Hi. I’m in Australia and Amazon have both the 6TB WD Blue Desktop and WD NAS drives available, but the latter is 100 bucks more than the former (280 vs 190). They’re both 5400rpm and have 256MB cache.
I run UnRAID at home, with the computer on 99% of the time. The drives are set to spin down after 15 minutes and I reckon at least a couple of my 8 drives spin up a handful of times a day.
What am I getting for that extra 100 bucks? What would I be missing out on if I bought the cheaper ones? I’d be thinking of buying 2 as one of them would be my new parity drive.
Thanks for any advice.
Anything is fine as long as it’s CMR. Always check the datasheet thoroughly.
WD Blue 6TB is SMR. There are no 8TB+ WD SMR drives in any line. And there are no 10TB+ SMR drives in any Seagate line. Unsure about Toshiba.
https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/50697/related/1
https://www.seagate.com/products/cmr-smr-list/
https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/ap-en/company/news/news-topics/2020/04/storage-20200428-1.html
For 2.5" drives, with the exception of a few Toshiba and specialized Seagate Exos E, all >500GB are SMR.