NAS drive in USB enclosure for reliability?

[chrismard]

I am looking for a reliable solution for my media (photos and video) backup. I am thinking about purchasing a NAS drive for its reliability but am wondering if I can place it into a standard usb enclosure and format it for win 8.1?

Should I buy an internal drive meant for DVR/surveillance for reliability.

Reading reviews of drives is depressing it seems nothing is reliable. HGST seems to get higher marks but even they have DOA's.

Suggestions?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

There's nothing stopping you from putting a NAS drive in a USB enclosure. SATA is as SATA does.

Nothing is reliable, everybody has DOAs. That's just how it goes.

 

[Scarpozzi]

I always say the same thing, so I'll say it again. I recommend looking at NAS appliances and buying drives sized appropriately. I purchased a QNAP 212TS enclosure (uses 13 watts of power) for $150 (I've seen these as low as $99 @ tigerdirect on sale). Throw a few Western Digital Red, Blue or Black drives in it and configure for RAID 1. I've had a hard drive failure and not lost data....so the raid appears to be sound.

Another option is to buy a few drives, spread them around and use something like RSYNC (free utility) to copy data from your master to your backup copies. If you store your important data in one place, doing multiple copies is pretty good.

In most cases, not storing data in the cloud or offsite can result in loss if you have a fire or severe electrical damage.

If you consider companies like Carbonite and others, they provide services for a premium....you pay them $60-100 a year or whatever....install a client and backup your data to them daily/weekly/instantly.... If you look at your overall costs of any solution locally, that's not a bad deal. Paying a subscription service sucks when you think you can do it in house, but you don't have the same service level they do and your costs will likely be higher than you think. A few drives and my NAS cost me $400 out of pocket....I'll have to replace my NAS one of these days with another one....just because it will die eventually. 5-7 years is a safe assessment. I'm at year 4 of using mine.

 

[imaheadcase]

I've never had any luck with USB and drives. They always fail to read data eventually.

 

[chrismard]

This would be more of a second backup. I try to keep my original media files on sd cards which can add up but gives me another backup. Just want a reliable external drive and it appears getting a red drive and installing it into usb enclosure might be the ticket. I am concerned about heat so will make sure there is good cooling or get a green drive.

 

[chrismard]

Any thoughts about WD purple surveillance drives. Since they are in use 24/7 they must be more reliable than regular desktop drives. Compared to nas drives?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Any thoughts about WD purple surveillance drives. Since they are in use 24/7 they must be more reliable than regular desktop drives. Compared to nas drives?

Meh.

The primary differences between WD NAS, Surveillance, and their Blue/Black series comes down to Firmware and spindle speeds, not anything really fundamentally physically different.

For a 1-5 user (home) scenario with a single HDD accessible over a network, the NAS's access and load patterns are going to look a lot like the drives in the client machine it's connected to. So the firmware changes are largely useless. (Just use any old consumer drive.)

For a home scenario with multiple HDDs in RAID, accessed over a network, some of the RAID optimizations of the WD Reds will be nice. But even then, access/load is going to be pretty light. Software RAID (most home NAS units) is particularly forgiving, and pretty much any consumer grade drive will also work fine. (Except WD Greens.)

Surveillance drives are further optimized for low speed 24/7 writes, but otherwise wouldn't offer any benefits over the others.

Some other manufacturers (Seagate, I think) derive their NAS drives from their enterprise lineups, which means they're a bit over-engineered for home use. And more expensive. They will usually tend to last longer in very heavy-load environments, but for home use it wouldn't normally matter, IMO.

Now all that aside, EVERYBODY has failed drives, EVERYBODY has DOAs, and EVERYBODY has bad manufacturing runs. So just be prepared to cope, and work with a reseller whose customer service you trust.

 

[Mark R]

NAS drives and surveillance drives are best used in RAID. They are LESS reliable if used as regular drives.

These drives have different firmware, so behave differently to normal drives in the case of "weak" or "almost bad" sectors.

Regular drives if they have trouble reading a sector, will keep trying over and over again, and switch to a different data decoding mode to try to get the data back. They will keep trying for several minutes, until either they get the data back, or they give up because it is hopeless. While the drive is working on the sector it is lagged out.

NAS drives are designed for use in RAID. If the drive is corrupted, then it won't try hard to get the data. It'll have a go for 5 seconds, and then give up, because RAID systems will have a spare copy of the data on another drive. Better to just retrieve the data from a backup drive, than lag out a whole server for 5 minutes.

Surveillance drives take this even further. With surveillance, it is critical that the drives never lag out, they must keep sucking up the recording. If the drive lags out, the recording may abort, and the surveillance record may be useless. These drives have almost no error protection. If the drive found a weak sector and lagged out for 5 seconds to try to recover the data, then the recording system might crash or abort. If the drive just gives up immediately, then it's only 1 second or so of video footage that gets lost, so no big deal - better to lose 1 second, then have the recording crash, and the system spend 15 minutes rebooting.

 

[chrismard]

Excellent stuff. So much for my idea of improving reliability on my external drive. Btw...Ihad an online chat with Seagate and the rep insisted that a nas drive would not work in a standard usb enclosure. I am sure he just meant I simply couldn't place it into the box and turn it on.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Excellent stuff. So much for my idea of improving reliability on my external drive. Btw...Ihad an online chat with Seagate and the rep insisted that a nas drive would not work in a standard usb enclosure. I am sure he just meant I simply couldn't place it into the box and turn it on.

They probably thought you were asking about an external NAS drive like this; you'll note that it doesn't have USB.