NAS drive in Media PC?
I'm just about at capacity on the current hard drive in my media PC/server, and I am seeing some great deals on NAS drives lately. Would putting a NAS drive in my media PC as the media drive (OS and apps are on SSD) be desirable, or should I stick with a desktop hard drive for this use case?
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Assuming your media PC is always-on, you're probably better off going with a NAS drive (or a server drive for that matter). The major difference (assuming the technical specs are the same) is that desktop drives are only warrantied for 8 hours per day average power on time. NAS/Server drives are warrantied for always-on operation.
Just buy a normal hard disk and set windows to turn the drive off when idle. It will spin back up when you go to access media and in theory extend the life of the drive. Nothing is guaranteed though. Even a 24hour use rating. I would just get something that's 7200rpm at a good price and call it a day.
If you are using Windows 10, you could use Storage Spaces. I have two 4 TB green (cheap) drives for media and everything that I don’t need very often. They take a couple of seconds to spin up but are configured for redundancy and didn’t cost much more than a single NAS drive. Don’t know how well Storage Spaces performs compared to real RAID systems, but it is easy to work with and you can use different size drives (JBOD) and increase volume size as needed.
No one said guaranteed, I said warrantied. As in, the warranty only covers a certain use case. If you try to RMA a desktop drive that has been running for more than the specified number of hours per day on average, the manufacturer can reject your claim as you voided the warranty by not using it for it's intended purpose. Also, spinning down the hard drive doesn't stop the power-on timer from ticking. If the manufacturer looks at that, they could still come back and say "the power-on timer shows x number of hours, which is more than the 8 hours/day we warranty these drives for. RMA rejected."
I was speaking more to longevity over warranty claims.
Of course, but while nothing is guaranteed, the point of having a warranty on something is so that if it fails before it's supposed to you can get it fixed or replaced. Just making sure it was clear why the warrantied use was worth paying attention to.