Home Server Hard Drive: NAS-Class or Enterprise, and What It Uses to Run All Year

What a home server hard drive has to cope with

A home server is the machine that stays on: a NAS in a cupboard, an old PC sharing files and taking backups, a media box under the television. Because it runs all year, the hours are not what separates one drive from another. The useful differences are the workload each drive is rated for, the warranty, the noise and the power it draws at idle.

Two NAS-class lines are sold for exactly this. Toshiba describes the N300 as 24-hour by 7-day high-capacity storage for personal, home office and small business use, and WD says the Red Pro is designed to handle the rigorous demands of high-intensity 24x7 multi-user NAS environments. Seagate's IronWolf Pro is the third NAS-class line here. Seagate's Exos X20 and WD's Ultrastar DC HC560 are enterprise drives that also turn up in home builds. This page compares them all at one capacity, 20 TB, so that the differences come from the class rather than the size.

Desktop drives are not compared here. If you are considering one, check its maker's sheet for an always-on rating and a workload figure before it goes into a machine that never switches off.

Home server hard disk specs at 20TB, from the makers' sheets

Each sheet measures under its own conditions: Toshiba quotes active idle, Seagate an average idle, WD its own idle figure, so treat a fraction of a watt as a tie. Noise arrives in three units. Seagate and WD give dBA for their NAS drives, Toshiba gives dB, and WD gives the HC560 in Bels, so compare noise only within the same unit.

The figure that separates these drives most is workload. The N300 20TB is rated for 180 TB a year and up to 8 bays; the Red Pro, the IronWolf Pro ST20000NT001 and the HC560 for 550 TB a year. The IronWolf Pro ST20000NE000 sits between, at 300 TB a year and up to 24 bays. To put the lowest figure in proportion, 180 TB a year is about 490 GB every day of the year; set that against what your own server moves before paying for more headroom.

Seagate rates the Exos X20 at a 0.35% AFR at full 24x7 operation, which is an enterprise sheet's way of saying the drive is built to run around the clock. We have not found a workload or acoustic figure in the Exos X20 data sheet. WD prints the Red Pro and HC560 MTBF figures as projected.

Warranty follows the same split: three years on the N300 20TB, five on every other drive in the table. Seagate adds three years of complimentary Rescue Data Recovery Services to IronWolf Pro, with a footnote that the service is not available in some countries, so confirm it covers the UK before counting on it. For a home server holding the only copy of family photos, that service may matter more than any line on the spec sheet.

Recording technology is stated on the sheets for most of these drives: Toshiba gives CMR for the N300 20TB, Seagate says every IronWolf Pro drive uses CMR and lists the Exos X20 as CMR, and WD states CMR recording for the HC560 20TB drive.

Part numbers are how you match a listing to these rows. WD lists two 20 TB Red Pro models, WD202KFGX and WD201KFGX, which differ slightly in idle power. Seagate's 20 TB IronWolf Pro is ST20000NT001 or ST20000NE000, and the SATA Exos X20 is ST20000NM007D. WD's HC560 sheet lists the SATA 20 TB drive as WUH722020ALE6L1, WUH722020ALE6L4, WUH722020BLE6L1 or WUH722020BLE6L4, and Toshiba's bulk N300 20TB is HDWG62AUZSVA.

Noise: the spec that matters when the server is in the house

A home server shares its room with people, so noise is something you live with rather than a line on a sheet. Seagate and WD both state their NAS drives in dBA: 20 dBA at idle for both the IronWolf Pro and the Red Pro 20TB. Under seek, Seagate prints 26 dBA typical for the IronWolf Pro and WD prints 32 dBA average for the Red Pro; typical and average are different measures, so read those two side by side rather than as a gap.

Toshiba gives the N300 20TB as 20 dB typical at idle. That is Toshiba's own measure, not dBA, so it does not line up with the Seagate and WD figures even though the number looks the same. WD gives the HC560 as 2.0 Bels idle and 3.2 Bels operating, another unit again, and we have not found an acoustic figure for the Exos X20. If quiet matters most, compare drives whose sheets use the same unit, and listen to one if you can.

What a home server drive uses in a year of UK electricity

Ofgem's price cap page gives an average electricity unit rate of 26.32 pence per kWh for 1 October to 31 December 2026, paying by Direct Debit. It is an average across the cap, not any one household's tariff, and it applies to that period; multiply the kWh figures below by your own rate.

A drive that never spins down runs 8,760 hours a year, so each watt of idle draw is 8.76 kWh a year. Using each maker's idle figure, our arithmetic gives:

• WD Red Pro WD202KFGX, 3.6 W: about 31.5 kWh a year
• Toshiba N300 20TB, 4.41 W: about 38.6 kWh a year
• Seagate Exos X20, 5.4 W: about 47.3 kWh a year
• Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB, 5.5 W: about 48.2 kWh a year
• WD Ultrastar DC HC560, 6.1 W: about 53.4 kWh a year

From the most frugal to the hungriest is about 22 kWh a year per drive, by our arithmetic. At one capacity, power is rarely what decides the choice; workload rating, warranty and noise usually do. In a four- or six-bay server each extra drive adds its own idle draw, so the gap grows with the bay count.

Ofgem also states there is no VAT on electricity from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027, while Amazon.co.uk drive prices include VAT. The sums above use idle figures only, and a drive's draw changes with what it is doing.

Home media server hard drive: what Plex adds

If the home server runs Plex, the drive is not the part that decides whether it can transcode. Plex says the CPUs used in most home or small-business NAS are not particularly powerful, and that only x86 processors really manage the transcoding Plex Media Server does. Choose the drives on the factors above and the processor on what your players need.

Network hard drives for home use: a NAS box or a home server

A network hard drive for home use is, in practice, a drive inside a NAS box or a home server that shares files over the network. The drive inside still has to suit always-on, multi-bay use, so check the bay rating on its sheet against the bays in the box; homelab storage works through bay ratings for larger arrays.

Ready-made network drives sold with disks already fitted are a separate product; this page covers bare drives you fit yourself.

Choosing a home server hard drive: a short checklist

• Estimate how much data the server moves in a year, and choose a workload rating above it: at 20 TB the sheets offer 180, 300 or 550 TB a year.
• Check the bay rating against the number of drives in the box.
• Weigh the warranty: three years on the N300 20TB, five on the other drives here.
• If the server sits in a living space, compare noise only between sheets that use the same unit.
• Treat idle watts as a tiebreaker: 2.5 W between two drives is about 22 kWh a year.
• Match the part number in the listing to the rows above before you buy.

Best server hard drives ranks new drives for home, media and NAS servers by pounds per TB, and planning a pool of several drives, with layouts and spin-down settings, is the subject of homelab storage.

Best home server hard drives on Amazon.co.uk, by price per TB

These tables rank by one thing: the lowest current pounds per TB, inc VAT. They do not rank reliability or noise. NAS-class 20 TB first, lowest £/TB £35.70/TB. The table shows 6 listings right now.

Enterprise 20 TB drives with a SATA interface, lowest £/TB £29.57/TB. The table shows 4 listings right now.

Seller titles on Amazon.co.uk do not always include the part number. Where one does, hold it against the spec rows above; the IronWolf Pro 20TB is the case to watch, since NT001 and NE000 differ in workload rating and bay count. Rows say new or used, with a Buy on Amazon button on each.