Looking to pick up a 12TB or greater HDD this Black Friday and was contemplating getting a QNAP 2-bay and loading it with 2 drives configured in RAID 1. But then I got thinking, I have a Fractal Design R6 case with lots of space inside and a couple SATA ports open on my motherboard. So I’m curious if it makes more sense to forgo the QNAP and just put the two drives inside?
My real question though is when it comes to drives spinning up, spinning down etc. I know from my learning on this sub forum that this can be hazardous to a drives longevity. My OS and primary task drives are all NVMe SSD’s but I wanted a large 12TB drive for long-term archival that I can dump to. If I can save money not buying the QNAP and have two 12TB mirrored drives inside my PC case, what do I need to consider in terms of Windows settings to promote HDD longevity?
Additional note: Ultimately whichever route I go, the hard drives will be backed up to Backblaze.
Will putting the HDD directly inside the PC result in a lot of spin up/do or would it also keep them spinning until the computer is shut off?
Also do you know if there’s any issue with putting a NAS type drive inside a computer? I would assume no different than if it went into a Synology or the like?