Can I Use a NAS as a Regular Drive? NAS vs Other Drives

What Is NAS Drive?

Nowadays, most HDDs are divided into the following categories: desktop drives, NAS drives, surveillance drives, enterprise drives, etc. Just as its name implies, NAS hard drives are HDDs used in NAS devices.

NAS drives feature heat-resistant and anti-vibration design and provide 24/7 operation with higher speeds. Therefore, these drives are suitable for multi-user business environment and are capable of processing a high amount of data for a heavy data transfer network.

However, due to the above features, NAS HDDs are 10 to 15% more expensive than regular desktop hard drives, although their performance is approximately the same.

Now, let’s make a brief introduction to other hard drive. For example, desktop drives, surveillance drives, and enterprise drives.

What Is a NAS Drive and How to Do a NAS Backup on Windows 10?

Desktop Drives

The Desktop drive is designed for general use applications in a system that is not on or being used 24/7. It is tuned for a mixture of data streaming and random data which helps load media and programs respectively.

However, desktop hard drives’ life expectancy and MTBF is low in comparison to any enterprise or network-based hard drives. In addition, a desktop HDD will not be able to cope up with bulk usage and storage, otherwise hard drive failure and data loss will easily occur.

Surveillance Drives

Surveillance hard drives are mainly designed for handling surveillance video data. These drives write a bulk amount of data every single day. Therefore, they should be able to get written without getting overheated, slow down or loss in capacity.

In addition, they should be able to work 24 hours a day and 7 days a week and consume a small amount of power in comparison to the regular drives.

The last but not the least, surveillance drives come with the better ‘Sequential Read and Write’ speed so that they can write and read video quickly.

Enterprise Drives

Enterprise hard drives are used in servers and large storage systems. They have high performance and can respond as fast as possible to transfer the data quickly.

In addition, due to the importance of data security for storage systems, enterprise hard drives feature many data safety functions, so that they can easily retrieve data in case of an emergency like drive failure.

External Drive Or NAS, Which Is Better For You

Can I Use a NAS Hard Drive as a Regular Drive?

Can I use a NAS hard drive as a regular drive? Many people may ask this question. The answer is YES. You can use it as a regular desktop drive, as long as the interface is in accordance. But there is a problem you should pay attention to: NAS HDDs have TLER technology.

TLER technology allows the drive to mark sectors as bad sectors when it can’t access the sectors after continuous attempt for 3-5 seconds. This reduced the failure rate of raid array and improved reliability and stability.

However, if you use NAS hard drive as a regular drive, some sectors may be marked as bad sectors incorrectly. Because common desktop drives without TLER technology usually mark sectors as bad sectors when they can’t access the sectors after continuous attempt for 30 seconds to 1 minute.

The Best NAS Hard Drives You Can Buy [Here Are 3 Options]

You can know how to buy the best NAS hard drives in 2019 after you read this article.

Read More