Recommended drives for a NAS

As part of my massive computing environment overaul mentioned in other recent threads, a NAS features prominently.

I've given the choice of NAS itself some thought, and pretty much settled on a Synology DS-220+ for the right blend of power, connectivity and capacity with cost, for my needs and likely usage.

I'm also planning on probably 4GB drives (two of, obviously). That is enough, for now at least.

But which ones?

Seagate Iron Wolf, WD Red, or Tosh N300?

Usage will be a mixed bag. There will be a lot of photos going back and forth, there will be a fair bit of video being stored and, yeah, played from time to time. There won't be much gaming and what there is will be largely, if not entirely, on local SSD. And while the wife might draw on it occasionally, my bet is it'll be about 95%+ just me. Not no heavy, or even medium amounts of multi-user loading.

Any recommendations, or just get whichever of those is cheapest at the time (i.e. doesn't much matter)?

TIA (again).

If I recall correctly, WD Red (non-Pro version) drives under 8TB are more likely to be SMR (which obviously caused an uproar given that SMR makes no sense for NAS drives due to its much slower speeds).

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Originally Posted by Output

If I recall correctly, WD Red (non-Pro version) drives under 8TB are more likely to be SMR (which obviously caused an uproar given that SMR makes no sense for NAS drives due to its much slower speeds).

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And that makes me wonder about Iron Wolf v Iron Wolf Pro, given that what I've noticed so far seems to be 5900rpm v 7200 rpm, and about 25-30% (IIRC) cost difference between the two.

My only hesitation is that the NAS itself is, well, I'd call it the high end of entry level. It's not designed to be a speed king as it's me only, it doesn't really need to be. Even so, it's about double the price of the entry level model in the entry level tier.

Not that this threadis about NAS model - just that drive speed won't have the same impact as it would on a high-end NAS under heavy load? Maybe even SMR is acceptable, at the price point, as long as you know what you're getting??? Or not?

I went Toshiba N300 for a couple of 4TB drives. They seem fine, last one was about £100 on Amazon.

I'm sure the SMR drive would work OK for your described usage. Part of the drive is not used as SMR, it sort of buffers writes in that area and then streams it into the SMR region when the drive is quiet. But I figured, if Toshiba do a perfectly good 7200rpm standard drive for the same money, why take the risk of hitting a use case where performance falls off a cliff? So they got my money.

I was tempted to get WD USB 8TB drives and shuck the hard disks out of those as they are apparently NAS grade for some reason. But I didn't need the capacity, or the hassle. But sometimes you can get a cracking deal, just not when I needed to buy something.

I gave up with Seagate years ago. That might be a bit unfair these days, but they had their chance many times :)

There is nothing "wrong" as such with the SMR/CMR drives, as long as you know what you are getting and what your use case is.
If you already have the NAS then it might be worth checking drive compatibility and for any updates that have dropped since drives started being "misslabeled"..

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

.... But I figured, if Toshiba do a perfectly good 7200rpm standard drive for the same money, why take the risk of hitting a use case where performance falls off a cliff? So they got my money.

....

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Well clearly because you can ..... I mean if you .... it means you can .... aw, shucks, beats me. :D

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Originally Posted by Saracen999

Well clearly because you can ..... I mean if you .... it means you can .... aw, shucks, beats me. :D

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Well, yeah I'm a bit baffled by the situation tbh.

If the SMR drives were cheaper, I would see the point. But they are cheaper to make, and then WD keep the difference. Don't see how WD make any sales really *shrug*

WD's SSDs are good though, perhaps they just gave up with the spinning rust now.

Doubt it, if there's still money to be made and though SSD's have come a long way, HDD's aren't fully redundant quite yet.

I've literally just set up my new NAS (Synology 920+) today, I transferred over the drives & raid array from the old NAS (DS216+). Here's my 2 pence worth.

Originally went WD 4TB Reds, 1 died 3 weeks after the warranty expired, other is still going.
Replaced both drives with 5TB WD Reds, 1 died during warranty period and couldn't be replaced as no equivalent was available so they sent me a 5TB Red Pro. I obtained another 5TB WD Pro to match it and they were transfered to my home server and are still going strong.
NAS drives were then replaced again with 6TB WD Reds but some reason I started seeings slower sustanined transfer speeds to & from the NAS, turns out I got done with SMR drives.
Removed these as I got some smoking deals on 10 & 12TB external WD USB drives and shucked those and performance is good again. 12TB's are currently raided in the NAS, the 10's are raided in the home server.
Going forwarded personally I'll just do my research, save much money and use shucked white label reds in raid config. The data is backed up multiple times elswhere so I'm not too concerned about data loss but if I was I probably would not use WD Reds anymore. The Pros do seem much better.
I also tried a Seagate 8Tb external usb drive which is an SMR drive and it's performance is absolutley dire. Before I moved my raided NAS drives over to the new NAS I backed up the Raid 1 volume to this drive via USB 3. It took 3 days to copy 6.5TB's of data!!!!

