Best bang for your buck NAS HDD

[SimonMac]

Anyone upto speed with best value NAS drives, the three most popular/readily available brands are:

Toshiba N300 // 12tb = ~£240 // 16tb = ~£280 // 18tb = ~£340

Seagate Ironwolf Pro // 12tb = ~£265 // 16tb = ~£355 // 18tb = ~£390

Western Digital Red // 12tb Plus = ~£235 // 16tb Pro = ~££400 // 18tb Pro = ~£460

Is there a good price point for bang for your buck?

[Protagoras]

Obviously, this above can be looked at as £/TB and I don't have a view on that.
I'd buy the required capacity rather than pay more for lower £/TB.

I can say that I've had no problems with 2TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives.
The hours count on the most used one in my NAS is 58k hours with no errors, running 24x7.

[Dorkeaux]

Obviously, this above can be looked at as £/TB and I don't have a view on that.
I'd buy the required capacity rather than pay more for lower £/TB.

I can say that I've had no problems with 2TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives.
The hours count on the most used one in my NAS is 58k hours with no errors, running 24x7.

The use case affects what drive you buy, obviously.

For example, if you are using the drive in a RAID scheme there are features like error recovery on many hard drives that can cause problems.
Also, in general drives should be of the same size, but different brands/models (in case there is a manufacturing defect common to multiple RAID drives).
All sorts f other things to look at other than £/TB.

If it's meant to be in constant use (like a PVR or security system) there are special drives that are designed for this.

For use as a single drive in a USB enclosure, you will be looking for performance and bang for buck, probably.

All kinds of stuff to consider.
There are some good recent reviews out there (Tom's Hardware etc.) that can lay this all out.

[WTFH]

This might not fit your need, but I have a few Apple Time Capsules set up. As standard they are 2 or 3TB and you can get them second hand for not much on eBay. One is used just for music/films and is accessible by the TVs/Sonos. One is for photography and has limited access. One is shared documents. One is a backup of the Mac.

[eek]

All that matters is price per tb - and then how the NAS works.

based on what you quote the Toshiba 16TB is the best deal - although I think the drives I need to install cost less as I bought them before storage costs started to increase thanks to AI.

[NotAllThere]

I recommend a mixture. I bought a bad batch of WD. Probably made at the same time and failed within a few months of each other.

[Protagoras]

I recommend a mixture. I bought a bad batch of WD. Probably made at the same time and failed within a few months of each other.

+1
I have 6 (identical) disks for my NAS and swap them out from time to time so that the hours-run counts differ significantly. Some years ago I'd 2 disks in a RAID5 array fail at the same time. Backups remain important!