need some nas advice and hdd

[petercook7]

Going to buy a NAS,

Synology DS218+ 2 Bay Desktop

QNAP TS-251+-2G

I am in between harddrives.

WD Purple 3 o4 gig 3 year warranty
WD Red 3 or 4 gig 3 year warranty

wd black 2 0r 3 gig 5 year warranty

or Seagate IronWolf 3 or 4TB

I have heard 3 gig hdd are not as reliable as 4gig.

[peterb]

I have had good service from HGST drives in the past (got a pair of 4TB drives that have run pretty much 24x7 for over 5 years - not that the experience of one person is statistically significant.

Remember that statistics about failure rates refers to populations not individual items - and you can get an early failure or exceptional longevity with any drive. However a statistical tend of early failures may mean poor quality control and/or poor quality assurance so the chances of picking up a poor quality drive might be higher.

Enterprise drives may be higher quality or have a longer warranty period which might be worth something - but if a drive fails and you can’t erase it, are you going to return it with potentially sensitive data on it?

So the option is to RAID cheap disks in the expectation that one may fail prematurely and have another standing by ready to drop in.

The down side of that is that the array will take some time to rebuild and if you had another disk failure occurred you would lose data (which you would restore from the backup you carefully maintain!)

If you do want to consider HGST I found this 8 Tb drive

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/8tb-...64mb-cache-oem

[jimborae]

Wouldn't pay a premium for WD red drives anymore. Both my 4Tb ones died, luckily within the 3 year warranty period so were replaced.

[petercook7]

I have had good service from HGST drives in the past (got a pair of 4TB drives that have run pretty much 24x7 for over 5 years - not that the experience of one person is statistically significant.

Remember that statistics about failure rates refers to populations not individual items - and you can get an early failure or exceptional longevity with any drive. However a statistical tend of early failures may mean poor quality control and/or poor quality assurance so the chances of picking up a poor quality drive might be higher.

Enterprise drives may be higher quality or have a longer warranty period which might be worth something - but if a drive fails and you can’t erase it, are you going to return it with potentially sensitive data on it?

So the option is to RAID cheap disks in the expectation that one may fail prematurely and have another standing by ready to drop in.

The down side of that is that the array will take some time to rebuild and if you had another disk failure occurred you would lose data (which you would restore from the backup you carefully maintain!)

If you do want to consider HGST I found this 8 Tb drive

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/8tb-...64mb-cache-oem

HGST drives I was looking for 3 or 4 TB versions but cant find any. those are the ones I'd like but cant source them.
So my next option is the above list.

[jimborae]

Funny that HGST used to be synonymous with with prematurely failing hard drives i.e. the old DeathStar moniker.

[Spreadie]

Wouldn't pay a premium for WD red drives anymore. Both my 4Tb ones died, luckily within the 3 year warranty period so were replaced.

I've never had a 3.5" WD fail - seven reds, four blues, two greens and an enterprise black. I wouldn't touch their 2.5" blues though - had three and all of them were junk.

HGST are WD drives, they just kept the brand when they bought it a few years back.

[peterb]

Funny that HGST used to be synonymous with with prematurely failing hard drives i.e. the old DeathStar moniker.

That was a bad batch of IBM branded DeskStar drives! (must be 20 years ago)

[matts-uk]

Going to buy a NAS,

Synology DS218+ 2 Bay Desktop

QNAP TS-251+-2G

Personally, I would buy the Synology. The QNAP build quality is great but no question, I prefer working with the Synology software. Compared to QNAP, the Synology DSM software is a little more polished around the edges. I have a DS218+ at home and a couple of my customers have the same model on premises. Performs well enough and the lower cost models are too slow. I dislike the aesthetics of the 218+ plastic casing but it does keep the cost down.

Currently I am fine with the lower cost, 1 Year warranty, end of WD and Seagate. We see failed drives from all manufacturers. What varies is the age and frequency of particular brands. Going by the imperfect emprical evidence of the distribution within our recycling pile, I wouldn't touch HGST (Hitachi) with a barge pole - I would guess that WD are using HGST to sell at lower cost into the OEM channel while protecting the Western Digital brand name.

Seagate had a poor reputation for a while, the fallout from the 2011 floods in Thailand quite possibly. When a manufacturer experiences stock shortage they can maintain supply and revenue merely by lowering the 'binning' test specifications temporarily. The 1Yr failure rate goes up hardly at all but at 3Yrs+ the repair trade start to see one manufacturer's drives being over-represented in the recycling pile.

Just my opinion, obviously.

[Spreadie]

Personally, I would buy the Synology. The QNAP build quality is great but no question, I prefer working with the Synology software.

I was about to chime with the very same thoughts.

I really do like QNAP boxes - until last week I was the happy owner of a TS-251+ and TS-269L, but I've just sold them to fund a Synology DS918+ and a couple of m.2 drives for caching. I primarily used the QNAPs for backups and served media from a home-rolled 4 bay mini server based on an InWin IW-MS04 running XPEnology, because I prefer Synology's DSM over QNAP's QTS software.

The DS918+ will take on media and file serving duties amongst other things, and I'll decommission the mini server. Backups are now handled by a couple of WD My Books and critical data is also backed up on an encrypted 2TB portable HDD, which I keep in the car.

All my HDDs are WD drives.


@petercook7, If you're thinking about a 2 bay NAS and a couple of 4TB HDDs in RAID1, consider a 4 bay NAS with 3 smaller HDDS in RAID5 - 3x2TB HDDs and a 4 bay is probably similar in cost to a 2 bay with 2x4TB HDDs - you'll have the same available capacity and you've still got room for further expansion later on.

[[GSV]Trig]

Going to buy a NAS,

Synology DS218+ 2 Bay Desktop

QNAP TS-251+-2G

I am in between harddrives.

WD Purple 3 o4 gig 3 year warranty
WD Red 3 or 4 gig 3 year warranty

wd black 2 0r 3 gig 5 year warranty

or Seagate IronWolf 3 or 4TB.

WD Purples are aimed at CCTV are they not, Blacks are performance,
I've got WD Reds and Seagate something or others in my server, all are NAS drives.

I'd pick the QNAP, only because I havent personally used Synology but either would be a good choice..

[petercook7]

Thx, I think I may go for two IronWolf Pro 2tb the 5 year warranty and the recover services may have won me over.

I dont need huge drives yet, more to do with storing files rather than movies etc..

[DanceswithUnix]

Currently I am fine with the lower cost, 1 Year warranty, end of WD and Seagate. We see failed drives from all manufacturers. What varies is the age and frequency of particular brands. Going by the imperfect emprical evidence of the distribution within our recycling pile, I wouldn't touch HGST (Hitachi) with a barge pole - I would guess that WD are using HGST to sell at lower cost into the OEM channel while protecting the Western Digital brand name.

That would be sad, I used to work for a branch of Hitachi (not HGST but storage related) when the company I worked for got bought up by them. For enterprise/RAID use the HGST drives were awesome, like most people who worked there I have a bunch of 1TB drives in the garage because they hit their 5yr working life and got dumped in the recycling pile still working just fine as per usual storage policy.

As for seagate, they burned me hard in 1988 (maybe 1987) and I have been putting up with the drive failures ever since. It isn't about the flooding, which ISTR hit WD harder than anyone.