Therefore personally, I'd say whatever you do, do not put SMR drives in your NAS, they are only fit for external USB purposes and small volumes of data.

I'm no expert like some folks on here but just relaying my experiences.

By the way not sure what other folks views are on Synology NAS's but my old DS216+ has performed brilliantly over the years. For along time i just used it to simply back up data but recently I've discovered it's unfathomed capabilties to run things like docker containers.

Therefore it's made my old Windows based HP Microserver download box redundant. All automated downloading duties are now handled by the Synology NAS via Docker and it's so simple to do. I always loved Synology's DSM OS & ecosystem but it's only now that I'm uncovering its true potential. Yes you can do the same things on a Linux box much cheaper running OpenMediaVault or some other Linux distro but I tried for weeks to get it up & running correctly but kept running into permission & mounting issues that were beyond my capabilities to resolve. With Synology DSM I had the whole thing up & running correctly within 2 hours!

Looking forward to working out what I should repurpose the old the DS216+ with now that it's main duties have been transferred to the DS920+.

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Originally Posted by Saracen999

Doubt it, if there's still money to be made and though SSD's have come a long way, HDD's aren't fully redundant quite yet.

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Far from redundant, vast amounts of hard drives are still getting made and sold. The use has changed hugely though, and that is what we are seeing here. Consumers aren't really buying hard drives any more, most PCs are bought as laptops where spinning media is a liability in a mobile device. If you want a server, then 2.5in drives mean you can cram more spindles into a tighter space for better performance in a certain volume. A lot of 3.5in drives are sold as warm storage, where the drives are in power save for most of their lives and just come up when someone wants something from archive (so basically a really fast tape drive). Enterprise storage is moving away from the traditional RAID controller setups and into cloud deployments where disposable VMs use SCSI over ethernet and data is stored in cloud objects & containers rather than files, with the whole lot in something like a Ceph storage pool.

A few of us have home NAS or server setups, but it is a niche market. That didn't used to matter, the likes of Samsung and Hitachi Deskstar drives were enterprise grade drive easily available to the consumer. Those are now gone, absorbed into the bigger players. A home NAS with its RAID controller is nothing like the minimum 3 nodes of a Ceph cluster. In short, we are moving away from what the big boys are doing.

I think that shows with jimborae's experience there: If you want to chase the proper RAID drives that the big boys are using then you want to be starting at the 12TB level. Anything smaller than that, and the big spenders would want performance instead. We think of flash as expensive, but it gets sold by the petabyte. My worry with the WD SMR drives was not the technology as such, it was the fairly insulting way they fobbed NAS users off with them. That strikes me as a nasty attitude to their customers, which is doubly annoying because I used to like WD drives.

The warranty on the N300 drives wasn't that great at 3 years, but overall it seemed the best bet. I actually have one of their MG Series enterprise drives in 4TB as well as the N300 ones, but only because the N300 wasn't available at the time and I needed to replace a failing WD Red in a hurry. That has a 5 year warranty, the official ratings are better for TB/year written and they are only £125 vs £100 for the N300 for the exact same capacity. Seems a bit overkill in a 2 drive setup though, they both have the necessary vibration sensors. But if you want a properly enterprise rated drive for the best odds of avoiding a failure, the MG 4TB might be worth thinking about.

I seem to remember a website that looked at hard drive reliability from I think a data centre perspective and Toshiba drives did very well in that iirc. I think I found it via The Register.

If I find any Toshiba drives at low enough price point I’d certainly give them ago. But at the moment shucking the right external drives is too cheap to ignore for me, as home user, as long as you have backups.

Not sure if this is any help : https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

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Originally Posted by Jonj1611

Not sure if this is any help : https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

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That was the one I was talking about! Thanks.

Note that while Backblaze publish very interesting results, you need to be very careful trying to interpret the results.

For starters, they run initial vetting tests and only approve specific models into their storage trays. So drives that appear not so good in those tests are actually the worst of the best and still pretty good. The actual bad drives, we don't get to see those.

Then there are cost implications, they acknowledged that the old HGST drives were the best, and then went out and bought Seagate because they don't mind the odd failure and the price was right.

Firstly, thanks all.

