NAS / NAS Pro

Hard drive manufacturers design drives that will perform well for their largest customers, or sets of customers. This is why “classes” of drives exist.

Design Expectations:

The information below is a high-level set of expectations the drive manufacturers have when designing, testing and selling “NAS and NAS Pro” drives.

Design Details:

Performance needs are in balance with cost. NAS usage may include: a RAID file system, 24/7 usage, data backup, multiple drives in once chassis, file sharing, OS/remote desktop or virtual machine hosting and media streaming.

NAS drives are built to be more tolerant of adjacent drives in the chassis, run longer and be more reliable than Desktop Client drives, and are tuned specifically for small systems using RAID technology. While NAS drives are technically capable of performing in a data streaming environment, they are not tuned for this, and may be under an undetectable form of stress, as they attempt to keep in sync with the expectations of the host. If your system is primarily a media server, you would be better off using AV / Surveillance class drives. NAS class drives are designed for small systems using 4 or less drives.

NAS Pro drives

While also tuned for NAS systems, the NAS Pro basically represents a higher quality drive that is intended for medium to large business use (above 8 drives per chassis), where the NAS drive would be recommended for home and small business (8 or fewer drives per chassis).

The table below is an excerpt from the HDSTOR Drive Comparison Table, which shows features (or lack thereof) of the different classes of drives, as well as relative performance, reliability and cost.