What is SATA NEARLINE?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearline_storage

Just go with the SATA-II version, unless there are other spec differences.

wtf... post some links so we can see what the hell that thing is. That wiki article told me nothing...

Good ol' wiki..
Althought in this case I gotta agree with Doughbuy, it didn't really explain it to well :?

Anyways I was looking at HD's to use in a RAID 1 setup, I see that WD also has these 'RAID edition' HD's. Any advantage here over the others or is that just marketing hoopla? They seem to be the same price as the rest and offer no advantage other than the fact they are labelled 'RAID edition' :roll:

Check the vendor's website.
I suspect this HDD may have slightly better internals designed for constant and long term use with lower failure.

This is a guess w/o specific links.
It may be hogwash. It may not.

The WD nearlines I use have 16M cache as opposed to 8. are designed for 24/7 operation. have a 5 year warranty instead of 3 and 1.2 million hours MTBF against the usual 300K.

NEARLINE HD's (SATA, SCSI or PATA, it doesn't matter) are storage devices built with a balanced compromise between speed, reliability and power requirements.
They're usually targeted to servers which need an always online and fast backup device (huge databases, sensitive data archives and so on).

For every day use choose a normal SATA HD, it will be faster or if you need extreme reliability a server class ES HD.

Hey... a real explanation, nice.

Stick with the standard consumer HDD's since their the best price per performance wise. They should also last more than long enough for you...

Enterprise drives have some added features, such as better heat and vibration management, longer MTBF, yadda yadda yadda... most of it won't apply to you except for the MTBF, but its your call on that.

320gig PMR drive FTW!

It's not just marketing hype the WD RE drives have a different error tolerance / recovery mode -- the WD non-RE drives don't work as well sometimes in failure / recovery in RAID setups.

Oh wonderful, that is EXACTLY what I need. I run my computer for extended amounts of time and have a lot of critical data on here. Tell you the truth I worry to death my HD's will fail and in light of this new technology I will be buying NEARLINE HD's from now on  

Thanks so much to those who cleared that up!

Actually TLER can be very usefull on a RAID array, and the difference between 3 year/300k hrs and 5 year/1200k hours is a big one imho.

I only buy 5 year warranty drives these days (any Segates, Raptors, or any WD Raid edition drive)

Hi
I was told that the NAS contained "Nearline"drives, but there is nothing obvious on the drives to differentiate from a regular consumer grade drive; should there be something written on themon them??? or was I taken for a ride???