Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, Steel
Krogoth wrote:I've looking around for SKUs and reviews for HDDs geared towards NAS needs. I've been eyeing towards WDs and Seagate units but it seems everyone is plagued by QC issues. Anything you storage-heads can vouch towards? Are NAS drives really just overkill for the personal use/home environment? The NAS is being used for bulk data storage/image backups so I/O throughput/latency aren't critical.
just brew it! wrote:Every vendor has their good and bad models.
- HGST/Toshiba if I'm willing to tolerate more heat and power usage to get better performance
Freon wrote:I like having a NAS given I have a few PCs and tablets on my home network that interact with the data, though 1gbit ethernet definitely limits performance. I do find near 100MB/s read/write is sufficient for what I need, but involves some waiting for large transfers.
I've started to eye a new box over my Qnap TS-431, something that will support 10gbit, along with the required upgraded switch and 10gbit card for my main PC at least. Probably the 8-bay TS-832X-8G which seems like a good natural progression.
Right now I have two 4TB WD RED and two older 3TB something or others in two RAID1 volumes (so ~7TB total usable capacity). The two 3TB drives were carry overs from a budget 2-bay build many years ago. Even the 4TB drives are probably 4 years old and I've never lost a drive.
Given pricing, I'm considering shucked externals for my next build. They're almost half price, often ~$180-200 on sale for 8-10TB drives instead of around $280-310 for "NAS-grade" drives. I'd really like to start with a 4 or 5 drive RAID6 in a TS-832X-8G, which is looking like $2k in total. A steep price tag for my upgrade project. I figure Even if I end up with some failures there are reports WD will honor a shucked drive return, and unless I'm pretty unlucky the money saved will easily pay for a few replacements over the years. Also it seems sometimes WD puts RED drives in their externals, but you may get the white-label (aka blue?) drives. From my reading I'm not sure it is super important.
Kougar wrote:Bit late... but definitely avoid Seagate Greens and WD Blues. ...
Kougar wrote:I just put an IronWolf into my new Synology DS918+. The intent was to just start with a single 10TB drive to support my replication/syncronization fetish and to add drives to expand capacity and implement resilience when I can afford to spend more money....Seagate IronWolf drives can be found for $25 a TB or a bit less on sale every ~3-4 months.
Good to know, thanks!Freon wrote:...Drive IO errors are just one of the things Seagate's IronWolfs will detect and warn users about. They also have vibration sensors, shock sensing, temp monitoring and good tolerances. ...
JustAnEngineer wrote:I started with two 10 TB Ironwolf drives in a DS418play, then added a 3rd drive when it was on a super sale.
JustAnEngineer wrote:I started with two 10 TB Ironwolf drives in a DS418play, then added a 3rd drive when it was on a super sale.
chuckula wrote:I don't know that I've been really happy about a spinning hard-drive recently -- not like when I put a pair of original 10k rpm WD Raptors together in RAID. The Ironwolf drives seem to work pretty well in the NAS environment for which they were created. With the current location of my NAS, I might wish that the head seeks were even quieter, but the sound is only noticeable when the rest of the house is quiet. Mostly, I'm really impressed at how well the Synology software package works.Are you happy with the Ironwolf's?
dragontamer5788 wrote:1. Be sure to "Wdidle3" firmware change on WD Green / 5400 Blue drives for a better "head parking" if you use WD drives. Or buy someone else's drives and don't worry about it.
chuckula wrote:Are you happy with the Ironwolf's? I haven't used spinning drives in more than 5 years but my drone footage is going to require spinning media for archival purposes at the rate I'm going. I have an old Atom box I could resurrect since Icelake is cancelled.
just brew it! wrote:TBH I think as long as you avoid the Seagate SMR crap that's still in the distribution channels, and tweak the head unload timer if you go with any of the WD drives which have that issue, using desktop drives (or shucked externals) in a home NAS is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you are on a budget. If you're willing to spend a bit more, sure, go for actual NAS/Enterprise drives.
just brew it! wrote:TBH I think as long as you avoid the Seagate SMR crap that's still in the distribution channels, and tweak the head unload timer if you go with any of the WD drives which have that issue, using desktop drives (or shucked externals) in a home NAS is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you are on a budget. If you're willing to spend a bit more, sure, go for actual NAS/Enterprise drives.
ptsant wrote:just brew it! wrote:TBH I think as long as you avoid the Seagate SMR crap that's still in the distribution channels, and tweak the head unload timer if you go with any of the WD drives which have that issue, using desktop drives (or shucked externals) in a home NAS is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you are on a budget. If you're willing to spend a bit more, sure, go for actual NAS/Enterprise drives.
Finding out whether a drive has SMR is a non-trivial exercise. Some of the Seagate entreprise drives explicitly mention SMR. From what I saw the Ironwolf [Pro] do not seem to have SMR (at least the 8TB models I'm mostly interested in).
ptsant wrote:just brew it! wrote:TBH I think as long as you avoid the Seagate SMR crap that's still in the distribution channels, and tweak the head unload timer if you go with any of the WD drives which have that issue, using desktop drives (or shucked externals) in a home NAS is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you are on a budget. If you're willing to spend a bit more, sure, go for actual NAS/Enterprise drives.
Finding out whether a drive has SMR is a non-trivial exercise. Some of the Seagate entreprise drives explicitly mention SMR. From what I saw the Ironwolf [Pro] do not seem to have SMR (at least the 8TB models I'm mostly interested in).
Forge wrote:Edit: The SMR drives aren't terrible if you know what you're getting and plan accordingly. My machine hosting an SMR mirror for backups is slower than any of my other arrays, but that's fine, since it's usually network-limited. I went SMR because it was cheaper per-TB than the other options at that size, and it's Good Enough. If you can choose SMR and PMR at the same or similar price point, though, obviously go PMR, it's much faster for writes, and very slightly faster for reads.