Question Can I use a NAS drive as a regular hard drive?

[Lee James]

Please could someone advise me?

For a while now I've been desperately low on hard drive space and have been patiently waiting for 8tb drives to get cheap enough.

I've now found a drive on Amazon which is just about within my budget (Seagate IronWolf ST8000VN0022 for £226.34) - however it's a "NAS" drive. I really have no idea what "NAS" means, and couldn't understand the Wikipedia article on it. (I'm pretty dumb when it comes to hard drives.)

So… Can I just stick this drive in my PC and use it as a normal hard drive? Is it a good choice? Will it be slower than the drives I'm used to? (My 2 main data drives at the moment are the Seagate ST4000DM000 and Seagate ST32000542AS - and then of course I use an SSD for my operating system drive.)

I do a lot of video and sound editing, so it needs to be able to accommodate that, also quietness is really important - my new PC was specifically built with silence in mind, after my old machine which sounded like a lawnmower under my desk!

 

[EndlessWaves]

A NAS is a drive that's connected to your router and accessible by all PCs on the network rather than just the one it's inside.

That hard drive isn't a NAS itself, you'd put it inside another unit that provided the networking functionality and the pair together would be a NAS.

It is a normal hard drive in terms of function and interface, just with slightly different choices of components and behaviour such as taking longer to spin down.

They might be slightly slower in response times but sustained transfer speeds should be good. It might be a little louder but that's the non-pro version designed to be used in homes so it shouldn't make a racket.

 

[Lee James]

Thanks EndlessWave