Advice regarding using NAS drives in PC

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Forums › Microsoft Windows › Advice regarding using NAS drives in PC

Hatch

797 posts

Ultimate Geek

#198195 30-Jun-2016 03:14

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Have a couple Enterprise NAS HDDs that I'm now looking to using in my windows 7 PC which I use as a basic file server/remote PC.

I've read a ton of articles which all say that using NAS designed HDDs will be fine in PCs but just that the NAS firmware won't be utilised by windows which is fine by me.

If anyone has experience in this regard can you confirm that the HDDs will spin down when not in use when used in a PC? Don't have the HDDs on hand to test at this moment.

Many thanks.

kiwigeek1

637 posts

Ultimate Geek
Inactive user

#1583057 30-Jun-2016 03:58

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well I havent tried a NAS firmware seagate in windows but I know

my thecus has a replacement one and that can put drives to sleep ok

I cant see it being a problem myself.. afterall the NAS specific drives is more

about Extended error recovery controls and vibrations

however I read this... which makes perfect sense why you wouldnt want to

-----------------------------

Desktop drives are optimised to be fast on seeks. This causes higher seek retries but significantly higher performance. AAM is usually set to moderate levels or disabled. If they hit an error, they'll try very hard for a very long time to get your data back (the system may freeze while this happens, but the alternative is data loss).

NAS drives are optimised to use less power, cause less vibration and always have AAM set to high levels, which multiplies rotational latency. They also do not retry forever to get data back, and just try a few times and then report an error (early retry termination).

You can create a desktop drive from a NAS by disabling AAM, although it'll then reach desktop levels of vibration (which you don't care about) or a NAS drive from a desktop drive by maximising AAM, but you won't get the early retry termination. In RAID-1 you should care about this, as the array may drop a disk for simply taking too long to read.

however reading more thats drives that are a few years old now.. and AAM cant edit even now days.

and most just say this

That's no problem. You can use it as a normal drive. The main difference between a desktop drive and a nas drive are some modifications to the firmware, like TLER: which is what i said initially.. so go for it.. espc if theyre seagates ?

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