Which drives to get for new ReadyNas?

First, if a drive fails, in my experience, they don't ask what service they were in. I have never used Enterprise class drives in any of my ReadyNAS units, and have had to replace two Seagates (a ST3500630AS four years ago after a month in service and ST1000528AS last fall, again after a month in service). I replaced the 630AS with the same model to bring my two drive array back up to redundancy and those two drives then ran for over 24,000 hours until replaced with larger drives because of space limitations. I replaced the ST31000528AS with a spare purchased when I bought the drives. I have a second drive that needs to go back now for replacement by Seagate. This is two of this model, but I do have 10, 8 in use and two spares.

The consumer class drives are more prone to failure, but use in Raid5 use will not cause a failure. I use X-Raid in my NV+ and X-Raid2 in the two NVX units. When I started with the NV+ it was a two drive raid, so was the equivalent of Raid1, and lost a drive. The 1TB drive was lost in a four drive array (equivalent of Raid5). On the Seagates, you run SeaTools and when it fails the long generic the report gives you a code that is used when you apply for the RMA. You then get a download that details packaging requirements, return instructions and a mailing label. When they get the drive you get an e-mail that it has been received, another e-mail when they are shipping the replacement. In both of my cases, it was less than 10 days from the time I sent off the failed drive until I had the replacement drive. The replacement is generally a refurbished drive.

It is recommended that for rack mount ReadyNAS units only enterprise class drives be used, but for desktop ReadyNAS units both consumer and enterprise class drives are on the HCL.

Once you get the NVX fully backed up, connect the drives and run both short and long tests in SeaTools and see what the results are.