I am getting ready to buy some new drives. While doing my research I found that Red Pro is more optimized for use in a NAS but I have not found how it is optimized. Is there a benefit to use NAS drives over enterprise drives in unRAID? Since unRAID does not operate the same as a consumer NAS that uses a traditional RAID does it matter that the Red Pro is optimized for use in a NAS?

I use a mix of enterprise drives, nas drives, consumer desktop drives. All have worked without issue. Examples from all categories have failed prematurely.

There are specific types of drivers that are less performant or less optimal (SMR), but even those will still work. I have removed all SMR drivers from my system, but that was because I wanted to maintain a specific level of performance, not because it had to be done.

Outside of your specific aesthetic requirements and tolerance for warranty requirements, I don’t think it actually matters that much. I shop based on my minimum size requirement and $/TB, which leads me to frequently buy used enterprise drives.

"optimized" is a big word, it is more that the drives put a focus on certain things, but "beeing better".

One thing is about "power on events". Desktop drives do not care about how many cycles they do, the even spin up fast. NAS and Enterprise drives take a lot of more time to spin up and do not like to be shutdown very often. They wanna run, run run...

The other thing is about shock absortion. Desktop Drives usuall do not like shocks at all. NAS Drives know that they are not alone in the box and watch out for vibrations from other drives and try to compensate them.

NAS Drives usually are designed to watch for up to 8 other drives put into the same cover. Enterprise Drives can take many more vibration sources and compensate.

At home in your small box, NAS and Enterprise hardly will make any difference, at least when it comes to spin up and shock absortion. They may have different speeds for reading and writing though. And of course, they can have a very different power consumption (Enterprise dont care about power) and heat dissipation (Enterprise assumes there is effective external cooling, NAS try to stay cool and do not heat up the box too much)

But of cause, all these things are just examples. Manufactures name their drives as they like and sometimes its only a marketing (and pricing) thing that makes the same drive appear under different names at the same time. So read the specs closely and compare yourself "WD Red" itself means not much (and there are "WD Red Pro" too!)

Right now I have a mix of HGST Deskstar NAS, and Iron Wolf Pro all 6TB drives. I am looking to upgrade add 12 TB or larger drives and with the recent Seagate scandal of used drives being sold as new and HGST now part of WD and the WD Gold drives being basically rebranded HGST drives, I would buy WD Red Pros or Golds. I was looking to get the fastest speed drives that are NAS or Enterprise drives I could because parity checks will take even longer with 12 TB drives. Also Price is a factor since I will need to purchase 3 drives just to make use of all 12 TB because I am using 2 parity drives.

I also am running at 15 drive 45drives case with a LSI 9305-24i SAS card so I could use 12GB/s SAS drives. Would there be a benefit to using SAS over SATA?

I just checked my order history and the HGST drives have been installed since 2015 and 2016. The Iron Wolf Dives have been installed since 2019. That's a pretty good run with no errors that I could remember.

I couldn’t find any scandal about Seagate selling used drives as new, but I did find a bunch of complaints about 3rd parties selling used drives as new. That’s got nothing to do with Seagate and everything to do with knowing who you are buying from.

According to Forbes and USA Today articles -

customers in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, the UK, the Czech Republic, Japan and the USA. These drives are being sold by third parties through outlets such as eBay.

It’s foolish to think that only buying WD Gold or Red Pro guarantees anything. I bought 4 Red Pro. 3 were exchanged under warranty in the first 18 months. That’s why my bottom line is $/TB and mostly buy used enterprise drives.

5 hours ago, whipdancer said:

According to Forbes and USA Today articles -

The scandal is worldwide, it was discovered here in Germany first, but it turns out to be almost everywhere. And it is not about dubious resellers or buying cheap. Even major shops with good reputation have been flooded with this shit. These are not even refurbished drives, just old ones where SMART data was resetted mostly (there are still some traces left, tools are available to detect such a drive). And many of them relabled too ("gold" was "blue" before and so on).

We dont talk about a handful of few drives. Vast quantities have been modified and brought back to the market. The sources are still unknown and under investigation. It is believed that the drives worked some years in chinese cryptofarms.

So, currently, it is a major risk to buy a Seagate, whereever you buy (ok, maybe not if you buy from Seagate directly).

Edited August 8, 2025Aug 8 by MAM59

On 8/7/2025 at 5:31 PM, whipdancer said:

I couldn’t find any scandal about Seagate selling used drives as new, but I did find a bunch of complaints about 3rd parties selling used drives as new. That’s got nothing to do with Seagate and everything to do with knowing who you are buying from.

According to Forbes and USA Today articles -

It’s foolish to think that only buying WD Gold or Red Pro guarantees anything. I bought 4 Red Pro. 3 were exchanged under warranty in the first 18 months. That’s why my bottom line is $/TB and mostly buy used enterprise drives.

I don't mean that Seagate itself was involved only that the majority of the drives that were used drives were Seagate drives. I even read articles about drives bought from reputable retail stores being also used drives.

I have been buying WD RED and WD RED+ exclusively so the past few years.
I have had some failures on them usually around the 3-3.5 year mark even if they run continuously. I have a 3TB Red drive that is 7 year old though.

I have heard about the Seagate scandal
What is the consensus from you guys?

Stay with WD? Go with some specific seagate drives?

I rarely buy new drives unless they are a great deal. I primarily focus on used enterprise drives (just added 4x 26tb Sea Exos drives). They come with a 3 year warranty handled by AllState.

I just had to RMA 3x 18tb WD Red Pro (bought new 3 years ago) and 3x Sea Exos 18tb drives (bought used 3 years ago).

The WD are all being replaced by WD. The Exos were all refunded. I’m still waiting on WD as only 1 replacement drive has arrived so far (about 3 week turn-around at this time). The quick refund on the Exos is why I already have replaced them with the 26tb drives.

I no longer do advanced replacement with WD, because they lost one of my RMAs a few years ago and it took over 6 months to get the full retail price charged to my card reversed because of their mistake.

Edited August 29, 2025Aug 29 by whipdancer
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