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Thread: Recommended drives for a NAS

  1. #17
    Pedandic mo-fo IAmATeaf's Avatar
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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    The SMR/CMR debacle has caused a lot of confusion. If you decide to shuck then make sure you get 8TB drives or larger.

    My NAS, which is an old Bufallo Terastation has old 6TB WD reds which as far as I know are proper reds and have been going strong for quite a few years now, hope I haven’t just jinxed them

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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    @Saracen you’ve basically listed all the reasons I went for the 920+. Also you can actually fit a 16GB ram module if you get the right one. I’m going to try out the nvme ram cache tonight in read only to see what difference that makes. My 216+ now has 2 small ssd’s in raid 0 config and it absolutely flies, it also has 8 Gb ram in it as well and currently it’s going to be my test box for the time being.

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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    Currently Laptops Direct is the cheapest place to get the 920+ from.

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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    Quote Originally Posted by jimborae View Post
    @Saracen you’ve basically listed all the reasons I went for the 920+. Also you can actually fit a 16GB ram module if you get the right one. ....
    Great minds think alike.

    I know you can fit bigger memory, but as I understand it, Synology specifically recommend against. Dunno why? Heat maybe, though the cynic in me suspects deliberate product hobbling so as to undermine high-end units and not compete with themselves. They're good at that - hence (IMHO) the 6GB RAM limit in the 220=, 720+ and 420+. I'm very conscious of being led, by the nose, to the 920+, rather like a mouse following a tempting trail of cheese nibbles. Yet still ....
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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    Well I’ve just ordered a Samsung 16GB ram module so I’ll let you know how I get on.

    On my DS216+ It didn’t come with more than 1GB RAM but I took it apart & it happily ran for many years with an 8GB stick in it.

    On Reddit folks are arguing about this saying that the CPU only officially supports 8Gb so that may be one reason but as others have pointed out OEMs are flogging main boards with this CPU & stating that 16GB is the max.

    Then of course you get into discussions around losing dual channel mode etc which I guess will be true but I like the idea of 20GBs available if I’m running lots of containers. I would imagine though I’ll hit cpu limits before I’m RAM constrained though.
    Last edited by jimborae; 15-02-2021 at 12:43 AM.

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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    I was going to get a 918+ rather than the 920 but new prices meant there was no savings.

    Secondhand I could have saved about a £100 over the 920 but then I’d have no warranty and less long term OS support so I went for the 920.

    You could argue though that the 918+ is the better box though in some circumstances. I.E no soldered ram, twin ram slots so easier to upgrade and keep dual channel. Better transcoding support etc. But for my use case and long term support I thought the 920 was the way to go for me.

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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    I've been thinking about getting a nas for years as I watch the spare space on my external drive tick down until I eventually get a new one and the process starts again. But rather than going for one of those little nas boxes I'd rather just shove an ITX board into a Silverstone DS380 and have Truenas run on it so I can also have some random VMs/Containers run in the background...

    For drives I've always just shucked the external ones that you can buy on Amazon and not had a single one fail (so far), i was looking the other day and found 2 nice options:
    16TB - £15.87/TB - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-Exp.../dp/B08899GVT6
    8TB - £15.38/TB - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07DQBFQ2D

    By the sounds of it our use cases are kinda similar but I'm not too worried about performance because at some level there will be caching in memory and if that fails I can just throw 2.5in SSD I have lying around if memory caching is not good enough. Not too sure if Synology does caching in the same way as ZFS (file system in Truenas), I image it'll be similar but we might be in different boats there.


    Meh, Food for thought

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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    I hate it when this happens. Just about when I'd settled on the 920+, a friend asked me "Why not the QNAP TS-453D?"

    "Because, well, Synology ease of use, and DSM" I said, and the bar-steward went on to point out :-

    - QNAP have upped their game (somewhat) in the OS-polish stakes

    - 2x RJ45 (like 920+) BUT 2.5GBe out of the box, and upgradeable

    - many more USB ports

    - PCIe Gen2 x2 can add all sorts of stuff, easily and with good performance

    - HDMI 2 port, up to 4K 60fps

    - 8 IP camera licences vs 2 on 920+. I need 3, maybe 4.

    And so on. On the other hand, I do like some of the 920+ apps.

    So now, having decided 920+, I'm thinking if I'm just predisosed to Synology, but that QNAP really do deserve a real look, especially on hardware grounds, having also upped their OS and S/ware game too,

    @Jimboreae especially .... any thoughts? Did you consider the 453D?

    Rabbit-hole, here I come again. This is getting to be a habit, and is so not-me. I must really be out of touch with tech to be this indecisive. I think. Or am I? Yeah, old joke, I know.


