# NAS vs non-NAS drives: a TL;DR in normal rigs?



## Atnevon (May 30, 2014)

So I got 2 hard drives lately.

HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 4TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB Cache Internal Hard Drive Kit (0S03664) 
and
Toshiba 3TB Internal Hard Disk Drive - 3.5" Form Factor, SATA III 6 Gb/s, 7,200 RPM, 64MB Buffer - HDKPC08

One is reserved for my work rig, and the other for my personal.

Now, the question is ultimately, which would be suited better for which? I can't seem to find any good info that directly says a yay or nay in this manner. The only thing I can find is that NAS drives that are for servers and don't power down or have a lag to their power-up (as say the WD Green drives do). However I can't find anything that is for or agianst using them with say, Steam games.

At work, I have some backed up raw images files, hd videos, and the occasional archive. I can say the same for my personal rig, however, the main is that at home I have an 240gb EVO drive as my main OS drive, and want to reserve on of the other drives for my growing Steam library.

Seeing I can't game at work, Steam and games are the only different really between my home and work rig. So which drive would you put where?

EDIT:  I thought it might help to add my thought process in this. I have an SSD for the OS and select apps (adobe suite for example) and currently the second drive for files, games, ect. I want the better performance out of the games so a 5400 drive is a no-no (so no WD Green, HGST Coolspin, ect). I know a 7200 drive is then the option I need (no raptors, too much money). I know to avoid Seagate at the moment because of the drive reliability reports I've seen lately so I read that HGST was Hitachi, and that Western Digital owns the 2.5 form portion, and Toshiba the 3.5 of what was originally Hitachi. 

Got these drives at the time because they were a good price for what I wanted to spend.


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## FordGT90Concept (May 30, 2014)

Just by looking at the specs, the NAS drive looks like the better of the two.  Which you use where depends on where the better hard drive is required.


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## Atnevon (May 30, 2014)

I would imagine in this case the home rig, with Steam, would benefit from the better performance. It has the better specs for the performance demands over my work rig.

When I read online the differences in drives (mainly Western Digital because the colors are easier to explain to their lineup) I see benefits of the Red over a Green, but nothing about how a Black is better than a Red or why.


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## newtekie1 (May 30, 2014)

I don't believe either is going to make a very big difference.  NAS drives still spin down and park the heads, they just don't do it as aggressively as the WD Green drives.  The only difference is that they have TLER, so when they do have to spin up and unpark the heads before accessing data they will tell the RAID controller "Hey, I'm spinning up, give me a while." so that the RAID controller doesn't freak out and think the drive is dead and kick it out of the array.  At this point, NAS drives are basically desktop drives with TLER enabled.


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## Atnevon (May 30, 2014)

newtekie1 said:


> I don't believe either is going to make a very big difference.  NAS drives still spin down and park the heads, they just don't do it as aggressively as the WD Green drives.  The only difference is that they have TLER, so when they do have to spin up and unpark the heads before accessing data they will tell the RAID controller "Hey, I'm spinning up, give me a while." so that the RAID controller doesn't freak out and think the drive is dead and kick it out of the array.  At this point, NAS drives are basically desktop drives with TLER enabled.



Great explanation! Ok, Let me make sure I have my understanding right: 

Red in this case would be much faster at spooling up than the Green. Both have tech to save some power when not used, but, the Red in this case is faster and targeted towards server use. This is why the marketing seems to target Green towards consumer (home computers) and Red to server use (more advanced demands).

The difference between Red and Black is the black stays on, won't spool down, and the red will. This is why the black is more targeted towards higher perfomance home enviornments (for say in my case: Steam games stored and played because not all will fit on a 240GB SSD) However the tech in the Red (the TLER) is also geared at RAID configurations and tells it not to freak out when they are powered up.

(Side question: does the Green in this case throw a false positive to the RAID controller when powering up, and does TLER play nicer with RAIDS because of such?)


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## newtekie1 (May 30, 2014)

Reds aren't really any faster at spinning up than Greens, Reds just have the ability to tell the RAID controller to wait while the drive spins up.  However, Reds don't spin down as much as Greens do.  The Green drives spin down after say a minute of inactivity, and the Reds spin down after say 10 minutes.  Those numbers aren't actually the times, I'm just guessing for to give an example.

Marketing comes entirely down to TLER.  Drives with TLER enabled are marketed towards servers/nas/enterprise while drives with TLER disabled are marketed towards desktop use.

The Black drives still spin down, though I think their timeout is much longer.

Yes, Greens(and Blues and Blacks) can through a false positive to RAID controllers cause the controller to drop the drive from the RAID array, this is due to the drives not supporting TLER.  Drives with TLER definitely play nicer with RAIDs.   It isn't just spinning up and down that causes issues, it is all times when the controller has to wait for the drive.  TLER(Time Limited Error Recovery) basically just allows the drive to tell the RAID controller that it is still alive, but it is taking a little while to finish the command the controller issued.


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## Atnevon (May 30, 2014)

Even better info.

So if I do not have a RAID setup would it matter if I used the red? From the sounds that if RAID are involved, the red is the go-to. If not then the blacks are the best choice.

It looks like the Toshiba I have is the Black in this case, and the HGST is the Red. Is that correct?


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## newtekie1 (May 30, 2014)

The Hitachi is more like a Blue drive but with TLER, the RED drives are actually 5400RPM.

The Toshiba is, I believe, actually a Seagate drive.  So it would be basically equivalent to the Barracuda series.


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