So far the thing about specific NAS drives is supposed to be specific firmwares, and so far it seems to be rather unproven. As in, there's a lot of talk, and anecdotal evidence here and there, but not a really proven study clearly pointing a noticeable difference. AFAIK Backblaze uses normal desktop hard drives on their setups. Since they live from doing cloud storage, they use hard drives faster than anyone out there, and the make their statistics public. They release every few months their HDD failure rates.
As for which NAS, better stick to Qnap/Synology. Way better app compatibility and community support. If you're only sharing files, you can get to the lower class ones, maybe without HDMI port and using an ARM processor (they still handle files pretty damn quick, but they're not very expandable in RAM/CPU for the future).
Originally Posted by jgl:
Unless something has changed, I have never read anything about desktop drives being prohibited from being run in a 24x7 environment, and I would highly doubt that a 'shop' would be able to get into the board of a dead drive to figure out how it'd been used. This sounds more like a case of typical HK customer service, where they just tell the customer to bugger off.
I could be wrong, I haven't bothered reading the fine print of hard drive warranties for maybe five years or so.
...Exactly. There's no fair use for a HDD. Theoretically it might be possible to infer where the drive has been used based on the amount of times the unit has been spinned up/stopped, and the head moved around/parked, by reading the SMART info. And from that I guess you can pull out of your arse whether it was on a normal PC or on a server/NAS. But yeah, I highly doubt they went to that sofistication, and most likely figured a quick excuse to try to avoid a warranty replacement.