What is NAS and can i use it?

[Nhyrum]

Sorry for the stupid question, I tried searching for something outlining NAS but cant find anything.

I am looking for a large HDD to back up my PC to and have come to the WD green or red. The reds, as im sure youre aware are NAS drives, which is completely foreign to me. after googling it, its "Network Attached Storage." can i put a nas drive in a reguar old pc and use it? or do i need to stick with the greens?

Also, ive seen mixed reviews of the reds, some are silent, while others are noisy.

[Vicotnik]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage

What NAS means when we're talking WD Reds is that the WD Red is "NAS ready" or whatever you want to call it. The drive is designed to be able to run 24/7 if need be, like the case could be if it would sit in a NAS box. There's nothing special about the drive; it's a normal SATA HDD. A normal desktop class HDD is not really meant to run 24/7 for years on end, even if they sure can.

Seems like the old Reds have slow but quiet seeks (what we want) but the new ones have nosier but slightly faster seeks. I don't think idle noise is worse than before.

[Abula]

I am looking for a large HDD to back up my PC to and have come to the WD green or red.

If you are looking for a simple way to backup your pc into a WD Green, external, i would suggest you look into WD 5TB Elements External Desktop Hard Disk Drive, it comes with WD Green 5tb inside, and very convinient to connect it via USB3 and do your backups. If you want something smaller without the need of an external psu, and dont need a big hdd, then look into Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB Portable External Hard Drive with 200GB of Cloud Storage & Mobile Device Backup USB 3.0 (STDR2000100) - Black.

Now if you are looking for something a little more automatic and via network, you can get a prebuild small server like Synology DS216se, Synology DSM is a very easy to use OS, and you can program the backups. You simply add the hdds you prefer and load the software. I would use WD Reds in any NAS envoirement, personally i have had very good results with them, although some have reported newer versions arent as quiet, still i would go reds for something like a Synology diskstation.

[Nhyrum]

Now if you are looking for something a little more automatic and via network, you can get a prebuild small server like Synology DS216se, Synology DSM is a very easy to use OS, and you can program the backups. You simply add the hdds you prefer and load the software. I would use WD Reds in any NAS envoirement, personally i have had very good results with them, although some have reported newer versions arent as quiet, still i would go reds for something like a Synology diskstation.

I do like that option. I want something automatic, and have it be able to rebuild drives if necessary, i was looking at macrium reflect, but that NAS device sounds more reliable, and quieter than an internal backup, i dont want to hassle with an external backup, Id always forget.