Should I use enterprise class SATA drive or regular desktop SATA drive for my Raid 5 NAS?

[Qianglong]

I am building a SATA raid 5 NAS server and I would like to maximize storage space. The 7200.10 Seagate 320 GB wtih 16MB of cache cost the same as the 250GB Seagate Barracuda ES, which is an enterprise class SATA drive.

SHould I go with the Barracuda ES or the Seagate 7200.10 320GB regular desktop drive?

 

[obeseotron]

If I were doing it, I would definitely go with the bigger drives. It's RAID5 so a single drive failure isn't catastrophic, and you still get the 5 year warranty.

 

[imported_nunya]

I agree. Buy a spare to have on hand in case a drive goes down and with raid 5 you're set.

 

[d3n]

Something to lookout for with the non enterprise drives is the raid/disk drive controllers having timings that are compatible for a RAID setup. I have heard of a few problems with WD drives that are non-enterprise dropping from RAID arrays and reappearing. The RAID has to rebuild and the whole thing is very slow as it takes place.