The best NAS hard drives in 2022

The professional IronWolf Pro hard drives are the gold standard for server storage solutions and are among the most reliable NAS hard drives out there. Since they’re designed for larger NAS enclosures with up to 24 drives spinning side-by-side, the IronWolf Pro has a higher tolerance to vibrations, with all its storage variants getting the rotational vibration sensor.

While the IronWolf Pro drives are better suited for professional NAS systems, you can easily use them for your home servers as well if you prefer that extra reliability. These drives are rated for 300TB of workload (data transferred to and from the drive) over a year, almost double what consumer NAS drives offer.

Seagate bundles these drives with an incredible five years of warranty as standard. And it sweetens the deal with a 3-year data recovery service, under which you can send your damaged hard drive to Seagate to recover your data — a service you’ll have to pay extra for if taken from a third party.

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For small NAS enclosures meant for home use, like the DiskStation DS220+, you don’t necessarily need pro-grade hard drives. Instead, you can save some cash and go with the WD Red Plus, which offers ample benefits without the premium price. The best part about these WD NAS hard drives is all the options you have to get just the configuration you need. Do you want a pair of 8TB drives but can do without 256MB cache? You can go with the 128MB variant instead and save even more money. Need a smaller capacity drive that doesn’t skimp on cache? You have that option too!

You get all that for a price that won’t break the bank, even if you go for the higher storage variants. Compared to other premium hard drives, you’ll save quite a lot of cash with the WD Red Plus. But that doesn’t mean you’re losing out on anything. The Red Plus packs the same NASware software as WD’s higher-end drives, ensuring better compatibility with NAS enclosures. You also get the same drive reliability score across storage options, and the company also includes a standard 3-year warranty. However, you should note that the smaller capacity variants use the 5400 RPM configuration, which is a bit slower than 7200 RPM models, though home users are unlikely to feel any difference.

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Enterprise servers and data centers usually have hundreds and thousands of hard drives spinning simultaneously, a challenging environment for any hard drive. But the WD Gold is geared toward such demanding situations, making it more than capable of handling smaller rackmount NAS servers with dozens of bays that medium-sized businesses set up in-house for their team-sharing needs. And it does all that while offering some notable improvements over our editor’s pick HDD.

The WD Gold gets you double the cache size (on higher storage options), up to 2.5 million hours of mean time between failures (MTBF), and almost double the workload capacity. What these numbers mean is that Western Digital’s top-end hard drive stands true to its purpose as an enterprise HDD and is a dependable choice, no matter the size of NAS it’s used with.

Just make sure you avoid the 1 and 2TB sizes because they get you slightly inferior features, like 128MB of cache and hence, a lower transfer rate. You’re better off getting the IronWolf Pro or the WD Red if you want something with a smaller capacity.

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Most users buying a small Synology or QNAP system don’t need to invest in high-end hard drives and can easily get away with the standard IronWolf. This Seagate hard drive borrows the best part of its Pro sibling—the bundled data recovery service—and brings it to a much more affordable package. The IronWolf scores high when it comes to how well it performs under load, with respectable MTBF and workload figures, allowing you to run your NAS 24/7, all through the year without worrying about the hard drive’s health.

It’s worth noting that the IronWolf variants below the 6TB capacity offer lower read/write and spindle speeds. And Seagate doesn’t include a vibration sensor on IronWolf drives below 4TB. To make it easier for you, the IronWolf option with 8TB or higher storage comes with everything that you need, so those are the ones you should ideally go for. For anything below 8TB, look at the WD Red, our value pick.

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Western Digital’s answer to the Seagate IronWolf Pro is among the best NAS hard drives suitable for businesses and demanding home offices. It goes all the way up to 22TB, allowing you to make the most of the available bays in your rack server. Like other professional hard drives, the WD Red Pro can also withstand vibrations in large NAS setups with up to two dozen drives running simultaneously. And if you’re still worried about its longevity, Western Digital takes care of hardware failures for a lengthy 5-year period.

While you get top-notch capabilities with the Red Pro drives, it’s better to avoid the base 2TB variant. All higher storage options get you a better overall experience with higher transfer speeds and cache size. The Red Pro’s price is slightly on the higher side when compared to the IronWolf Pro. However, it makes up for that (to a degree) with NASware 3.0 software that ensures better pairing with NAS enclosures to offer lower operating temperatures and power consumption, which will be particularly noticeable in large setups.

