Are NAS-rated drives REALLY worth it?

Right now my goto basic chunk of block storage is WD 8TB Blue drives. Brand new out of the box price per TB is hard to beat in my area, and they’ve been shockingly reliable and performant.

I see the price of NAS drives and frankly don’t see how they could be worth the price is you follow sound backup strategies.

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

No.

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.

I have Exos drives (which are probably more enterprise 24/7), and I don’t really see a difference to normal everyday consumer use HDDs. They’re just loud af, which is honestly a huge drawback

That said, I’ve only ever had one HDD fail, and these have only been running 24/7 for about a year

If they’re not that much more, might be worth it for the NAS drives. Just depends how important your data is and how much you value peace of mind

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.

I am the guy running used enterprise drive for $5 a TB. I do raid z2 and keep an extra on hand. I am not the right person to say…

Considering the prices are simlar, I'm not sure what the purpose of NAS drives are other than running a little quiter than enterprise grade server drives.

I think it depends on your needs and use case. Are you housing critical data? Using in a harsh environment? Are you okay taking on a little risk? Only you can determine if it’s worth it.

Two thumbs up to those who are posting that NAS and by inferred extension, Enterprise drives aren't necessarily any better for home use.

However, since NAS/Enterprise labeling is now 98% marketing, there really isn't much of a decision necessary today. Other than the handful of drive lines HTWingNut posted and another handful of specialized surveillance drives, everything else is NAS or Enterprise.

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

For completeness, I'll add the only other type of generally available drive category currently available, surveillance drives, which are designed/tweaked for 24/7 writes.
Seagate Skyhawk - All CMR
Seagate Skyhawk AI - All CMR
Seagate Skyhawk Lite - All SMR

WD Purple - All CMR
WD Purple Pro - All CMR

Toshiba S300 - All CMR

Some consumer drives aren't well suited to continuous use - they're designed and rated for only a few hours a day. Heat and vibration tolerances are lower. I wore out some WD Greens that way - they were throwing errors by 60k hours.

NAS drives are the opposite, they're designed to run 24/7. In the same way, enterprise drives are designed for better vibration tolerance to be crammed in a chassis with many other spinning disks.

Basically they'll work, but longevity is an issue, which is particularly relevant to us hoarders. I use WD Reds in my NAS and enterprise/SAS drives in my servers now. Seems to be a good combination.