NAS drives are the “shut up about your disk being slow, your gigabit is even slower” category (back when they were introduced most NASes couldn’t even fill up the gigabit, if they had it at all). That is if anyone asks how they’re different from the “DAS” and “Server” category. That somehow the marketing was so successful that now they’re considered superior to the others is another story.

If you plan on doing any sort of RAID array stay away from SMR disks, they are hugely performance costly because of having to read multiple layers to get down and read/write to lower layers across multiple disks.

How much are you saving? Since I have a job, and would rather trade some money for more time, I choose nicer kit with better warranty. I definitely didn’t do this when I was younger and would run at a much lower cost.

I had more losses and maintenance work back then. In either case, the real specs are what matters. There is more obfuscation of things now than there used to be. There is also more market consolidation and less competition to keep manufacturers on their toes. None of this is great for the consumer.

I think in general they have lower RPM and run a bit cooler and use a little less power. That usually comes with a bit less performance.

But I’m hooked on the WD Ultrastar series. Server Grade and fast. Also has low power usage, at full tilt, mine use less than 10w each. I’m running 20 hc530’s and been rock solid.

Assume it’s all marketing unless proven otherwise

WD Blue 8TB is a CMR drive and just as good as any NAS drive. But I’d avoid any consumer grade hard drives 8TB and under:

• Seagate Barracuda / Barracuda Compute
• WD Blue (except 8TB)
• WD Red (Red Plus and Red Pro are fine tho)
• Toshiba DT02
• Toshiba P300