20 Best Hard Drives For Nas (2023 Updated)

Ordered Friday 04/03/22 at 10:04am, arrived by Royal Mail on Saturday 05/02/22 before 12pm – thank you CCL & Royal Mail. Paid a little extra over a global online retailer, being put off them for computer components as I’ve had a retail boxed HDD from them in the past which had some shoddy outer packaging.

Also their recent reviews for HDDs showed it’s a bit of a lottery as to how they package their HDDs for shipping. Some customers receiving very poorly packaged drives, dented and broken. My Seagate Iron Wolf 4TB arrived in it’s sealed anti-static bag, inside a thick tubular bubble rap envelope, inside a double thick, snug fitting cardboard box with a grey courier pouch bound tight outer layer.

Installed and working perfectly as anticipated. A further 4 weeks later and drive working just fine. I had thought this would be replacing a 4 year old 3TB Western Digital WD30EZRZ (CMR) as my main backup drive in my gaming PC as I was getting errors on that while doing drive image backups.

Long story short, the WD drive subsequently proved not to be the culprit (memory/mobo) so I did not really need this new drive. It’s quick and quiet enough while still using CMR (not that problematical shingle / SMR) recording method along with other tech alluding to reliability.

It has a reasonable 3 year warranty and additional rescue / data recovery service – wouldn’t expect to use it but it might show Seagate has some faith in their product. Happy so far.

It was that for my tech refresh. My storage systems (2 synology ds2015xs with a total of 16x4TB disks) are always the to be refreshed and so I started hunting for a seller especially since I was looking to upgrade to 16x8TB disks.

My attempts at looking for a reputable seller o Amazon was to say the least not encouraging as I had spent months trying to figure out where to get the disks (I buy most of my tech from Amazon). The very poor reviews I had read from various buyers on Amazon did not give the confidence that I was going to be happy with my purchase either.

So I decided to give the independent retailers a try. I choose CCL and another retailer and split the quantity into 2 batches. 9 (8 + 1 spare) to CCL and 9 (8 + 1 spare) to the other retailer. The disks arrived on time as promised and were properly secured and packaged and for the first time ever, I checked what the warranty status was on the disks.

(This was one of the major issues reported by buyers on Amazon) I was over the moon when every single disk I bought from CCL still had the 3 year warranty on it!!! And when it came to building the array (raid 5, took about a day and a half checking for consistencies), not a single error was reported on completion!!! To say that I was extremely pleased is an understatement.

The whole process from purchase to utilisation was. as they say in mortal kombat. a “FLAWLESS VICTORY” for me. I would have given more than 5 stars for this transaction but alas 🙂 5 is the maximum I would definitely recommend CCL for purchasing tech equipment.

On a completely unrelated side note, I have been camping on their website waiting for an opportunity to grab an ASUS 3090 RTX GPU. we all know how that is going these days :).

A great drive for the cost. Approximately $35 per TB. The drive is a nice quiet one to sit next to while you have lots of data to copy to it. It takes approximately 1/2 day – a full day to copy it full.

A 2 TB folder takes approximately 2-3 hours. Timing I guess depends on files, more than totals though as every time you copy a new file/folder it pre-makes the room for it’s storage. If you only had a few large files though, thus 500GB+ each they’ll copy much quicker than if you had say 2000 files in one copy task.

Once your files are on this drive too, I’ve noticed that when you access them they load ready for you very quick. After all it’s supposed to be a drive for NAS units, but works excellent on it’s own.

You should have no trouble RAIDing if you like. I’ve always maintained that your data is best backed up as 3 backups – 2 Local – different drives and 1 offsite. If or when one of your drives comes to its knees, you at least know you’ve still got a workable backup to buy a replacement and re-copy your data safely.

Hope this helps.

Ordered 2 of the 4TB Red Plus drives for some storage in my NAS server that runs 24/7. I received a box containing the two drives surrounded by plastic supports and air bags to make sure they were secure in shipping (and of course, they were in anti-static bags).

It wasn’t foam, but it seemed pretty secure. I put them into my server and checked their SMART stats; everything was great. Since then I’ve formatted them and put them into my server. Checking their current status right now, after being in there for a few weeks, they only have 341 power-on hours so far, but they’ve been running flawlessly and there are no reallocated sectors or errors.

