I have never specifically bought/used NAS rated drives in any of my unRAID servers I have built for me, my friends, my family, or even the customers who have asked which drives I recommend.

Thank you for that explanation. My unraid setup is clearly incorrect as I leave the drives spinning (since my NAS drives are supposed to always be on). I may wait till Black Friday and upgrade to a bunch of 8TB hard drives, whatever they may be!  

1 hour ago, sannitig said:

My unraid setup is clearly incorrect as I leave the drives spinning

That's neither correct nor incorrect. Just user preference. If you set unraid to "turbo write" it will keep all the drives spun up during writes for extra speed for some configurations.

 

I honestly have not seen any difference in drive longevity between spinning down drives after a reasonable period or keeping them spun up 24/7 as long as you have steady power and keep temperatures consistent.

 

The things that kills drives besides physical trauma seems to be inconsistent temps and power.

 

If you spin down your drives and they cool off to 10C overnight, and spin up every morning in a poorly cooled enclosure that keeps a spun up drive near 40C, you are going to shorten the drive's life significantly vs. leaving them spun up at 40C consistently. If they spin down and drop to 25C and run normally at 30C, then the thermal shock of spinning down and back up isn't significant.

 

The designation of the drive be it NAS, surveillance, desktop, workstation, whatever, doesn't seem to really be a factor in real world longevity.

10 hours ago, sannitig said:

Thank you for that explanation. My unraid setup is clearly incorrect as I leave the drives spinning (since my NAS drives are supposed to always be on). I may wait till Black Friday and upgrade to a bunch of 8TB hard drives, whatever they may be!  

Ditto what jonathanm said.

You seemed to have misread my "can" as "must".