Well, I know I said DS-220+ but my mind is changing. Cyrrently on DS-920+ (and no, it wsn't 'cos that's what you got, Jim). Mainly, it was me reprioritising a bit of future-proofing and expandability over the couple of hundred quid difference. So .... why? 2-bay would do me right now but, is going to hit a brick wall if I want to expand, short of replacing existing drives. A 4-bay unit with a couple of drives in gives me ability to add drives. Also, I found out about SHR allowing me to add in bigger drives initially in the expansion (yes, I know they'll act like smaller ones until the rest catch up). But then, it's much easier to migrate small the smaller to the bigger, and remove the smaller. And I do have the DX-517 option though I doubt I'll ever need it.

Then, quad core v dual core, 4GB v 2GB, 8GB max v 6GB max, and of course, NVMe caching, should I need it. But not on the 220.

The final factor was finding out about some of the things either will allow, but the 920 more so, like IP camera support, and even (if they're good enough) things like calendaring, Office-type apps, hosted right in the NAS. And of course, given my interests as mentioned in the new PC thread (photo and video). Some of that looks very interesting.

And the final, final factor .... in the PC thread, the stranglehold on GPUs, and also if to a lesser extent, CPUs, just, well, winds me up. It's clear that now is not a good time to be buying a PC without risking getting bu.... messed about with.

So, my priorities have re-ordered. Sort the storage thing now. Hence the NAS. With some of the changes that MIGHT, if I get on with them, make in what software runs where, my PC requirements might change. If I offload some of it to the NAS, who knows, maybe the desktop becomes a laptop .... later in the year.

Meantime, NAS now with some satorage. I might even go single drive. Plus, maybe a larger, faster USB external than my current one, to backup the NAS.

That drops the overall cost a bit, so phase two, get the damn DSLR (and bits), now-ish. Sort out the workflow revamp (for photo nuts among you, LR+PS only if II have to, alternatively some blend of Bridge, Adobe ACR (if I can sort the licence issue and maybe RAW Therapee if I can't), Capture 1, Affinity Photo and /or ACDSee Ultimate).

And then sort the PC later, once product shortages have gone, or I've settled on a new laptop).

In any event, currently on DS920+ for the above reasons, and now just deciding on drives, which brings me back to this thread but with slightly different intentions.

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

@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.

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

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Originally Posted by jimborae

@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. ....

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Great minds think alike. :D

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 .... ;) :D

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.

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.

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 ;)

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. :D


Bear in mind, re-CPU loading, this device will really just be supporting me, mostly. I know IP cams can hit CPU loading, etc.

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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Originally Posted by virtuo

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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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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.

@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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Originally Posted by Saracen999

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.

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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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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

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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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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Originally Posted by Saracen999

Having done it, opinions on that concern?

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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.

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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Originally Posted by Saracen999

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Saracen999

That said, £250 for 16TB can't be that bad. ;)

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You could always buy one crack it open to see what's inside and decide your next move from there ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Saracen999

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. :D


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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@Saracen, sorry but I didn't really even consider any other makes of NAS as my main use case was to turn it into a fully fledged download box & I knew I could quickly & easily do that with a Synology box. Yes I saw that for the same money I could get better hardware with other makes but I wasn't familiar with say QNAPs or Drobo's OS so for me it just wasn't worth it. Plus I don't need 2.GB network ports, when & if I upgrade the whole home's network it will be straight to 10Gb so it's a non issue as far as I was concerned.

Parm has actually reviewed the 453D for Hexus, don't know if you missed it?

https://m.hexus.net/tech/reviews/net...s-453d/?page=7

This was was older 453B but Ithink the same points generally remain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76yW1sUwpag&t=2s

By the way my 16GB RAM just turned up and all seems good, I'm now rocking 20GB RAM in this bad boy.

Thanks, Jim. The company I'm looking at for NAS supply do offer 8GB 'legit' memory options, as well as 12GB (4=8) and 20 (4+12) using non-Synology. They pointed out that the CPU limit was 8, so anything beyond that is really only for dedicated RAM for a VM. That's not really my bag, but I might go to 12GB because, as non-Synology it's cheaper than their 4 upgrade, will max out for CPU usage and gives me headroom for a VM if I ever do need it.

Also, the Asustor 6604 is nearly hardware-identical to that QNAP, other than internal NVMe caching slots, and not having the PCIe expansion slot. My brother has an Asustor and rates it highly.

I threw 32gb of compatible Crucial RAM in mine, it moans every time you reboot it that "unsupported memory" is installed, but then still happily runs on it without any issues. It's not ECC but I'm happy risking it. Never heard of anyone having issues with non-ecc ram (from a decent manufacturer).

