Choosing the right hard drive for your network-attached storage (NAS) enclosure is more important than you may assume at first. Sure, you could install a few budget-friendly desktop-class drives, the same you would a PC. This would be the best choice for saving money, but these hard drives simply aren't designed for continuous use.
That's where NAS drives come into play. Western Digital has the Red family of drives that serves this purpose, but if you want to take things to the next level, there's the Red Plus. The 10TB capacity Red Plus is on sale for Black Friday and sits with a full $121 discount applied at Newegg.
Designed for NAS with up to eight drive bays, the WD Red Plus series is a good choice if you want to strike a balance between value and functionality. They support up to 180TB per year for data written and come with a three-year warranty.
The difference between Red and Red Plus drives is the technology for storing data. Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording (SMR), while these slightly more expensive drives use conventional magnetic recording (CMR). This isn't major but can have an effect on write performance and RAIDm rebuild support. Generally, CMR is considered the better choice.
The Red Plus series of drives come with up to 180TB per year workload rate. There's also a three-year warranty, which can provide peace of mind if you plan on running your NAS enclosure continuously. We've not seen the Wed Plus 10TB priced this low, making it quite the steal should you require an immense amount of space to store everything.
It's worth bearing in mind that for RAID and effective data redundancy measures to be in place, you'll need to buy at least two of these for a NAS. This allows for data to be copied between the two drives to ensure you never lose data, even if one of them should fail.
