Hi. I’m in Australia and Amazon have both the 6TB WD Blue Desktop and WD NAS drives available, but the latter is 100 bucks more than the former (280 vs 190). They’re both 5400rpm and have 256MB cache.
I run UnRAID at home, with the computer on 99% of the time. The drives are set to spin down after 15 minutes and I reckon at least a couple of my 8 drives spin up a handful of times a day.
What am I getting for that extra 100 bucks? What would I be missing out on if I bought the cheaper ones? I’d be thinking of buying 2 as one of them would be my new parity drive.
Thanks for any advice.
Putting aside the conspiracy theory that SMR could be submarined in to drives again, all WD Red Plus, Red Pro, Gold and Ultrastars are CMR. Red is all SMR and available up to 6TB and 8TB WD Blue (the max size) is CMR.