Safe to use a regular 'green' drive in a NAS enclosure?

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TokiWartooth

TokiWartooth

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Dec 22, 2014
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I was on the cheap and last year bought two 4 TB Seagate STBV4000100 external drives to use in a Mediasonic HUR3-su3s3 dual drive RAID enclosure. I note I bought them last year because I didn't start using one until recently (just as its intended external drive use for the time being) and after the first power down it started clicking. I'm hoping it's just a bad power supply because the warranty expired a while ago.

Inside the enclosure is a SATAIII 5,900rpm ST4000DM000 drive (which was more expensive as a bare drive than as an external unit). I'm wondering if it's OK to use them as NAS because after the clicking I'd like to get some redundancy in place.

What's the big difference between the much more expensive NAS drives and the slow 'green' 5,900 rpm drives?
 
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SuperSoph_WD
Hey there, TokiWartooth!

To be honest, I'd definitely NOT trust an HDD that is clicking. This could be indicating that the drive has internal/physical hardware damage on it. If that's the case, I'd advise against using it anyhow, especially storing essential data. My first move would be to test the HDDs using their manufacturer's diagnostic tool and check up on the health and SMART status. You should be able to find such a utility on their website.

No matter what the results show, I'd not use standard desktop drives in a NAS. If the NAS will be running 24/7 and accessed by your whole network at home, you should make sure you have NAS drives inside. The difference between them and any other 3.5" desktop drive is incorporated in the...
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SuperSoph_WD

SuperSoph_WD

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Jul 30, 2014
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Hey there, TokiWartooth!

To be honest, I'd definitely NOT trust an HDD that is clicking. This could be indicating that the drive has internal/physical hardware damage on it. If that's the case, I'd advise against using it anyhow, especially storing essential data. My first move would be to test the HDDs using their manufacturer's diagnostic tool and check up on the health and SMART status. You should be able to find such a utility on their website.

No matter what the results show, I'd not use standard desktop drives in a NAS. If the NAS will be running 24/7 and accessed by your whole network at home, you should make sure you have NAS drives inside. The difference between them and any other 3.5" desktop drive is incorporated in the firmware and the design for a different purpose. NAS/RAID drives are specifically optimized to withstand the workload of 24/7 environments, which improves the reliability of the drive and expands the NAS experience with it.

Since your enclosure is 2-bay and you want redundancy, your safest choice is to configure a mirror a.k.a. RAID 1. This array requires minimum 2 HDDs and has excellent redundancy because one of the HDDs is simply an identical copy of the other (mirror). Either way, I'd definitely go with NAS drives and make sure those old 'green' drives are healthy. If they are, you can use them as an off-site backup for your NAS.

Hope I was helpful. Keep me posted if you have further questions! :)
Best of luck & Happy Holidays!
SuperSoph_WD
 
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