Grab a stack of CMR drives from serverpartdeals and you’ll be good.
That being said I’ve run enterprise drives, and consumer drives and for home use I’ve never noticed a marked difference between the two in performance.

Honestly, for normal people things hard drive is hard drive. If it’s a hard-core high-performance DATABASE, always spinning ZFS pool then MAYBE it’ll matter. But for just storing data, like a normal use case, heck even a heavy normal use case like photo/video storage where you’re caching on an SSD for editing but fairly intensely reading/writing back to the drive, it’s fine.

The only time it’ll probably matter is if it’s someone else’s money, then just get the expensive drives so you don’t get blamed (enterprise), it’s some super intense database or something, or Security systems there are some benitifs for a drive designed to be CONSTANTLY written to.

I have iron wolf 3TB in my NAS. But seeing they only increased in price over the last months i reconsidered. I just bought Exos E 8TB because theyre quite a bit cheaper and should perform equally. I have to install them yet.

“NAS” in the name doesn’t matter. If it’s CMR and specced for 24/7 work it’s fine.

Depends how much you care about your data and what your backup plan is. Mine is unRAID with two parity drives, meaning I can lose two drives in the NAS without losing any data. Of course my house might burn down so I back up the REALLY important stuff to the cloud as well. Given this I don’t care about consumer grade SMR drives, so I buy the cheapest.

I don’t know where you are located but a good site to cross check Amazon for decent prices is https://diskprices.com/ Good luck

Avoid SMR drives. Limit the use of refurbished drives, no more than 1 less of your fault tolerance, but try to keep it to just 1. You can guess the life remaining based on the hours reported from SMART.

NAS drives should have shorter recovery times with bad sectors so that the raid array doesn’t completely kick the drive out, and have more vibration tolerance since they’re supposed to be in an enclosure with multiple drives.

If you’re using RAID for redundancy go cheap. I’ve been using renewed HGST enterprise dives from Amazon in my NAS for years and still haven’t had one fail. When one inevitably does I’ll probably just replace it with another renewed HGST.

Purely anecdotal, but in my experience drive deaths have been more closely related to power cycling than their type. The drives that stay on 24/7 have generally been problem free, but those in desktops that get turned on and off regularly seem to have much shorter lives.

In one example, I had a set of 8 WD drives that I bought together from the same batch. Half went in a Synology NAS back in 2012, and the others went in desktops. The drives in the NAS and the desktop that always stays on are still running after 11 years. All the other drives died within 4.

Yes it does matter, they use better parts that are rated for better temperature scaling and vibrations and have features that allow the drives to be more reliable and accessible.

If you are just storing data that is going to be shelfed … maybe not so much, just buy a drive that has a high reliability rating, put you stuff on there, unplug it and move on with life, but if the data is being used and writen and read on a regular basis, having NAS rated drives like IronWolf or Exos does matter.

Where I think the “NAS” hardware is applicable is if you are running mission critical services (up to you to decide what is mission critical) and you want to minimize the down time.

It’s certainly much cheaper to buy conventional drives, and just have a few extra that keep live or regular backs up on.

If you are doing any kind of drive RAID where you combine multiple drives into a larger pool of storage I would absolutely skip out on anything that uses SMR, and would probably justify the extra price for the NAS grade equipment, purely because of how nightmarish it can be to repair RAIDs. You’ll definitely want to minimize the amount of repair and maintenance you need to do on a RAID.

I run a Synology NAS w/ 4 x 10TB WD REDs. Two are CMR and two are SMR. IMO you can’t go wrong with WD REDs but you can go wrong with only buying a NAS that holds 4 drives :| I do plan to eventually replace this NAS with a 5, 6 or 8 bay NAS but not until Synology includes a 2.5Gbe as default without having to pay for an upgrade. Will also start replacing these 10TB drives with 16TB in the future starting with the SMR drives to increase the size of my storage pool.

Personal anecdote: I have had an old Synology DS215j using WD Blues for about eight years now, and the SMART checks show the drives are within spec.

First, I’d go with making sure you have 3-2-1 protection. It is better to have RAID 1 with two Blues than one enterprise drive. If you already have 3-2-1 protection in place, then move to higher tier drives.

Focus on the backups and getting that in place first. Ideally, CMR Reds are what you should be using, but if money is tight, blues can work.

I use WD Blues with a mix of Reds for my unraid system for the past 3 years now. Haven’t had any issue as of yet with any of my drives. Knock on wood thou.