4 tips to keep in mind when shopping for NAS hard drives

Synology DS218

The result with NAS is that, generally, hard drives are put under considerable stress with continuous operation. While desktop hard drives may survive the onslaught of use for a period of time — some may even last years — information technology'south recommended to at least consider NAS-specific counterparts. Should you be considering a buy that will piece of work in a NAS and offer advanced features for enhanced immovability, we've got some tips for you.

Size matters when it comes to NAS

Hard Drives

Difficult drives typically come in standard sizes, which dictate how much storage is available for use. NAS hard drives come in 1 terabyte (TB), 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, 10TB then on — a single TB being one,000GB. Since most users will be using a NAS for storage, you're going to desire to ensure y'all have ample capacity available, since media can speedily take upwards all your space.

The chapters you should go for depends on what you will store on the drive. If y'all're using the NAS for home storage, you tin can usually become away with i to two terabytes of space. Movies, games and more will crave increasing amounts of a drive, and so yous'll need to calculate (and estimate) accordingly. Information technology'due south besides worth noting that if you wish to utilize RAID to keep an immediate backup copy of files, you'll want to friction match the capacity of both drives or yous'll be limited to the drive with the bottom limit.

Seek out trusted brands

Seagate Baracuda

Your data is important, especially when it comes to NAS. Money can be spared in the bodily unit — it's possible to create your own using nothing more than a Raspberry Pi — only for difficult drives, nosotros recommend that y'all spend the actress bucks and purchase a drive from a reputable make. Western Digital, Seagate, HGST, and other hard drive manufacturers all produce their own NAS-certified drives that tin come with extended warranties.

Information technology's virtually endurance

FreeNAS

NAS drives are specifically designed for apply with such devices, and as such, they usually come packing more reliable components with higher use ratings. For example, the Seagate IronWolf NAS family of hard drives has a rated transfer of around 180TB per yr, and a meantime before failure (MTBF) of i one thousand thousand hours. That allows you to transfer a lot of data and have peace of listen that the drive is backed by rigorous testing for prolonged use.

Backblaze does some groovy enquiry on a number of difficult drives, noting downwards failures and analyzing reliability across various vendors. It'south well worth checking out to see what brands (and models in particular) are prone to failure.

Drive traits

NAS

NAS hard drives come with an array of marketing jargon, but some of it tin be useful. Vendors may include technologies for enhanced reliability when operated 24/vii, optimize drives for specific NAS configurations, and include information recovery, as well as other measures to reduce wear and tear. While information technology tin can prove useful to compare various models, normally they're similar, and yous should value capacity and reliability over such traits.

These three difficult drives are ideal for NAS

More than on NAS

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Everything y'all need to build your ain NAS
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