Differentiating NAS Hard Drives?

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snakyjake

Member
Jan 22, 2014
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When considering hard drives for a home NAS, what features should be considered that differentiate Western Digital Red, Seagate Enterprise NAS, and Hitachi Deskstar NAS?

Planning for up to 8 drives.
Mostly for video media, photos, and small data files.
24x7 availability.
Light home usage.
Snapshot RAID/JBOD/No stripe.
Linux OS.

I've read WD Red doesn't park the heads, which concerns me if the storage case is bumped. Or maybe the drives are so well built that they heads won't cause damage?

The other drives have higher RPM's, which typically means more power consumption.

Other features I'm looking for is solid firmware, zero maintenance; or easy/automatic upgrades and tuning.

Anything to differentiate? Or just buy whichever is cheaper?
 

ttabbal

Active Member
Mar 10, 2016
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They are all about the same for what you're doing. The head parking thing with WD red isn't that they never do it, just that they don't spin down and park when they haven't been used for a few minutes. People with Green drives in arrays know that pain.

Higher RPM means more power, more heat, more performance. For what you say you want to do with them, anything will do. Desktop drives, NAS drives, used enterprise drives, whatever. A bunch of us recently bought used 2TB enterprise drives for about $30/ea, as one example.

Whatever you get, burn them in thoroughly. badblocks and SMART long test at a minimum. Testing should take days. Maybe a week+ for big drives like the 10TB monsters.

After testing, put them in whatever setup you desire and start filling them up. Don't forget backups. :)
 

fractal

Active Member
Jun 7, 2016
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Drives marketed as NAS drives are often better at dealing with the vibrations and resonances that occur when you put multiple drives in a small space. This may be worth the extra cost.

The thing that's important to me is ... heat kills .. this has been proven over and over. Lower RPM drives frequently use less power than speedier drives. And, since virtually all of the power going into a hard drive is turned into heat, this extra power must be dissipated. This means bigger power supplies and more fans.

So, for me, the important factors are vibration compensation, low power and high density. I am less concerned with RPMs than I am with power.

My media arrays currently use WD Red drives. I am looking seriously at the HGST NAS drive for my next expansion. But, be sure to test whatever you get to catch any infant mortality drives.
 

snakyjake

Member
Jan 22, 2014
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What is the best way to test and "burn them in"? Which manufacturer has the best tools? Best support for Linux?
 

ttabbal

Active Member
Mar 10, 2016
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I use badblocks and smartctl in linux. Start however many badblocks processes you need using screen/tmux, when completed, smartctl to start long tests.