Question WD RED vs SSD

[pcm81]

So, i am running synology disk station in raid6 with 4TB WD Red Drives. With price of SSDs falling, i am wondering if it is time to start replacing the failing drives with SSDs. Since it is a NAS on GbE connection i am mostly thinking in terms reliability not so much speed.
What do you think?
Few years ago i had 4 WD Reds fail all at once after disk station was shut down and unattended for 6 months... About 30K hours on each drive. So kind of have bad taste in my mouth after that.

 

[Tech Junky]

10X the cost for the same space.

Reliability plays into the decision though as you have stated. I would do it for the speed but, would need to bump my 5ge nic to 10ge to take advantage of the speed.

The downside of using SSDs besides price is when they die they don't give any warning typically.

 

[pcm81]

Well, not exactly 10x cost. 4TB WD Red is $80 while 4TB Red SSD is $390, so about 5x cost; but i'd expect ssd price to keep falling... Mostly interested in relative reliability... Want to just have 1 pack-up location rather than many...

 

[Shmee]

Are the WD Reds you have currently failing? Also, are they SMR? If buying new drives, I would definetly avoid SMR drives, but I would consider high capacity Red Plus or Red Pro drives, as well as SATA SSDs. High capacity enterprise drives are also an option, such as the WD Golds, or Seagate Exos enterprise.

Obviously, SSDs will be faster, but more expensive, and limited in capacity. But you don't need to get WD Reds, you could get something like a Crucial MX500 and save a lot of money. The 4TB model is on sale for $239 on Amazon.

 

[OlyAR15]

I have a mixture of WD Blue and Sandisk Ultra 4tb SSDs in my NAS. For me, it was the silence and low heat that I wanted. If you can afford it, then go for it. I was hoping SSD prices would drop faster by now, especially the 8tb ones, though. Hopefully by the time I fill the drives, they will become affordable.

The downside of using SSDs besides price is when they die they don't give any warning typically

None of my dead HDs gave any warning before crashing.

 

[Tech Junky]

4TB WD Red is $80 while 4TB Red SSD is $390,

I was just doing it off the top of my head but, that sounds about right.

None of my dead HDs gave any warning before crashing.

I've always seemed to notice quirks in the data w/ errors starting to accumulate as a sign that impending doom was about to arrive. SMART should also indicate some more alerts as they age if you have alerts enabled.

especially the 8tb ones

That would be ideal as that's what I'm running for spinners. SMH though due to them being quite expensive still in either SATA or NVME 600/1000 is a bit too rich for my blood when it comes to just hoarding data. Though it would make for a more sleek setup in terms of keeping it clean inside the case and being able to compact the case in size.

Seagate Exos

I've been eyeing up their Mach.2 drives they keep teasing as they're as fast as an SSD but big like a spinner due to their dual actuator inside the casing. They seem to be slow to roll them out and put them up for sale though. I'm interested to see what they end up selling for in comparison to the non-M.2 versions. Though I'm a bit wary of Seagate after getting bit a couple of times in the past with their drives.

 

[pcm81]

Are the WD Reds you have currently failing? Also, are they SMR? If buying new drives, I would definetly avoid SMR drives, but I would consider high capacity Red Plus or Red Pro drives, as well as SATA SSDs. High capacity enterprise drives are also an option, such as the WD Golds, or Seagate Exos enterprise.

Obviously, SSDs will be faster, but more expensive, and limited in capacity. But you don't need to get WD Reds, you could get something like a Crucial MX500 and save a lot of money. The 4TB model is on sale for $239 on Amazon.

Looks like they were CMR. PN: WD40EFRX. Got a nice stack of 5 paper weights.... That was couple years ago... looking at PNs in NAS now, looks like it is a mixture of SMR and CMR. Trying to plan ahead what to replace with when these ones start failing...

 

[Tech Junky]

when these ones start failing.

Take a look at the SMART data for them and figure out how long they've been in service. I've got
WD80EZAZ
Power On Hours 40010

I'm running 5 of them in a R10- 24/7 with one of them as a hot spare in the array. For ~5 years of spinning they're built like a tank still and will probably go another 5 years without issue. By then though things should be a bit different when it comes to replacing them with something better.

When thinking about upgrades though I've contemplated adding a single 18TB to backup things and then take out the 8TB's and put in 18's to grow things but, that's just more of a "want" than a "need". The other thought is to just dump the spinners and switch to SSD in a R1 w/ 2 8TB drives instead. Use a little bit of restraint when adding media vs spending more for more capacity. It's just convenient to have them on the network vs storing things everything locally on the laptop which also has dual NVME drives as well.