts to the needs of the user, providing great performance but at the same time, reducing energy consumption, and therefore, operating temperature.

On the other hand, Seagate incorporates technologies such as rotary vibration (VG) sensors, allowing high performance to be maintained in multi-unit NAS housings

Warranty and durability on NAS hard drive

Possibly the most important factors of a dedicated NAS hard drive, durability and longevity. This is another point that is based on the use of the unit. In a similar comparison, NAS hard drives will certainly last longer if both are left on indefinitely, again, that's because of the sporadic access resistance of their firmware and physical build. Beyond that though, is the fact that traditional entry-level desktop hard drives generally come with a 2-year manufacturer's warranty (for example, WD Blue and Seagate Barracuda), while NAS hard drives for the most part arrive with a minimum of 3 years of manufacturer warranty like the WD Red and Seagate Ironwolf, and they even come in professional business versions also with an even stronger and more durable design. These units come with a 5 year warranty. If you end up with drives running in a RAID, it is a mistake to think that adding more drives equals more security. The probability of hard drive failure is actually increasing, as RAID makes drives work a little harder and stay active longer.

Companies use a marker known as MTBF, an average time before a failure or error. It is a measure of how reliable a storage related product is. For most components, the measurement is typically thousands or even tens of thousands of hours before failure. For example, a hard drive may have a mean time before failure of 300, 000 hours. A desired MTBF can be used as a target when designing a new product. It can be developed as a result of intensive testing, based on actual product experience, or predicted by analysis of known factors. The manufacturer can provide it as an index of the reliability of a product or component and, in some cases, to give customers an idea of ​​how much it can have in operation. The MTBF on a WD Red and Seagate Ironwolf are considerably higher, at over 1, 000, 000 hours. In addition, these hard drives are certified to be in operation 365 days a year without any problem.

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So far our article on hard drives dedicated to NAS. We hope you have learned the difference from normal models. Any questions you have, tell us in the comment box.