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Exos is Seagate’s separate lineup of enterprise HDDs suitable for large data centers and server rooms, like what you get with the WD Gold. Be it for performance consistency or speed, the Exos drives are counted among the best in the business. And to offer more versatility to its technically inclined enterprise clients, Seagate offers these drives in SATA and SAS arrangements.

SAS basically allows the drive to read and write simultaneously, thus speeding up its operations. If you have a specific need for SAS-based hard drives, then it makes sense to pick those up. But bear in mind that the price quickly mounts for SAS drives. Most small and even medium-sized businesses would be perfectly fine with standard SATA drives, saving them a substantial upfront cost.

This versatility is also a bane for Exos drives as they’re available in multiple variants, which can add to the confusion for the consumers. The newer X series Exos drives (X16, X18, and X20) have minor differences in maximum transfer speeds and power consumption, but they only start from 12TB. For anything lower than 12TB, you will have to go for Exos 7E8 or 7E10 drives. Each of these generations is offered in SATA and SAS configurations, further complicating Seagate’s enterprise lineup.

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For small NAS enclosures, Toshiba’s entry-level hard drives do the job pretty well. Pop a pair of these in your home office NAS, and you’ll never have to worry about slow file transfers ever again. Unlike other brands that skimp on the lower-end variants, Toshiba offers a generous amount of cache memory for these drives, helping the N300 touch 230+MB/s of transfer speed across storage sizes.

Toshiba is a trustworthy brand in the storage modules market. In fact, it is known for making white-label NAS HDDs for other popular brands, so you cannot go wrong with Toshiba. The only thing that doesn’t work in the N300’s favor is that it awkwardly sits in the middle of price segments. You can get a similar drive from Seagate for less or a better one for slightly more.

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Synology is better known for its outstanding NAS enclosures and their accompanying software, but it also got into hard drives to offer a complete package in-house. The HAT5300 is designed to work in tandem with a Synology NAS and unlocks some additional features, like direct firmware updates through DSM. Catering to enterprise customers, these Synology drives offer all the bells and whistles we’ve seen on the WD Gold and Seagate Exos, including impressive workload capacity and an MTBF rating.

The HAT5300 is priced on the higher side when put up against other comparable hard drives from Seagate and Western Digital. While you don’t necessarily need to buy it for most Synology enclosures, some higher-end DiskStation models like the DS3622xs+ now require Synology HDDs and won’t show drive stats for other brands. This is definitely unreasonable but still your only option if you’re eyeing the DiskStation model mentioned above.

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With the WD Red SA500 for your NAS, you can double the transfer speeds both ways. This allows you to transfer more data between your computer and your NAS in the same amount of time and with much lower latency. The Red SA500 is primarily a cashing SSD that you can install in the same HDD slot even if your NAS doesn’t have a dedicated M.2 slot for caching. On a small NAS, you can get started with a single 500GB SSD for caching for as low as $60, but you have the option to go all the way up to 4TB for even more space for caching. A good thing about SSDs is that the transfer speeds remain the same across all storage variants, unlike HDDs.

SSD caching is perfect for businesses where multiple people are using the NAS at the same time or if you need to access the same files over and over again, where SSD will speed things up considerably. Though not meant for storage, given the higher per GB cost of SATA SSDs compared to HDDs, you can still choose to create an SSD-only pool alongside a separate HDD pool on your NAS for better utilization of the additional speed that the SSD offers. Just make sure that all your devices in the chain are connected to a faster, preferably 10G, line so that there isn’t any bottleneck between your client devices and the NAS.

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If you are on a tight budget for your NAS hard drives, you can consider the WD Red for your setup. It brings the best of Western Digital to a budget package so that home users can get started with their first NAS without needing to pay a hefty price upfront. You can get it in up to 6TB size, which is quite enough for single or two-bay NAS units that are good for home use and offsite backups. And just like every other WD NAS drive, the Red also comes with a 3-year warranty.

The only caveat with the WD Red is that it is based on SMR, whereas most other NAS drives rely on CMR. Especially for businesses with a high workload, SMR is downright unsuitable as these drives can get quite slow when transferring data in bulk — we are speaking tens of GBs or more here. That also means the data recovery time in a RAID setup would be much higher if one of the drives fails. None of these problems should affect home users with minimal use or single-bay NAS units. Just make sure that you don’t pair SMR drives with CMR ones on your NAS.

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