Can any CMR drive be used as a NAS drive?

[Enquiries]

Will be getting a synology 4 bay nas.

my nas will run the times my PC will run, so about 12 hours or less. i will shut down the NAS when not needed. its not going to be a media server.

its only use will be backup of files. and photo backups straight from phones.

I feel like 2 TB HDD's are enough for me, so 2x4 with Raid 5 will give me 6TB of space, more than enough more me.

I saw on seagate's website than 2TB Barracuda Pro's are CMR.

If i use those, will they be fine for the long term? or should i just spend more and get the 2 TB Ironwolf?

What about WD Red? are those drives reliable now after the issue with WD pulling some scam a few years ago?

[BobS]

In short, yes. Back in early 2020 I installed a NAS at a clients site and hard drives were hard to get as well as expensive. There are 25 PC's and laptops that get full image backups every night with an 8 day retention using ABB. Previously they were being backed up using MS Home Servers installed in VM's and all total the space used was only 2TB. Caught a deal on some 6TB WD Blue drives (CMR) and installed those and they have run 24/7 without error. For your light duty use, there's no need for a heavy-duty Enterprise grade hard drive.

In a previous post, I commented about having to replace two Toshiba N300 Enterprise grade hard drives today that failed after 18mo. So go with price and CMR technology. My bias / experience with hard drives is go with WD Red's for reliability, Seagates for price.