NAS Drives

Tobit

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - March 2010/May 2011
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I've been out of the loop for awhile and see we now have NAS specific drives such as the IronWolf. What makes a NAS drive a NAS drive and can they be used as a regular HDD?
 
I've been out of the loop for awhile and see we now have NAS specific drives such as the IronWolf. What makes a NAS drive a NAS drive and can they be used as a regular HDD?
They can be used as a regular drive. Sometimes the drives themselves are the same, with different firmware and or different rotational speed. The nas firmware adds features a NAS setup can utilize that helps the drives perform and last longer utilized in a NAS setup.
 
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NAS drives are usually rated for 24/7 operation, better protection against vibration and heat, longer warranty, something normal drives don't have. They're absolutely fine as a regular HDD, but they tend to be pricier.
 
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Just bought two 4TB Ironwolfs for another QNAP NAS I inherited. Nice drives but I forgot to adjust the power settings on them before install and every now and then I hear a odd noise as the heads park.

One thing I did do with the NAS was to install some squishy sorbothane feet under it. Has helped reduce the noise from usual usage vibration nicely.
 
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I remember a time long ago, when some drives were a bit disadvantaged (might have been WD greens, but seriously, I don't remember) as far as fault conditions go.
Once they encountered a recoverable problem during read/write (which normally causes the 'pending sector count' to go up) it would take a longer time to get back to business, which caused them to be marked as 'bad' by RAID controllers.
Does this, or a similar thing still happen? Or is a drive a drive, be it desktop or NAS?
 
I remember a time long ago, when some drives were a bit disadvantaged (might have been WD greens, but seriously, I don't remember) as far as fault conditions go.
Once they encountered a recoverable problem during read/write (which normally causes the 'pending sector count' to go up) it would take a longer time to get back to business, which caused them to be marked as 'bad' by RAID controllers.
Does this, or a similar thing still happen? Or is a drive a drive, be it desktop or NAS?
NAS or enterprise drives have command timeout set to 7 seconds so it isn't booted after 8 seconds in a NAS or raid array, you want the disk to give up because the raid will fetch a copy from mirror or parity and rewrite the sector so the bad sector can be reallocated (bad sectors can't be reallocated until a write happens to same sector witch the raid does automatically when the disk reports a UNC) having bad sectors on a NAS or enterprise HDD isn't a problem as long as it isn't rising after a 2 smart extended scan and scrub

also means it won't get stuck when used in a desktop when it hits a read error when used as a single disk

using consumer HDDs in a raid array should Only use RAID6/SHR2 (really main nas should just use raid6/SHR2 anyway as most users don't have 2 NASs so they can backup the first one seen pepole lose lots of data because they just used RAID5/SHR1 and lost 2 disks or ransomware witch raid doesn't protect from anyway)
 
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