My brother and I have decided to build a NAS for a “home cloud.” Essentially a single place to upload our media and documents to free up space on out home systems.

My brother is more versed in this than I am, so I’ve let him select the NAS RAID system and how to set it up. Since we have four slots, we started discussing drive configurations. The debate was should we get commercial 4TB drives or NAS-specific 3TB, since they were about the same price. Then comes this article.

Enterprise vs. Consumer Drives
At first glance, it seems the enterprise drives don’t have that many failures. While true, the failure rate of enterprise drives is actually higher than that of the consumer drives!

It turns out that the consumer drive failure rate does go up after three years, but all three of the first three years are pretty good. We have no data on enterprise drives older than two years, so we don’t know if they will also have an increase in failure rate. It could be that the vaunted reliability of enterprise drives kicks in after two years, but because we haven’t seen any of that reliability in the first two years, I’m skeptical.<\blockquote>

The gist is that as long as we expect to change drives about every three years, we should be fine with commercial drives.