What Is The Difference Between NAS Hard-

Drives And Standard Hard-Drives? Is It All A

Big Con?
PO ST ED ON  8TH SE PT EMBE R 2017  BY  ROB ANDREW S

Why do we need different kinds of hard drives

– why not make just one kind for all?

 Hard drives are not exactly new technology. They have

existed in one form or another for over 20 years in the consumer market, all the time
getting bigger in capacity and smaller in physical design. That should not come as a
surprise to any of you. Such is the way of technology that no sooner have we got used
to the way things are, then a brand of manufacturer will turn around and bung on a
new connector, introduce a faster and more expensive version, or worse, the entire
industry changes it’s mind overnight and all our old technology becomes useless. Most
tech buyers feel like ships in the sea, at the whim of the sea and it’s currents.

However in data storage, one of the biggest upsets 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 were releasing a series of NAS server tailored Hard
Drives. Moreover, they were telling people who it was bad to populate your Synology
NAS or QNAP NAS with ordinary desktop hard drives – which was odd, because the
week before it was fine! Now in 2017, the market as a whole seems to have accepted
this as a fact – however there are a still a few of you out there that are still
unconvinced. Is the ‘NAS HDD’ badge just a big con to make you pay more for drives?
Are they just the same hard disk drives with a different sticker on them? More
importantly, will it actually damage your NAS or your data to use bog standard hard
drives in your 2 or 4 Bay NAS server device? And why hasn’t the data storage industry
just made 1 kind of hard drive that is perfect for EVERYTHING?!?!?! Let’s discuss.
Why should I have to choose between
Standard Hard Drives and NAS Designed Hard
Drives?

 Before we get down to the nitty-gritty of what makes

certain hard drives different, it is worth highlighting that we are going to focus on WD
Red NAS hard drives, WD Blue Desktop Hard drives, Seagate Ironwolf NAS Hard
drives and finally, Seagate Barracuda Desktop Hard drives. There are of course others
available (Toshiba NAS HDD, HGST Deskstar NAS, etc) but it will be better to make
like-for-like comparisons. I should probably lay my cards on the table early on, I DO
NOT believe NAS hard drives are a con. Aftering using, testing and on a few
occasions, repairing hard drives of both NAS and Standard drives, I am confident that
they are very different drives. Moreover I can see the reasoning for different drives
being specialised to different tasks rather than 1 drive for everything. For a start the
drive would be insanely expensive to be able to fluctuate between tasks. Take a look