The data hoarders among you running capacious NAS setups and home servers know that cost and reliability often trump performance. SSDs might leave HDDs in the dust in terms of read/write speeds, but most home NAS setups don't really benefit from all that speed. Hard drives, especially ex-enterprise ones, offer a great combination of longevity, affordability, and performance. With refurbished enterprise hardware, you're more likely to get higher-grade internals at low prices. If you haven't been paying attention, you might be missing out on the most value-for-money storage for your NAS or home server.

HDDs are still relevant for the right use case

The cost-performance analysis is in their favor

Most people are too quick to write them off, but hard drives are far from obsolete. Depending on the scenario, they're often a better storage technology than SSDs. You might not prefer them for your PC's primary storage, but where you need tons and tons of storage, SSD pricing can easily get out of hand. Just compare the price per TB of 8TB or 16TB hard drives and SSDs, and you'll see a massive gulf in pricing. It's not even a competition; hard drives are the go-to option for mass storage in NAS setups and home servers.

The typical home NAS or server taking care of your backups, self-hosted services, and virtual machines deals with constant writes. This is where hard drives trump SSDs in terms of longevity. Even if you think the typical 150–200MB/s hard drive speeds are slow, your 1Gb or 2.5Gb network will often become the bottleneck long before the hard drive. Lastly, those who routinely maintain terabytes of data archives can't trust SSDs, since they can lose data when powered off for too long. Hard drives are simply better for cold storage.

Cheap enterprise drives are a great value

They're built to last

Consumer hard drives might be all you need in your NAS or server, but there are even more benefits to be had with enterprise drives — refurbished or recertified enterprise drives, to be exact. Ex-enterprise drives are often available for resale at dirt-cheap prices, considering what you're getting in return. These drives are engineered to take a heavy toll in server environments, built with higher tolerances and higher-grade components. They come with a longer Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and warranties, far better vibration resistance, enhanced error correction, and stricter quality assurance.

Refurbished enterprise drives might be heavily used, but they still have a lot of life left in them. The thing is, businesses routinely rotate their hardware stack long before its natural life is exhausted. Ex-enterprise drives are tested, repaired, and recertified to be sold at deep discounts. If reliability and redundancy are important to you, you should certainly consider enterprise drives instead of consumer hard drives. Considering it takes a long time to run an enterprise drive into the ground, you'll be able to grab a reliable drive for a fabulous price.

Most enterprise drives are CMR instead of SMR

Avoid shingled drives for your NAS

Buying SMR hard drives for your NAS is one mistake you should never make. Hard drives typically come in two varieties: SMR and CMR. CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) drives use the old way of storing data by recording it on parallel, non-overlapping data records. SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives, on the other hand, use overlapping records to store data, reducing the manufacturing cost since the same amount of data can now be stored on fewer platters. SMR drives are cost-effective, but they're terrible for any setup where write performance or data redundancy is crucial.

SMR drives will not only tank your transfer speeds in write operations, but also take days to recover data from a failed drive in a RAID setup. CMR drives will cost more, but will be superior to SMR drives in every way. The advantage of picking enterprise hard drives is that you're more likely to grab a CMR drive. Many (not all) enterprise drives use CMR, so you're getting even better value from your purchase. That said, you should always Google the drive model to confirm if it indeed uses CMR, since not all capacities will use the same technology.

Don't sleep on ex-enterprise hard drives

It's usually not a good idea to rely on used hard drives, especially in NAS setups. However, refurbished enterprise drives are tested to work, and even when heavily used, they have a lot of life left in them. You can get them for a lot cheaper compared to their original price, making them much more attractive than consumer drives. Many of them also use higher-grade CMR tech instead of SMR, making them faster and better for RAID setups.