5400 or 7200 for NAS?

A

Adam

[H]ard|Gawd
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So im going to be setting up a NAS. I'll probably be doing harware RAID 5 but havnt decided on FreeNAS or just using something like WHS or Windows Server 2008 (since i want to use it for file storage but maybe printer sharing later down the road).

Anyway... the WD Green drives (WD20EARX) 2TB 6GB/s drives just dropped to $114.99 on NewEgg so i was thinking of using 5 of those... but they are only 5400 RPM.

Is that a big issue regarding speed? Yes they are not the high end RE4 drives but hey lets face it, for my home use i don't need the crazy nicer drives... but should i go for the 5400RPM? Will the speed be much slower then say 7200 RPM?? Right now all my media for my HTPC Is stored on local HD's, some of them are green drives (forget which ones).... but im going to be moving everything to the network, worried about speed. SUre its a gigabit network but still, speed is a concern as all my stuff are x264 blu-ray rips (about 12GB each) I want to make sure i can still stream them (i mean i can stream it from my HTPC to my main office pc without problems and right now in on 100 meg since i have an issue with my network cable
 
I think with 5 of those drives for sequential writes you will be near the limit of the gigabit cable, not the limit of 5400rpm drives, and you may thank the lower heat/ noise output one day too!
 
There should be a performance difference between a comparable 5400RPM and 7200RPM drive (comparable as in architecture, age, platter density, etc) but for normal streaming and such, the 5400RPM should be ok.

However there's two other issues that you have to worry about:

1) Hardware RAID compatibility. Whatever RAID card you're using, make absolutely sure that the WD20EARX drives will work with that card. It's a Green drive so it more than likely doesn't have TLER support which some hardware RAID cards need in order to use a drive. With that said, if you use software RAID like ZFS or Linux MDADM, compatibility is pretty much assured.

2) Relatively poor Newegg reviews. 26% of the Newegg reviews for that drive are one star. 6% of the reviews are two stars. That's a combined total of 32% unsatisfactory performance out of just 47 reviews. A tad high considering that this Seagate 2TB has only 25% unsatisfactory performance out of 283 reviews and this Samsung 2TB with 13% unsatisfactory performance out of 1325 reviews. So from a reliability standpoint, might be a good idea to forget about that WD 2TB Green drive unless you're willing to take the chance with your data.
 
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I didnt even concider the seagate at the time, it was higher price.. they must have just lowered it. maybe i'll get the seagates instead, ive been using them lately over WD. I sat there for an hour going over reviews and doing the math on the %'s that were above 4, etc... lol... Seagates have 2nd highest rating in the 2TB range it seems.

The samsungs would cost me $225 more overall then the WD drives.. but MUCH better reviews. Would I see a drop in performance from the 6GB/s to 3GB/s??? Im sure my raid card will be cheaper for a 3GB card also
 
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Adam said:
I didnt even concider the seagate at the time, it was higher price.. they must have just lowered it. maybe i'll get the seagates instead, ive been using them lately over WD. I sat there for an hour going over reviews and doing the math on the %'s that were above 4, etc... lol... Seagates have 2nd highest rating in the 2TB range it seems.
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Something I forgot to add in my earlier post: The Seagate also has the same issue as the WD Green drive in that it lacks the TLER switch. So as with the WD Green drive, make absolutely sure that the Seagate will work in a RAID array with whatever RAID card you're planning on using. However, note that the Samsung has significantly better compatibility with true hardware RAID cards than either the Seagate or WD.

Adam said:
The samsungs would cost me $225 more overall then the WD drives.. but MUCH better reviews.
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Yeah sad that there's a huge price difference. Before the floods, those Samsungs were about the cheapest 2TB drives out.
Adam said:
Would I see a drop in performance from the 6GB/s to 3GB/s??? Im sure my raid card will be cheaper for a 3GB card also
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When it comes to mechanical hard drives, theres no difference at all between SATA 6.0Gb/s and SATA 3.0Gb/s. It's pretty much marketing fluff as no consumer mechanical hard drive has even come close to the limits of SATA 3.0Gb/s let alone requiring SATA 6.0Gb/s.
 
Using a good ole High Point, bout $155 so its not breaking my bank. It was between that or an LSI Harware card for about $250... decided on the highpoint since

1) its on the cheap
2) i've used their products before, never had issues and i know how to configure them easily

Its a home server so no need for something crazy like adaptec/hardware equiv... it'll suit my needs fine.

Now if prices were NICE i'd go with an adaptec and some nice RE4 drives from WD, but hell right now the RE4's are about $450 or so for a 2TB... NO WAY i can afford that right now, way out of my budget, even the drives with todays prices took me a week to decide on hitting that SUBMIT button
 
RocketRaid 2720SGL - Got decent reviews actually, although some people were biased on it saying they couldnt get it to work, but ive never had issues with HP cards before. I have a few raid 5 arrays that havnt had anything but HD failures over the years... one with no failures at all, the other with maybe 1-2 drives that have failed but thats not the HP fault.
 
My recommendations for a NAS is the following:

It's gonna run 24/7

1. Power conservation is always good (less heat) (less bills to pay).
2. Unless you are using a high end NAS ($800.00 +) or hand built NAS, you are not going to saturate gigabit easily even with 5 7.2K drives. It's not just a raw numbers game.
3. Heat - Heat means less reliability, less reliability means less data integrity and hardware life span.

So I vote for 5400rpm drives. I have been rocking 5x Samsung HD204UI 2tb disk in RAID 6 in my QNAP TS-659Pro II for going on like 9 months 24/7 and there is ZERO smart errors and the drives idle at maybe 80 F in temp. I get over 120MB reads which is 99% fully saturating gigabit. I also get about 85-100MB writes. Keep in mind this raid 6 and using 5400RPM drives. Raid 6 is very processor intensive due to the vast sum of parity calculations. This all on an ATOM Dual Core 1.2ghz processor with hyperthreading haha. Not bad. And of course I am using a $1200 dollar NAS with out the hard drives lol ... You get what you pay for. QNAP is pricey but damn featured and very fast.

Edit** I read that you ended up getting some seagate drives. Good luck and I wish you high performance and happy NAS'ing about :p
 
Adam said:
RocketRaid 2720SGL - Got decent reviews actually, although some people were biased on it saying they couldnt get it to work, but ive never had issues with HP cards before. I have a few raid 5 arrays that havnt had anything but HD failures over the years... one with no failures at all, the other with maybe 1-2 drives that have failed but thats not the HP fault.
Click to expand...

Well good luck with that controller. Not much user response about that card here on the forums. However, do note that it's not a true hardware controller but more of firmware/software/fake RAID controller.
 
Yeah they call it "Hardware assisted" which is a nice way of saying "software" . but its cheap... if i used FreeNAS id be doing software anyway, though ZFS. But at least i can add-on to the raid with ease. Ive used their cards before, they do the job for a budget rig, which this started out as, since i have spare parts laying around (good parts, but still spare).

Its just tough to drop $500 on 1 raid controller.
 
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