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Desktop Hard Drives

Desktop Hard Drives covers 3.5-inch drives for PCs, workstations and small NAS units: WD Blue, Green and Black models, earlier Caviar drives, 10,000 RPM VelociRaptors, and Seagate desktop and NAS drives such as the ST3000VN000. Most are SATA at 3Gb/s or 6Gb/s with 16MB to 64MB of cache, and older listings serve systems built before SATA. Desktop drives are designed for a single-drive PC; for a multi-bay server or busy NAS, a drive rated for that duty lasts longer.

Desktop Hard Drives: 10,111 products

Buying guide

Desktop, NAS or server drive?

  1. Duty cycle

    Desktop drives are rated for typical office hours and modest workloads. NAS drives are rated for 24/7 operation in small arrays, and enterprise drives for heavy, continuous workloads.

  2. Error recovery in RAID

    Desktop drives can spend a long time retrying a bad sector, and a RAID controller may drop them from the array while they do. NAS and enterprise drives cap that recovery time.

  3. Recording technology

    Some desktop models use SMR recording, which slows large rewrites. Check before putting them in a RAID set that will need rebuilding.

Desktop Hard Drives

Frequently asked questions

Is the VelociRaptor a SATA drive?

Yes. VelociRaptors are 10,000 RPM SATA drives; the 3.5-inch versions are a 2.5-inch drive mounted in a heatsink frame so they fit standard desktop bays.

Will a 6Gb/s SATA drive work in a 3Gb/s port?

Yes. SATA negotiates down, and a hard drive's sustained transfer rate stays below 3Gb/s anyway, so the difference is small.

Can I use a desktop drive in a RAID array?

It works for a simple mirror, but desktop drives lack the time-limited error recovery that keeps controllers from dropping a drive mid-retry. NAS-rated drives are the safer choice.