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NAS drives and experiences....

C

compguy786

Platinum Member
Hello guys,

I am building a NAS using a Lenovo Ix2. There are many drives out there marketed as standard consumer drives, NAS drives, Enterprise and so on....

With that said, i have seen that NAS drives (WD Red) are running at 5400 rpm...have nasware and all this stuff....is nasware something actually useful per experience ?

I intend on running a raid 1 setup in the ix2 and am looking at 2 TB drives. I was so far thinking WD Red...but may also look into regular consumer drives.

What is the best course of action per your experiences ?
Thanks !
 
the red pro are the 7200rpm ones
I havn't specifically setup a NAS unit myself, but my general feeling is they tend to be somewhat overpriced. Personally i'd snatch up consumer 7200rpm drives if the price was right.
 
I've had no issues with the 8 Seagate 2TB drives I have in my SAN. Runs between 4-10 VM's as well as a media servers thats usually streaming and transcoding to at least 2 devices so they are getting pretty good usage.
 
I'm using a pair of Seagate 1TB Barracuda 1TB-per-platter DM drives, in RAID-1, in a QNAP, without issue thus far. (Nearly a year?)

Keep meaning to swap in my two Toshiba 3TB 7200RPM HDDs, for more space, but haven't gotten around to doing it.
 
I have 4 disk arrays (1 raid 5 and 3 raid 1). 3 out of the 4 use consumer HDDs. One Raid1 uses WD Red. I can't tell a different between them at all. The oldest array is a 5-disk 8TB RAID5 with the old samsung spinpoint F4 (5 years now) which is configured to run 24/7. The others have HHD spin down time.
 
Right now, the best performing AND lowest priced NAS hard drives are made by HGST. You can get a top performing 4TB HDD for 165 dolars, and 3TB for about 200 dollars.
Look at these drives specifically, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-912-_-Product

You definitely do want a NAS drive. It has specialized firmware that works with the NAS's management software. Regular consumer drives do not have this firmware.
 
Interesting view points...i am looking for 2 2TB HDDS as the content i have is on a 1TB drive and maybe 700GB is being used alltogether. I will put this in a RAID 1 configuration and possibly retire the existing 1TB external i have. I may even keep it running along side the NAS but that might be useless.
 
compguy786 said:
Well I paid $66 for the ix2 I got...i m sure it should be decent and more powerful than my router being used uo
Click to expand...
Just looked at the specs for that unit. It is entirely entry level, and will never do any multimedia processing that is passable. You really are getting what you pay for with this unit.
 
From what I understand, NAS drives have a bunch of error handling routines in firmware that consumer drives do not have. These routines harden the drive to errors.

There may be other differences also. Look it up.
 
abekl said:
From what I understand, NAS drives have a bunch of error handling routines in firmware that consumer drives do not have. These routines harden the drive to errors.

There may be other differences also. Look it up.
Click to expand...
I think you're overstating the case a bit. A lot, actually.

Most hard drives have error recovery control, the WD Greens being one of the few examples of a drive that doesn't. (Which is one of the two reasons they are annoying in RAID arrays.) This doesn't "harden the drive to errors" - it actually forces the drive to ignore them so the RAID controller can deal with them instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control

A WD Red is just a WD Green with TLER and less aggressive (and more configurable) power management. And an extra year of warranty.

But anybody's mainstream desktop drives (WD Blue/Black, or the Toshibas I have in my sig, or... a lot of drives) are going to behave perfectly normally in a RAID array or NAS setup, as long as they 1) support error recovery control, and 2) don't spin down every 3 seconds, forcing you to wait for a spin-up every time you open a folder.
 
I would just go with WD Green. You'll rarely if ever notice the difference between 7200 and 5400 rpm in such an application.
 
I have a QNAP TS-212 or whatever. It's basically 2 hard drives that are not hot swappable....it was $150 for the NAS and whatever I put in it for drives. I've got it setup with 2 WD Reds. You need to use Reds, Blues, or Blacks....stay away from Greens in all NAS setups...power saving mode will kill your RAID in some setups. I never had a problem with mine, but read reviews that others had issues. (they're not officially supported for RAID)

QNAP does active firmware development for their systems. They can do iSCSI, CIFS, and have a lot of app features. It's a pretty solid product.

DROBO is another brand that I've heard good things about...though I had a friend lose their whole array in the past 2 years.

