One of the things that people like about drives rated for NAS use is they typically come with longer warranties as well. You're not going to see that kind of firmware and design in a standard desktop rated drive.įor comparison, a standard BarraCuda drive is rated for 8 hours a day x 5 day a week usage, and to handle up to 55TB of data per year, whereas a standard IronWolf NAS drive is rated for the mentioned 24x7 use and to handle up to 180TB per year, with the IronWolf Pro rated for 300TB per year.Īnother consideration is warranty. NAS drives are optimized with firmware that manages and mitigates these issues, and some also have RV (Rotational Vibration) sensors which serve this purpose even further.
When you bunch up hard drives together in enclosures typical for NAS units or servers, the confinement with all of that spinning, operation, and moving parts creates a lot of vibration, and the hard drives can really beat up on each-other. A NAS-rated drive is rated for 24x7 use, being continuously ready to go at a moment's notice with firmware optimizations for multiple users/device access, and vibration control. Different drives are built for different use cases. For NAS/server use, you're actually going to be better off with a NAS rated drive, these usually are referred to as red-labeled drives.