I actually came back to comment on the warranties on the EXOS drives that I shucked. After commenting on this thread previously, I went back in to my seagate portal and the warranties had been wiped from all my registered bare drives - I'm emailing them to find out why, maybe I managed to slip mine through and they fixed the issue since. Without telling me.

I registered the serials from the enclosures themselves, and they come up with 2 years. Not bad, just a pain, lucky I kept them.

It'll be interesting to see their response .... assuming they respond.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by virtuo

It's not ECC but I'm happy risking it. Never heard of anyone having issues with non-ecc ram (from a decent manufacturer).

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You wouldn't, which is sort of the point. The corruption is silent.

My Ryzen 3700X box here reported a corrected bit flip yesterday morning. It is really rare and possibly wouldn't have had lasting consequences, so I can utterly see why most people don't bother with ECC. But errors do happen, and in my case it happened while I was working, so nice to shrug it off and carry on working.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Blue000

....

You could always buy one crack it open to see what's inside and decide your next move from there ;)

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I might well do exactly that.

The worst that can happen, assuming I don't use a sledgehammer to crack it open, is a ruined enclosure, and a drive not suitable for NAS use. In which case, I can stick it in a 3rd party enclosure, or in a removeable drive bay in another machine, or even into a USB "dock" (/makes note: current one is still USB2, acquire 3.x version) ad use it to back up the NAS, then stick bare drive (in anti-static bag/box) into safe.

Saracen, have you built your NAS now? Prices are going nuts/going OoS. Don't leave it too long

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ik9000

Saracen, have you built your NAS now? Prices are going nuts/going OoS. Don't leave it too long

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Sadly, no, not yet. And for a while, i think it's already too late, Prices have already jumped, if you can get the drives.

I did get the backup I'll be using for certain categories of data (a 12 TB USB drive) but nit the NAS itself.

Hey Saracen not sure where you're at with the NAS purchase right now but the Synology 920+ is only £404.39 in Amazon right now. That's a brilliant price.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-DS...dp_ob_title_ce

Look for other sellers and you'll see Amazon are now selling it £403.19 with 1-3 week delivery

Rather caught by the scarcity, and/or drive price hikes. I got a 12TB WD external USB drive, partly for backup but also to identify what drives it used, and immediately after that, drives became hard to get. There's some availability again, but .... about £60 more per drive that a couple of weeks ago. I'm kinda stuck as to whether to swallow the four to six lots of £60 price rises before they go up more, or wait hoping they settle back down.

Also, pretty much decided on QNAP, either TS-473D (4-bay) or 673D (same NAS, but 6-bay). The reason is that while Synology are very strong on 1st party software suite (and DSM7) the QNAP is looking better on hardware, and I wont use much of the Synology software anyway.

Then, QLocker hit and that put a kink in my plans, after which the drive thing hit.

Thanks for the heads-up, Jim, but I've pretty moved moved to the QNAP route.

Be careful with QNAP if its got any access to the internet, they seem to have issues every year or so with security.

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Originally Posted by [GSV]Trig

Be careful with QNAP if its got any access to the internet, they seem to have issues every year or so with security.

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this.^ IIRC they just had a major breach with lots of people's NAS's being remote encrypted with ransom ware via an UNSECURE BACKDOOR. And this in enterprise grade NASs. I mean seriously?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by [GSV]Trig

Be careful with QNAP if its got any access to the internet, they seem to have issues every year or so with security.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by ik9000

this.^ IIRC they just had a major breach with lots of people's NAS's being remote encrypted with ransom ware via an UNSECURE BACKDOOR. And this in enterprise grade NASs. I mean seriously?

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Indeed. Warning appreciated, but note the "QLocker" comment in my post.

One of the reasons that put a dent in my tmetabke was exactly that - considering whether I needed the NAS to have net access or not. My conclusion was that for most or all of what I want, it might be convenient, but not essential. The biggest pain was the media server aspect. It was probably the biggest factor in finally ditching the plans to go Plex, for Jellyfin. That way, my intention is to set up most of the media offline, maybe briefly connect up to scrape metadata, etc, but then keep the NAS air-gapped.

I can't think of anything I really need the NAS to have a net connection for, though some things would be nice. I might have to just not do one or two things I otherwise might have, on the NAS.

Meantime, I finally got around to replacing my old router with what I think is a much, MUCH more secure option. I just need to spend some time working out how to lock down what I possibly can, and don't need open, on the router.

That said, QNAP aren't the only ones to have had issues with NAS security. Obviously, NAS boxes tend to hold what is often large amounts of important data, so are going to be prime targets for hackers and other *rude word* types to target.