We’ll have to see how long they last, but I’m not worried in the slightest. By the way, I will note that they are 5400 RPM (though luckily CMR), but I, myself, consider that an advantage because I don’t mind the speed, and the lower temperatures are helpful.

Other then installing windows 10 and getting drivers and installing about 7 LAN capable old school games i hardly ever used this PC. Recently i was just making sure it was working and updating WIN10 and testing games.

It was sitting for a majority of its life unused. I moved but i was careful with my legacy PC’s. Not sure if i blame win10 or i just blame a faulty drive dying. Im used to seeing the drive die slowly.

FIrst time i ever bought two WD drives. Their is a reason behind my worries. This was one of the reasons, alas its on newegg and its an old product but i didnt expect to die so suddenly with no real use unless win10 is to blame.

Again i have another drive in another PC and now im wondering if that once is going to die as well. For the price i expected it to last a long time since i never use it.

Great drive so far. I didn’t realize this NAS Plus drive runs at 7200 rpm. It may be slightly louder than the 5400 rpm drives but if it is it’s not very noticeable unless you’re right next to the PC.

Transfer rate drive to drive and over the network is great. After transferring large files over a few hours the temperature range stayed between 90 degrees F at idle to 110 degrees F (after moving 2TB of video).

I’m using this drive in a standard HTPC enclosure without any extra cooling fans with an intel 775 motherboard, quad core CPU running Linux. More details for nerds: I was planning on setting this up in a separate NAS box but decided instead to just add this drive to the HTPC and set up a shared network folder on it.

Works great. If you are looking for NAS storage plus an HTPC, I would suggest that you only one device, the HTPC. Boot it from a small SSD with a second large NAS hard drive configured in the fstab file with a mount point in a network share folder.

Linux allows you to set a mount point for any size partition as a virtual file system within a shared folder on the boot drive. Note that the partition will only auto mount when specified in the fstab file and it would only be shareable if mounted in a folder on the boot drive due to OS file security.

I’ve used Synology NAS since around 2003 and pretty much found every drive maker has good and bad runs. HGST was the only drive I could say I had trust in. I’ve had three of this model (6GB ST6000NE000-2KR101) and so far they made it over 18 mo just fine.

I like the extended SMART data branded under Ironwolf on this drive, but I’m holding off judgment, since every failed drive on my Synology I detected due to performance issues (freezing while copying files etc).

I look at the SMART diagnostics and always states the drive was healthy. Um, yeah. Maybe the Ironwolf will do better. Bottom line, I just manage risk by only buying my hot spare when my performance tanks so I am not burning a warranty down just to have a hot spare.

(I pay expedite costs if urgent. ) Second, I only buy drives that have 5 year warranties (more if I can find them) as three year warranties seem to crap out at 3 years, while 5 year warranty drives usually make it to five years.

It’s worth the up-charge since it reduces the risk to the data. It’s a three star drive, while WD, Seagate are all 2 stars. Ironwolf version earns and extra star for at least attempting to provide something better than the useless SMART data.

I don’t have an ultra-quiet setup, but have not heard a peep from these drives (ordered 2). I was disappointed to see they have 2TB less than advertised available to use, so expect to only have 14. 5TB available to start with.

I feel like they should advertise the capacity based on what’s available to the end user to use. It’s definitely misleading. I did hear a few clicks when first fired up, but quiet since. It seems under certain rare conditions, these will make noise when they want to, but have not had an issue with noise otherwise; I only hear my fans.

I use them in a RAID 0 config as Plex movie storage. B&H shipped quickly and the drives were packaged well. I will definitely order from B&H again.

Bought 2 of these to mirror each other. Sequential write speeds for both are good which is useful during array rebuilds or other heavy data transfer. Got a steady write speed of 125 MB/s increasing to 138 MB/s, likely due to the heads moving from the inside to the edge of the platters.

Bear in mind translates to well over a day for a full rebuild, but that’s expected at such a high capacity. Did not test random access speeds. Acoustics – the head movement noise during seeking was louder than I expected, when compared to lower capacity models I have from the same range.

Might be something to bear in mind depending where you want to put these.