    Bear in mind, re-CPU loading, this device will really just be supporting me, mostly. I know IP cams can hit CPU loading, etc.
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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    I had the same Qnap vs Synology decision to make, but the Synology just seemed the better product to me, and there is a lot of very good support both officially and unofficially on the synology subreddit.

    As for drives, I'd always recommend shucking USB drives, purely for the huge cost savings although you do get usually get slightly less warranty. My previous set of drives were shucked 10TB WD Reds from a trio of USB WD MyBook Duo enclosures. I've got a post about it here somewhere, picked up on black friday a few years ago and they haven't missed a beat. In fact I moved them all to a basic desktop enclosure and they are still happily chugging along.

    More recently I was trying to get 12 or 14TB WD drives on black friday, but the discounts never happened. Instead I picked up 6 seagate 16TB external desktop drives, and they all had enterprise grade EXOS drives inside. They are fast, reliable and reasonably priced all year round (when bought in an enclosure and not individually) - you can even register the bare drive for a 3 year warranty.

    I don't really have much experience with smaller 4 to 8tb drives, but I know there's been a lot of controversy with SMR/CMR claims, especially with WD. I don't really think the difference should be that noticeable in real world use, it seems to be more apparent in benchmarking, but people do like to kick up a fuss.

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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    Quote Originally Posted by virtuo View Post
    .....

    I don't really have much experience with smaller 4 to 8tb drives, but I know there's been a lot of controversy with SMR/CMR claims, especially with WD. I don't really think the difference should be that noticeable in real world use, it seems to be more apparent in benchmarking, but people do like to kick up a fuss.
    I'm a long way from an expert in that area, but I do remember the controversy when it came out last year.

    I have done some reading recently, and here's what I came away with :-

    - A large part of the anger, or ittitation if you like, was over apparent deception

    - WD see it differently (though I can here the "well they would, wouldn't they" in response.

    The anger appears to be based on the notion that SMR is slower than CMR/PMR, and that WD (and others) snuck it in as a cost-saving measure, and especially in drives targetted at NAS usage, like WD Red and Seagate Iron Wolf, it's a very important issue if, indeed, they are slower.

    NASCompares, though, did some testing. WD's position seemed to centre around the fact that DM-SMR is a hybrid solution, that ONLY uses SMR during idle cycles because, yes, it's slower when under continuous read/write load (as can often be expected with NAS), and CMR the rest. If I understand it. That DM- bit stands for "Drive Managed", as opposed to Host-Managed .... that is, the drive, internally, contros when it is or is not in CMR mode.

    Those NASCompares tests, if I understood them, were a bit surprising, in that, quite a lot of the time, the CMR drives were either no slower, or even a bit faster. The tests I thought especially interesting were the NAS Build, and NAS Fill tests, which would be expected to put the drives under continuous load, and the anticipated performance hit was noticeable by it's absence. It did't happen.

    WD, therefore, do seem to have some justification in their assertion that, overall, the drives did not under-deliver, or under-perform, and that the 'mistake', perhaps, was in underestimating user reaction when they found SMR where they expected CMR, and not appreciating the implication of the "DM" bit.

    Naturally, it was a bit of a double-edged sword and there were times when the SMR drives were a bit slower than CMR but, overall, the differences were not hugely significant and "gain here, lose there" was certainly a factor.

    Which means my takeaway from all that is that they blew the marketing, for sure, but that the performance impact, if any, was nowhere near as bad as suspected.

    Then, they introduced the Red Plus (as opposed to vanilla Red, or Red Pro), which seemed to be guaranteed CMR versions of vanilla Red drives where they had DM-SMR. So anyone wanting to be sure to avoid DM-SMR, in the affected 2GB to 6GB (at least, for WD) range, buy Red Plus, or pay for the extra performance in Red Pro which, according to WD, never had DM-SMR at any capacity point.

    Again, not an expert here. I might have misinterpreted all that and so please, anyone reading this, don't take my word for it. Check it out yourself, or find an actual expert.

    But I can't say, based on that, that the SMR fiasco bothers me that much. It seems to be mainly a marketing goof in WD trying to not over-complicate the message and market segmentation by changing what wemt on inside the drive, without really impacting on what the user would see, performance-wise. We can call that naivity, stupidity or, depending on your perception of WD, deceitful, but I can't say it twists my knickers very much.
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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    @Virtuo .... the idea of shucking consumer-grade USB enclosures to extract Enterprise-grade drives does appeal to me .... up to a point. Especially if you can then register the bare drives for Enterprise-length warranties.

    Nice one.

