NAS hard drives

My old NAS drive have gone belly up after 13 years, it was a Buffalo and done the job, not a great unit, but it has lasted 13 years. I have been looking around I have got the NAs unit itself down to three different ones, Two that are very cheap, including a Zyxel and one about £140 ish, but that is not what i want to ask about
My problem is the drives that goes into them, now my old NaS, used a single standard Toshiba 1TB drive, just a normal one you would put in your computer. NAS spec drives seems to be recommended for NAs units, but the prices are twice the price of a normal drive. I understand that these NAs drives are built to a higher spec and should last longer than a normal internal drive and if this was an office and the NAS was used a lot I would say fine, but it will be used once a day to back up, so is it really worth paying the extra price for NAS spec drives?

I did see some NAS spec tosh drives on Amazon, 8TB for £159, that is not a bad price, but I would need two as most units have raid these days, not that you have to use raid.
cheers peeps

Whatever drives you get, make sure that they are not "shingled". Some drives advertised as NAS quality use Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), where tracks are overlapped (shingled) to achieve higher recording densities than disks that use Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR). See here.

Get cheaper drives (with the proviso that Mick mentions) and mirror them. They might not last quite as long as accredited NAS drives, but you'll save money in the long run.

(You didn't ask, but I'd highly recommend Synology or Qnap NAS units.)

In reply to a post by micksharpe:

Whatever drives you get, make sure that they are not "shingled". Some drives advertised as NAS quality use Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), where tracks are overlapped (shingled) to achieve higher recording densities than disks that use Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR). See here.

Thanks for that, i have heard the terms, but I did not know anything about them until now, thanks for that, it seems trying to find that info is not easy for the drives, the Toshiba N range uses CMR, it seems WD ironwolf uses SMR., I presume normal drive with a high capacity is going to use SMR due to cost. I am just wondering if it will make a lot of difference to me, after I have been using a slow NAS drive for 13 years.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Get cheaper drives (with the proviso that Mick mentions) and mirror them. They might not last quite as long as accredited NAS drives, but you'll save money in the long run.

(You didn't ask, but I'd highly recommend Synology or Qnap NAS units.)

Thanks, I did look at Synology, and they only have one around my price range and that is the DS220j, Qnap is certainly out of my price range.
All it will be used for is back ups.

why are things so complex?

I think that any modern NAS will be considerably faster than your Buffalo, irrespective of which drives you use in it, judging by the speed of my old Buffalo NAS.

I have a WD MyCloudMirror Gen2 NAS. Experimenting with Macrium Reflect yesterday a backup of the second drive in my PC which holds about 1TB data at the moment was showing at 20HRS, I cancelled it.

A backup to my WD MyPassport USB3 of both my system and the second drive which come to around 1.5TB in total took about 2 hours. I'm not bothering with the NAS.

I've got a new Buffalo 4TB USB3 external drive coming today which I'm going to alternate with the WD MyPassport and run two independant backups/drives.

p.s. - I should add that this was in preference to updating the cabling, buying a new router etc. in the hope of squeezing more speed out of my network which I'm sure would be possible if I were up to it.

Edited by longedge (Wed 03-Jun-20 15:23:42)

It very much depends upon how fast your network is. Are all components of yours Gigabit?

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

I think that any modern NAS will be considerably faster than your Buffalo, irrespective of which drives you use in it, judging by the speed of my old Buffalo NAS.

That would not be difficult. but it did well.

i have read reviews on the WD my cloud units and none of them does it any favours, due to speed or lack of it and other problems. The thing is they are produced like my old Linkstation was, just for small backups, i tried to use my linkstation with Reflect once and like you found it was going to take hours.