I am already pretty careful with my data. Some of my data never goes near any machine with a net connectiom. It is strictly offline only. Other bits, like my media files, well, I can back those up relatively cheaply to optical media. And the volumes of data, other than video files, on the NAS are small enough for a set of relatively modest HDs to provide about three layers of backup, on a plug-n-backup basis.

It does require some planning to ensure that nothing I can't afford to lose is exposed on the NAS, so if despite precautions, I get it crypto-locked, I can just reformat, rebuild the RAID and reinstall media server, etc.

The other important stuff, to me, is photo stuff. The NAS will just be a data repository for that, and I won't be using the photo apps, etc, from QNAP (or Synology) as I use ACDSee and Affinity Photo on several PCs for that. If need be, I can restore backups of that quickly and easily.

All told, yeah, the risk of getting a NAS hacked/hit is real, but it existts with any NAS and the only way to really protect it from online threats is to keep it offline, regardless of manufacturer. And that, frankly, is true of any data, on NAS or PC.

I've had a systematic approach to data for several decades, backing up some to HD, some to tape, some to optical media. That has involved everything from "Jumbo" tape drives to both DAT and SLR tape (Tandberg drives), and to both DVD-RAM and MO drives. the volumes of data involved with sticking tens of TB of data, mainly video, on the NAS have required some quiet contemplation of my backup regime and a change or two, but it still comes down to separating different types of data from each other and using type-appropriate methods accordingly. Stuff that is relatively small and changing often gets a different treatment to stuff that, once created, rarely or never changes (like RAW photos direct from camera, edited/finished versions of those, digitised video, etc) where sizes are large but one "archived" copy, and maybe a spare for photos, will do.

As ever, it's a balance between the cost (whether money or time, or just lost data) of backing up, versus the inconvenience if you lose it. Some data would be nearly impossible to recreate (scans of documents where the originals no longer exist) BUT, while losing them would irritate me it wouldn't actually be a disaster. But re-ripping a couple of thousand DVDs would be a major pain in the wotsit, to the point where much of it wouldn't get redone. So .... copy to archive-optical media. It's about, as I said, type-appropriate backup strategy, and media, depending on data type.

Just to get back to the original thread question, I've had yet another WD Red drive fail on me today. This time it was the other one of the 5TB pair that I had originally, warranty expired 2019. Thankfully there was nothing important on this drive and it was backed up.

I'm done with WD Reds from now on, they are becoming the modern day equivalent of Hitachi DeathStars. In my NAS's I'll just use cheap shucked whitelabe drives that are raided and in my main PC for rusty dick storage requirements I'll try & find something more reliable and not SMR.

If you keep losing drives, why chose RAID?
What OS/System you running?

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Originally Posted by jimborae

in my main PC for rusty dick storage requirements I'll try & find something more reliable and not SMR.

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I sincerely hope that's a typo.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by [GSV]Trig

If you keep losing drives, why chose RAID?
What OS/System you running?

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Um bit of a misunderstanding here. The 5TB Reds were raid 1 in a 2 bay Synology NAS originally. One died ages ago and I moved the other to my main rig as general storage, so not raided.

In my main 4bay NAS I run Synology Hybrid Raid as it's easy to deal with if things go south and in the Xpenology Test NAS Ihave raid 5.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by spacein_vader

I sincerely hope that's a typo.

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OMG! That nearly made me wet myself. Sorry that should have said rusty disk storage but I think i'll leave it just for the lolz.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jimborae

, they are becoming the modern day equivalent of Hitachi DeathStars.

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In full pedant mode, those were IBM Deathstars. It was a very specific fault in machines which used the drive for light workloads and was solved with a firmware fix (which was too late for one of my drives which went back under warranty). It was long fixed by the time Hitachi took them over, and as Hitachi drives they were pure awesome.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

In full pedant mode, those were IBM Deathstars. It was a very specific fault in machines which used the drive for light workloads and was solved with a firmware fix (which was too late for one of my drives which went back under warranty). It was long fixed by the time Hitachi took them over, and as Hitachi drives they were pure awesome.

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You are absolutely correct, my memory is not what it once was, apologies.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jimborae

Um bit of a misunderstanding here. The 5TB Reds were raid 1 in a 2 bay Synology NAS originally. One died ages ago and I moved the other to my main rig as general storage, so not raided.

In my main 4bay NAS I run Synology Hybrid Raid as it's easy to deal with if things go south and in the Xpenology Test NAS Ihave raid 5.

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Ahh, I thought you had been using the Reds in RAID..

I'm more disappointed in myself for missing the rusty dick line tbh..