I am using this hard drive as a primary desktop drive (EXT4 format) running Mageia Linux. The HDWQ140 replaced a PATA Seagate Barracuda ST3500630A, so any comparisons I make are relative to that hard drive.

The Toshiba is fast: cold boot times (from power-on to desktop login) have gone from roughly 1 minute 15 seconds to about 25 seconds. Three runs of hdparm -Ttv yielded speeds of around 200MB/sec, in line with what Toshiba reports, so I have no issues with the drive’s speed.

The HDWQ140’s sounds are pitched higher than my old ST3500630A’s. When reading/writing, the Toshiba makes a “chir-chir” sound whereas the ST3500630A made more of a “dut-dut” sound. That being said, I do not find these sounds unpleasant, but they are audible.

In my particular setup, the major annoyance is a slight “hiccup” every five seconds or so, which I think is a read/write of minimal data, but I do not think this is the fault of the drive; my guess is that either the OS or the programs I am using (or both) are to blame.

Toshiba packages the hard drive in a plastic bag (which did not appear to be an anti-static one) and fits it snugly into a 2-piece “sleeve” that has multiple plastic air cushions, so it does seem as if there is no way for it to move around inside the box.

There are no SATA cables or screws, so make sure you pick some up elsewhere.

I ordered 2 identical drives from NewEgg, they arrived quickly but due to other projects it took about a week to get around to installing them. Connected both drives, powered the system up, verified both were detected in the BIOS.

Booted into Windows 10 Pro and went to partition them. 1st drive went without a hitch, 2nd drive seemed to be taking a very long time, so I walked away and got a cup of coffee and when I returned there was an error saying the device didn’t exist, figuring it was a glitch I tried again, same result, system also seemed to take an unusually time to boot especially considering it’s running on a PCIe 4.

0 Sabrent Rocket nvme drive. Went into device manager and removed the drive, redetected it and tried again, same result. Shut the system down and swapped cables between the 2 drives and the problem followed the drive eliminating the possibility of a bad connection, bad cable or faulty SATA port.

NewEgg immediately issued an RMA and provided a return label so 5* to NewEgg. Now I’m unsure if I just got unlucky or if they are following in the footsteps of the dreaded IBM Deathstars of the early 2000s.

Time will tell, so far the other drive is working perfectly.

Just like any other Toshiba products, this HDD also is one of the types of product that you may heard over the years: good/great at all aspects, outstanding in none. It is not the cheapest in similar specs from other brands, nor is it the most expensive one.

It is not the fastest in similar specs from other brands, nor is it the slowest one. It doesn’t get notably faster than other 7200 RPM ones, but the speed is fine/acceptable. Once you get used to the speed of a good SSD, you no longer care about the speed of a HDD.

It is not the stablest or most reliable model either, those go to slower and more durable survillence models; but I don’t think it is the most unstable one, meaning I won’t worry about it lost data any faster than comparable models or would be broken in the shortest amount of time.

If you have specific boxes that needs to be checked, and you like the Toshiba brand, this could be your choice. The boxes that I ticked were: 4TB or larger, 7200RPM, ~$20 – $30 per 1 TB, don’t have bad history.

Pros: No noticable drawbacks. Good/great overall. Cons: Can be loud sometimes.

Although this is sold as a NAS drive, it can also be used in a computer. You wouldn’t want it as a boot drive. Use an SSD for that. But if you have a home server, home theatre PC or any application with high reads and writes this drive is also ideal as it is designed for 24/7 365 operation.

The Iron Wolf drives are more reliable, have a longer warranty and include free data recovery from Seagate. That alone is worth spending the extra money as professional data recovery services can cost thousands.

When used in a NAS, the firmware monitors the health of the drive and reports to the NAS software if it is about to fail. You won’t get that warning on a PC. You will have to check the S. M. A. R. T data yourself like any other drive.

The drive arrived in retail packaging, well protected and with same day delivery from a delivery service. It was cheaper at Best Buy than Amazon and I know that the warranty will be valid. Warranty is always a concern with Amazon as the drive you purchase may have been intended for sale in another country and the warranty may not be honored.

I’ve been burned by that in the past.

Pros: Despite hearing from multiple sources, the drives themselves aren’t very loud at all. Your case fans have a good chance of drowning out the noise anyway. Performance on Unraid at least is very good and didn’t really require a cache SSD as seems fast enough.

