I got tired of guessing whether a NAS drive was CMR or SMR, so I built NASdisks
A while back I was expanding a home NAS (it's past 1PB now) and kept hitting the same wall: it's weirdly hard to tell whether a drive is actually CMR or SMR before you buy it. Manufacturers have quietly slipped SMR into NAS-branded lines, and an SMR drive can choke or drop out during a RAID rebuild - exactly when you don't want surprises. I'd end up with a dozen browser tabs open, half of them disagreeing.
So I built one table for myself. It turned into NASdisks: https://www.nasdisks.com
CMR or SMR, verified - not guessed
Real failure rates I computed from Backblaze's public Drive Stats, not vendor marketing
Live price and price-per-TB, updated daily across a few regions
Price history, plus a side-by-side comparison view (think cpubenchmark, but for NAS drives)
It's free, no login, no ads. The full dataset is public under CC BY 4.0, and there's an open API. It's a solo, self-funded side project, launched about six weeks ago, monetized only by Amazon affiliate links so hosting pays for itself.
I'd genuinely love feedback from this crowd - on the product, the positioning, or how you'd try to grow something this niche. A lot of the best features so far came from people just telling me what they needed.
Solving the CMR vs SMR nightmare during RAID rebuilds is an absolute lifesaver. Integrating Backblaze’s Drive Stats directly alongside live price-per-TB is brilliant—vendor marketing metrics are usually useless. Huge respect for keeping the dataset open under CC BY 4.0 and offering an open API!
Curious — are users mostly one-time buyers, or does this turn into a repeat workflow for upgrades/research?
What stood out to me was the emphasis on “verified, not guessed.” In a category where conflicting information is the norm, that feels like a much stronger differentiator than simply having a bigger database.
I’m curious have you found people come for the CMR/SMR lookup and then stick around for the pricing and reliability data, or are those what convince them to keep coming back?
The interesting part of NASdisks is turning a frustrating research task into a trusted decision tool.
How are you thinking about making this become the default resource people use before buying storage, rather than just a one-time comparison site when they have a drive decision?