My QNAP lost a drive a year and a half ago to drive failure. It beeped and Emailed me to let me know that there was a failure. I promptly ordered a replacement and got it back up and running. The drive rebuild process was pretty painless. My only gripe is the unit has more features than the processor can handle. They basically give you a server with an Atom processor and 512MB of RAM in the 212TS. Some of the apps are extremely slow due to the hardware, but the RAID and disk throughput are fine. I would definitely buy another.
 
Interesting...I was actually thinking about going QNAP or Synology...i am so impressed by what their software is like...amazing dashboard and tools...really awesome ! I think i may go with 7200 RPM drives in RAID 1 to be honest. 5400 rpm doesnt sounds cool to me and after hearing from you guys, the WD Red may be a marketing scam. If i was able to locate a cheap intel itx setup, that would have been a excellent freenas system and probably would perform ALOT better than the ix2 for sure
 
I don't think WD Red drives are a "marketing scam", it just seems some are more dependable than others. I've had 2 2TB Reds in my Synology NAS, they run fine. They replaced two WD Green drives that were doing some funky stuff. However, the Green drives do OK in an external enclosure. Sometimes it takes a few seconds for them to wake up, but it's not a big problem.
 
compguy786 said:
the WD Red may be a marketing scam
Click to expand...

Nah. They'd be a scam if they were more expensive than other types, but they're not, really.

WD sells a bunch of nearly identical drives for a similar price that have tweaked firmware for certain tasks, and charges a few bucks more for models with a longer warranty. Not really very scam-ey.
 
dave_the_nerd said:
Nah. They'd be a scam if they were more expensive than other types, but they're not, really.

WD sells a bunch of nearly identical drives for a similar price that have tweaked firmware for certain tasks, and charges a few bucks more for models with a longer warranty. Not really very scam-ey.
Click to expand...

Actually good points...makes sense.
 
i actually bought two drives today. Seagate 2TB consumer grade. They seem like they are solid drives and will be running in Raid1 so we will see....tsk tsk
 
QNAP is very cost effective. The features are plenty and the speed is good. The TS-212 is their basic model and has about ½ the speed of their “business line”, less memory but at a significant less cost.

All QNAP shares one flaw that I dislike. You can’t restrict certain users from the apps. For example, you can’t restrict user “kid” from using the web server, SFTP, SSH etc but allow that user to use SMB. Basically, the security of the device is about as good as the weakest password/username/rights in your setup.

If I have my kid with user name “john” and password “123”, that username/password/right is exposed to the internet (unless you clamp down on the entire device).

Things that QNAP should improve include their iphone App “QMobile”. There’s a bug that you can’t create user play list.

There are certain unknowns that a user must accept while using a pre-built NAS such as “what happen when the hardware itself fails. Can I just pull and plug the HDDs into another identical unit and have it up and running? “.

Lack of ECC at a reasonable price is also a drawback.

Other than that, I am happy with QNAP.

Scarpozzi said:
I have a QNAP TS-212 or whatever. It's basically 2 hard drives that are not hot swappable....it was $150 for the NAS and whatever I put in it for drives. I've got it setup with 2 WD Reds. You need to use Reds, Blues, or Blacks....stay away from Greens in all NAS setups...power saving mode will kill your RAID in some setups. I never had a problem with mine, but read reviews that others had issues. (they're not officially supported for RAID)

QNAP does active firmware development for their systems. They can do iSCSI, CIFS, and have a lot of app features. It's a pretty solid product.

DROBO is another brand that I've heard good things about...though I had a friend lose their whole array in the past 2 years.

My QNAP lost a drive a year and a half ago to drive failure. It beeped and Emailed me to let me know that there was a failure. I promptly ordered a replacement and got it back up and running. The drive rebuild process was pretty painless. My only gripe is the unit has more features than the processor can handle. They basically give you a server with an Atom processor and 512MB of RAM in the 212TS. Some of the apps are extremely slow due to the hardware, but the RAID and disk throughput are fine. I would definitely buy another.
Click to expand...
 
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I started with WD RE4 drives in my NAS and decided to increase the capacity by going with 3TB drives. Of course, this was just after the flooding a few years ago and 3TB RE4 drives were expensive. Instead, I went with Seagate 3TB and they just did not hold up. When the WD Red drives were out for a few, I began to replace the Seagates and they are much more solid. Run a 2-4C cooler, quieter and don't see failures or errors when running SMART tests. As far as speed, I never really saw a drop off in transfer rate, even as the array started filling up.
 
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