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Is it a good idea to use a hard drive that was made for use in NAS as a desktop system drive?

I am particularly concerned about error recovery.

The following post claims that NAS drives do not try as hard to fix disk errors, compared to normal desktop drives:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/78ek5h/comment/doxiq91/

BarraCuda drives are engineered for use in a desktop environment, whereas NAS drives like the IronWolf are designed for use in NAS enclosures. IronWolf drives are engineered to excel in situations where they work in a NAS as RAID teams, meaning they don't as aggressively try to fix reallocated/bad sectors because they can just "move on" and leave something for another drive in the array, meaning when used as a single drive in a desktop, it may potentially result in these errors stacking up quicker than a standard desktop grade drive would.

Is there any truth to this?

I would like to use a Seagate IronWolf drive as a desktop drive, without RAID.

Amazon Dies In Darkness
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mcu
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3 Answers3

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IronWolf drives are engineered to excel in situations where they work in a NAS as RAID teams, meaning they don't as aggressively try to fix reallocated/bad sectors because they can just "move on" and leave something for another drive in the array

This sounds like the drive's firmware just has a different retry timer before it gives up on a failing 'read' command.

Probably all HDDs will automatically retry a failed read. The OS issues a READ command just once and waits, and if the HDD detects that it's unable to read the requested sector 100% correctly, it'll automatically try again, and again, and again, until it either succeeds, or gives up and responds with ERROR maybe a minute later.

But "a minute later" is much too long in situations where the disk is part of a RAID array, and the OS (or the RAID controller) would much prefer to detect the failure quickly because it can easily obtain the same data from a mirror or recalculate it from parity.

So as far as I know, it's very common for "NAS optimized" drives to have a different firmware variant that significantly reduces the drive's automatic retry timeout in order to let the RAID do its work instead.

grawity
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For me the things are overexposed. What I mean is the behavior of "don't as aggressively try to fix" is true but the difference in this direction between NAS and desktop versions is not so big. The above is true mainly for surveillance disks because for this role in required to have as much as possible constant flow of information from cameras to the disk(s). And small error/pixel(s) degradation do not ruin the record.

So my opinion is you can use NAS disk(s) but you should be aware they emit more heat and they are a bit noisier (compared to desktop models)

Romeo Ninov
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This comes down to the error-recovery behavior of the drive. In general:

  • Consumer drives (including Seagate’s Barracuda/Firecuda models and WD’s Blue/Green/Black models) are designed under the assumption that the only option for recovering data from a bad sector is for the drive to do it itself because most end-user systems don’t do RAID and most home-users historically didn’t do proper backups (if they did any at all). This leads to them taking a long time (sometimes multiple minutes) trying to re-read a bad sector in an attempt to get data out of it.
  • Enterprise drives (including Seagate’s Exos models and WD’s Gold models) are designed instead under the assumption that not only are there other options for recovering data from bad sectors, but that those are the preferred options in most cases. As such, they tend to give up relatively quickly (I believe 7 seconds or so is the norm) so that the error gets reported promptly up the storage stack and whatever other recovery mechanism is in place gets triggered, but they also have support for configuring the error recovery behavior.
  • NAS drives (including Seagate’s IronWolf models and WD’s Red models) are a kind of in-between case, but they provide similar error recovery behavior to enterprise drives. Rather importantly, they also usually support configuration of this behavior, though actually configuring it generally requires using something other than Windows.

Rather importantly, you can almost always configure error recovery behavior for a NAS drive to be like a desktop drive.

However, I would also expect the spindle motor on a NAS drive to not hold up as well in typical desktop usage. NAS drives are usually designed for 24/7 operation, but the normal use-case for a desktop system involves the drive starting and stopping frequently (either because of power management (spinning down the platters to save power, or because of the system being powered off frequently), and that type of usage generally prefers different types of bearings and different motor design than continuous operation with infrequent starts.

Austin Hemmelgarn
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