Good stuff!.

This is a follow-up to my review about a year ago. Again, my use case is an 8 drive RAID in a Linux system (Fedora). These drives were purchased Nov 2020. I have also since moved from an Adaptec RAID card to a MegaRAID card, to hopefully get a better experience, however, that did not help.

I was running these as a RAID 5, but because of the failure rates I have switched to a RAID 6. I have now had 10 of these drives replaced in 8 RMAs (88473645 88545097 88568417 88587158 65073767 65099873 65155823 65162324 65191095).

Smartctl is also giving me the tell-tale warning signs that another is now going out (increasing ATA error count). So WD may expect my 11th RMA very soon. The response to my last review, to contact customer support, went no-where.

I did as suggested and it seemed to be promising at first. However, I got bounced around 3 different groups and eventually no more replies. Again, these drives appear to do very well as stand-alone drives.

But in a Linux RAID, seriously, hands-down the worst drive I’ve ever had the misfortune to use. And as an IT pro with over 20+ years. I’ve used a LOT of drives, different types, configurations, etc. I would not ever recommend this drive as a RAID drive.

WD customer support on this matter was a disappointment. However, their RMA program is fantastic.

Purchased 2x 16TB WD161KFGX (36 dBA seek avg, 20 dBA idle) Replaced 2x 10TB WD101EFAX (38 dBA seek avg, 34 dBA idle) Used in my Synology NAS for backups. During idle the new drives are quieter than my previous ones.

Read is probably just as quiet. But writes are pretty noisy. By the specs these should be a hair quieter – and maybe technically they are – but something about the quality of the seek / write clicks is much more distracting than the quality of the noise from the 10 TB Reds (CMR, later rebranded Red Plus).

It’s noisy enough that I’m considering putting my Synology on a power schedule so it’s not bothering me during work hours. This NAS is in a small home office with mostly Apple equipment. To understand the noise levels I expect, I replaced the Synology system fan with a Noctua and can still hear it, but it’s a more acceptable level.

I wanted to move up to 16TB and I’m willing to pay for 5-year-level warranty from Pro, but now I’m wondering if I should’ve waited for a 16TB Red Plus if WD pays more attention to noise quality on this.

The specs were a little bit off, I decided to take a leap of faith that it would be the latest WD 14TB Red Plus drives. They were, the model that reports it being a 7200RPM drive, I ordered 4 drives all 4 drives were the same model numbers.

I was very happy with the purchase. I purchased them to replace 6-7 year old 4TB Seagate NAS drives. Speed is comparable to the drives I replaced. They are in a NAS in the basement, and if I go down and listen closely while I am doing a large copy, I can sometimes hear them make some noise, but not like some comments I read.

Again, it is in a Basement setting within a NAS as these drives were designed for. One issue I wasn’t expecting was the Hard Drive cages didn’t have screws for the back and front, but for the back and middle.

These larger NAS drives don’t have the middle screws, I used them with only 2 screws that fit installed, and so far I have had no issues.

I though 5640 RPM was a little strange, so I read up on it a little bit. Turns out WD has been making drives with the RPM for a while, but in the past has mis-marketed their drives with a “classification” rather than the actual speed.

These were previously marketed as “7200 RPM-Class” and do indeed seem to perform accordingly, but it is nice to know the actual speed. I was specifically looking for 5400 RPM drives for my low power NAS, and 5640 is close enough.

I wouldn’t have bought if I though they were 7200. These have a long, slow startup which is nice so as to not tax my PSU too much. With 5 of these, my entire NAS draws only 100W during power up, and idles around 60W.

The quietness of these drives in my NAS are noticeable compared to my server which has WD Gold drives. The Gold are so noisy you can hear them from the next room over (they are high-performance RAID drives), while these Red Plus drives I can’t hear sitting right next to the system.

Definitely far more reliable than any consumer drive, worlds ahead of their barracuda drives. Found that the speeds are far more consistent than barracuda drives and far faster than competing WD drives due to WD RED drives being SMR which is just horrible for NAS purposes.

Cheaper than WD drives too, you’d be silly to buy a WD RED currently. Got two for my NAS, and one for my mothers NAS, haven’t failed me so far. Definitely recommend.