I’ve been buying seagate ironwolf only drives for my NAS but I’ve been wondering if it’s really worth it given that it’s a small server sitting in a corner and these drives are getting more and more expensive. What are your thoughts? Do you only go with NAS drives or anything really does the trick assuming I have a good backup strategy?
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Where I think the “NAS” hardware is applicable is if you are running mission critical services (up to you to decide what is mission critical) and you want to minimize the down time.
It’s certainly much cheaper to buy conventional drives, and just have a few extra that keep live or regular backs up on.
If you are doing any kind of drive RAID where you combine multiple drives into a larger pool of storage I would absolutely skip out on anything that uses SMR, and would probably justify the extra price for the NAS grade equipment, purely because of how nightmarish it can be to repair RAIDs. You’ll definitely want to minimize the amount of repair and maintenance you need to do on a RAID.
Depends how much you care about your data and what your backup plan is. Mine is unRAID with two parity drives, meaning I can lose two drives in the NAS without losing any data. Of course my house might burn down so I back up the REALLY important stuff to the cloud as well. Given this I don’t care about consumer grade SMR drives, so I buy the cheapest.
NAS drives should have shorter recovery times with bad sectors so that the raid array doesn’t completely kick the drive out, and have more vibration tolerance since they’re supposed to be in an enclosure with multiple drives.
If you’re using RAID for redundancy go cheap. I’ve been using renewed HGST enterprise dives from Amazon in my NAS for years and still haven’t had one fail. When one inevitably does I’ll probably just replace it with another renewed HGST.