Synology HAT5300 vs Seagate Exos X16 10-14TB Drives

[southerndoc]

My WD Red 8 TB drives have had several failures over the years, and now I have two that are failing with bad sectors. My RS1221+ is configured in a RAID10 array.

I'm planning to increase storage from 8 to 10, 12, 14, or 16 TB drives as they fail. Haven't decided on the size, but figured I would use the opportunity to start increasing. Either as they fail or when I desperately need additional space, I'll upgrade the rest of the drives until all are the same size and the RAID size will then increase.

I'm really torn between the Seagate Exos brand of drives vs. the Synology HAT5300 drives. I'm staying away from WD as they've left a bad impression.

Does anyone have any opinions between the two that they could share to help me make a decision?

Thanks!

 

[BlueFox]

Generally would not recommend basing your drive preferences due to your experience, given such a small sample size. If you want some stats, Seagate tends to fare worse than WD per Backblaze, and HGST has come out on top recently: Hard Drive Reliability: A Look at HDD and SDD Failure Rates

As for replacements, I wouldn't buy Synology branded drives. You're just paying a premium for rebranded drives (Toshiba made last I checked).

 

[southerndoc]

Can't figure out why my WD Reds failed over the years -- moreso than I would have expected. This is why I've been looking at other brands. You raise a valid point about Synology drives just being rebranded Toshiba drives. I'm wondering how much advantage there is for ability to upgrade firmware with the Synology drives. How much would it change drive function with updates? It's not going to make them more reliable or faster AFAIK.

 

[i386]

Seagate exos hdds have great Support, Firmware is publicly available and there are free Tools that can ne used to do a Lot of Things (GitHub - Seagate/ToolBin: All the great tools we have for the field.)

 

[tinfoil3d]

You obviously did make sure those are CMR drives, didn't you? AFAIR Red(without Pro) are SMR which causes issues with swraid. Otherwise just wondering what kind of failure did you experience? Not spinning, io errors, reallocated sectors?

 

[i386]

According to wd smr drives were available in sizes up to 6tb in the red series, 8tb and larger are allegedly cmr. But this didn't stop wd from introducing the new series "red plus" were they explicitly state that it uses cmr.
And smr drives that don't report themself as smr devices to the controller cause also in hardware raid problems

 

[southerndoc]

You obviously did make sure those are CMR drives, didn't you? AFAIR Red(without Pro) are SMR which causes issues with swraid. Otherwise just wondering what kind of failure did you experience? Not spinning, io errors, reallocated sectors?

Tons of bad sectors.