Hard disk for a NAS - fast or cheap?

[Peruzulu]

After 4 years of being used in threee PC's and for the last 2 in my NAS in the loft (running FreeNAS) my 120gig drive is telling me it is time to die.
With grace, not in a cloud of smoke.

Looking about, there is obviously the choice of 32meg caches and 7200rpm all singing fast drives, but is it worth it for a server that only streams video to an Xbox (original Xbox!!) for watching on the livingroom TV?
It is not going in a desktop where the speed would really be noticed and the files being transfered to the NAS are going over the network, so the drive is not going to hit full speed that way.
Also, being that it has been soooo long since I bought a drive, are there any manufacturers that really deserve the bad mouthing they get? There are obviously lots of people saying this or that about drives, the Samsung F1's seem to be getting moaned at just now.

Incidentally, 500gig is more than enough, so £40-50inc seems to be the going price range.

So, any thoughts? Worth getting fastest, biggest cache or go cheap and chearful?

Cheers, P

[alsenior]

for you i would recommend that you get the biggest drive for your budget. Something like the 1.5tb Samsung f2 could likely server 10 streams before running out of steam for video for the xbox and there are fantastically cheap to boot

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/15TB-...ache-89-ms-NCQ

[sjbuck]

HD performance is often masked by a slow network. Which NAS is it? Does it run at 1Gb? I've stuck 4 x 5,400RPM in my Synology NAS.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/15TB-...ache-89-ms-NCQ

More than fast enough despite 5,400RPM, virtually silent, and importantly low power so it doesn't overload the NAS's PSU (sometimes an issue).

[kingpotnoodle]

NAS such as Synology units don't have the grunt to process RAIDed data as fast any new drive you'd buy now can R/W.

You have to have some seriously good networking for that not to be a bottleneck as well...

Buy the larger, lower power drives - costs less per GB and won't show lower performance in home NAS use.

[circuitmonkey]

The only NAS that I've used that was slowed down by a HDD was one I built out of an Intel E5400 (not saying that others out there don't suffer from this), the drive in question was a Samsung F1 1TB. This was solved by buying an additional 3 drives and rebuilding it into a RAID 5 array (3 member drives, 1 reserve).
The biggest performance increase I saw was increasing the memory of the system to larger than that of the common file size that was being transfered (In our case the file was 3GB, so went for 4GB)

In summery, use your money to buy bigger drives and more memory, hope this helps!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would be looking at the power consumption and heat output of the disk TBH.

[jim]

Yeah, I don't think fast or cheap are particularly good ideas.

I'd go with low power, cool, high quality, and good warranty - but that's just me.

[Peruzulu]

Cheers for the replies.

The NAS is actually an old Compaq celeron with 192 meg of ram running FreeNAS!!
It is not running on a gig network and only one machine will ever be connected to it at a time.
I had looked at the slower drive for the purpose of less energy but noise is not a problem as it is kept in the loft, so it can make what ever noise it likes!
The Compaq does not have sata though, so I have an old Dell desktop that I can start using.

Basically, look for a slower drive as there is no need for the 7200rpm, but what makes would you recommend?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would look for reviews of the Samsung F2 or Western Digital Caviar Green.

[Peruzulu]

Thanks for the help guys.
Now just to get it delivered without a certain significant other noticing and asking what crap I have bought now!
P

[abaxas]

Slow, reliable and efficient is what you need.

The network is the bottleneck, so why buy something you dont need.

[tehguy]

Have you had a look at something like the Linksys NSLU2?