NAS hard drives for music recording studio

[Enquiries]

Hi. I am looking for a couple of hard drives for my my music recording studio, so noise level is very important. In looking at the WD product brief document, I found that one of the quietest drives is the WD Red Plus WD60EFPX with 256Mb cache (Acoustics (dBA) - Idle: 23, Seek (average): 27). I also see that it is CMR and not SMR.
In examining the model number I think I understand everything except for the RPM/Buffer Size digit which says P = Intellipower. Is this ok, or is there any disadvantage or advantage to this? Would R = 5400 RPM with 64 MB cache be better?
Thank very much for your informative YouTube videos. Cheers.

[TribalHound]

If noise level is important have you considered using some SSDs during recording that you can offload to HDDs once the recording is done ? Or do you need that 6TB for the recording itself ?

The R = 5400 is the speed it spins, so how quickly can it read / locate the part of the data you need. A bit like an LP - if you want to listen to track 8 (half way through) a 5400 rpm disc will take (marginally) longer than a 7200 rpm disc to get there. So the needle on a 45 gets through half the record quicker than a 33 does.

Total disc latency is broken down into 'seek' + 'rotation'.
The cache is your buffer size - how big a chunk can it process in one go.

RPM is your rotation , the slower the spin, the slower the drive - so those WD Reds at 5400 are slower than the Purple 10,000 - rotation also means it can read / write faster because not only does it get there quicker it also can skip through the data at that speed.

Generally, cache is faster in smaller volume, but higher spin is consistent and handles larger volume.

Intellipower is the HDDs brain that carefully manages the balance between spin, cache and physical read/write. A bit like the human brain with hand / eye / movement coordination / multitasking capabilities. We all have it, but how efficient are we.

Hope this helps explain.