    My only reservation is a concern that Enterprise level drives, while high-perfrming, may also carry a penalty in noise levels, not least because the racket in the typical data centre is not the same as my lounge, if I have a NAS on media duty acting as a DVR and/or local video (and audio) repository, right next to my TV. So "silent" is not as big a design criteria.

    I really don't want drives clicking and whirring in the lounge.

    Having done it, opinions on that concern?
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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen999 View Post
    Which means my takeaway from all that is that they blew the marketing, for sure, but that the performance impact, if any, was nowhere near as bad as suspected.
    The problem is that not all of these drives end up in a consumer NAS. Mine don't for example.

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020...e-not-garbage/

    So if they work for you, they work OK. Not better, but usually not too much worse, just the odd latency spike (thought that could timeout a NAS and in theory drop the drive back out of the array). But FreeNAS users with ZFS arrays, they are horrific. It can't take 9 days to rebuild an array with a replacement 4TB drive. Deal breaker.

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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    Quote Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix View Post
    The problem is that not all of these drives end up in a consumer NAS. Mine don't for example.

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020...e-not-garbage/

    So if they work for you, they work OK. Not better, but usually not too much worse, just the odd latency spike (thought that could timeout a NAS and in theory drop the drive back out of the array). But FreeNAS users with ZFS arrays, they are horrific. It can't take 9 days to rebuild an array with a replacement 4TB drive. Deal breaker.
    Interesting read, that.

    But it doesn't much change my conclusion. Should WD have been clearer about what they were doing? Yup. Does the use of SMR affect most usage situations? Not dramatically, but there are some. As they only used SMR in what they might reasonably consider "consumer" capacities, i.e. 2-6TB, and not in 8TB and up, is it fair to compare to a 6-drive RAiD 6 array under ZFS? I dunno. That certainly isn't a typical consumer setup, though it could well be an enthusiast/techie setup in a domestic environment, but that is why WD should have been open, right from the get-go, about using DM-SMR in 2-6TB non-Pro Reds. If they had just said what they were doing, then that niche section of a niche market (that is, 6-drive RAID-6 under ZFS, on a home NAS) should certainly be knowledgeable enough to either buy different drives or just go Pro, like maybe that usage really calls for. Or just use Red drives of 8TB and up.
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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen999 View Post
    Having done it, opinions on that concern?
    First thing I would point out is that the warranties for the shucked WD drives were only 3 years, where buying the enterprise drives directly get you 5 years - my takeaway from that is they either didn't pass some kind of quality check and ended up in enclosures, or the serials were specifically tagged as being used in external enclosures and so the usage profile will be much different than the enterprise usage scenarios they would guarantee for. Either way, 3 years is enough for me, I'm going to buy a couple of cold spares and I'm running RAID 5 so can afford a couple of unlikely failures.

    On noise, I have a 6 bay NAS and the EXOS drives are objectively louder than the WD reds. It's not a massive difference, and most of the time you can't tell that the noise has increased. I really wouldn't want either running in my living room, even the WD drives were noisy enough to distract, and you have the NAS system fans to consider as well (you can turns these to very quiet mode on Synology machines, but not completely off).

    The clunkiness really is the most noticeable difference, typically I'd hear it most when writing a large chunk of data to the NAS, it's much quieter when reading, but you'll never get away from it.

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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    One of the things that worries me a bit about shucking, apart from the obvious inference of invalisating the warranty as an external drive, is that it's a bit of a moveable target in terms of what you might get.

    Several years ago, consumer (say, Seagate Barracuda) druves topped out at 6GB (or was it 8GB, can't remember for sure) but now, Barracuda Pro (still very nice drives) go to 14GB, but Iron Wolf Pro, Skyhawk (Surveillance class drives) and EXOS all to to 16GB (maybe 18GB).

    To (currently) exclude BarraPro, I'd have to go >14GB, i.e. 16GB or 18GB and there, while EXOS is certainly what I might end up with, and so is Iron Wolf Pro (either, frankly, would delight me at the right price), I could also end up with Skyhawk and while still expensive drives, they aren't optimised for my type of usage case.

    It is, therefore, a bit of a gamble. Also, do they still do the fairly slow "Archive" series, and if so, at what capacities?

    That said, £250 for 16TB can't be that bad.
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    Re: Recommended drives for a NAS

    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen999 View Post
    One of the things that worries me a bit about shucking, apart from the obvious inference of invalisating the warranty as an external drive, is that it's a bit of a moveable target in terms of what you might get.
    Well you'll always get exactly the capacity you pay for the only difference is whether it's a consumer/enterprise drive and possibly the RPM of the drive.

    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen999 View Post
    That said, £250 for 16TB can't be that bad.
    You could always buy one crack it open to see what's inside and decide your next move from there

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