Which is the best drive for NAS？

With the popularity of cloud disks, NAS (check the article ‘What is NAS’ for reference) has also become widely known to ordinary people. It has more powerful performance and speed than cloud disks, and is more convenient for daily use. Of course, NAS is just a platform which can really work well only with the most suitable hard disk to bring the greatest value to your business or home office, especially in the production and application environment where data security values a lot. It is especially important to choose a stable and reliable hard disk. (off course, you must also actively make a backup).

Do you need NAS drives for a NAS?   

Although the ordinary desktop hard drives can also be used in NAS, they can only cope with 8*5 hour scenarios, and the design does not consider the working conditions of NAS. The performance in terms of stability and lifespan is much weaker, and it is prone to cause data damage and data loss. Monitoring disks are the most affordable choice among all around clock hard disks, but they are without NAS Ready features such as RAID support and anti-vibration. Enterprise-class hard disks exceed the demands in performance and reliability, but they are relatively expensive and have louder noise and higher power consumption.

In this era of "data values most", even the ordinary home users will always have some important data that can no longer be obtained, such as photos and videos representing family memories. Therefore, we still recommend NAS users to spend a little more money to choose professional NAS hard drives.

Professional NAS hard drives are suitable for 7*24 hours power-on and uninterrupted operation which achieve the complete silence in reading and writing and high-performance data throughput with the 5400rpm rotating speed. It can also stay silent at night without affecting sleep. In addition, it has 2 optimizations for NAS: Firstly, the dynamic balance vibration compensation of the RAID array, so that even when 4-5 disks form a RAID array side by side, they will not affect each other's reading and writing due to mutual resonance. Secondly, support the TLER (Time-Limited Error Recovery) technology, which is conducive to the parallel read and write work with RAID arrays.



How to choose a NAS drive?    

For different user groups, their focus on hard drive purchases is also different. Some users focus on speed, so they will choose a high-speed SSD. Some users pay more attention to capacity, so they prefer a large-capacity HDD. For NAS users, the stability of the hard disk determines the security of the data, so they mainly think about the stability of the hard disk, and then comes to the comprehensive consideration of capacity, performance, power consumption and price. Currently in the market, Western Digital RED and Seagate IronWolf professional are the most common NAS hard drives.

Western Digital RED



With 7*24 hours uninterrupted work, it supports unique NASware technology which improves the compatibility of hard drives with existing networks and equipment, TVs, stereos, etc. Using 3D active balance enhancement technology, its average trouble-free time has increased by 35% than ordinary desktop hard drives, which is more competitive in terms of data security. Each compatible NAS system corresponds to a Western Digital Red Disk with a storage space up to 18TB, which can provide a wide range of solutions for customers who need to build high-performance NAS storage. What’s more, it has the first-class support service and the warranty of at least 3 years.

You can choose the appropriate product model based on the following comparison introduction and actual needs:

Seagate IronWolf



It guarantees uninterrupted normal operation and is suitable for all kinds of NAS and multi-user environment. It is compatible with mainstream brand NAS products and adopts CMR technology to provide efficient and stable storage and reading and writing for large file editing, remote file sharing and synchronization. It realizes the best reliability and system scalability of hard disks through AgileArray™ and CMR technology. It can cope with the vibration and high workload rate of high-data networks in a multi-bay NAS environment which helps you work on schedule through 7*24 hours remote access, backup, and file sharing. It supports 3-year original data rescue and at least 3-year limited warranty.

You can choose the appropriate product model based on the following comparison introduction and actual needs: