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. Read For more information on NAS Hard Drive vs Regular Hard Drive

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 environments and are capable of processing a high amount of data for a heavy data transfer network.

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 the 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, slowing 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.

Last but not the least, surveillance drives come with a better ‘Sequential Read and Write’ speed so that they can write and read videos 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 a drive failure.

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 attempts for 3-5 seconds. This reduced the failure rate of the 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 attempts for 30 seconds to 1 minute.

Is there one kind of Hard Drive that is good for EVERYTHING?

Just those 5 Hard Drive uses alone (and there are hundreds more HDD applications) would result in a drive that would need to be insanely rugged, an on-board controller equivalent to a dual-core x86 CPU, a fan to keep it and the CPU cool, a warranty of at least 5 years, a connection that suited SATA, SAS and PCIe, and a whole extra small chassis to put it in! In case you are wondering, this Super-hero Hard Drive exists. It is called the OCZ RevoDrive. However, it costs over £1 a gigabyte (current drives are less than 2-3 pence/cents a GB) so £1000+ for a terabyte. The result, no one wanted it because it was expensive, power exhausting, and awkward as hell.