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HDDs for NAS

M

mdmcaf

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 23, 2011
Messages
68
I'm going to be building my first NAS within the next couple months or so (hopefully), and I'm confident of the components I've selected, save for the hard drives. Right now I have two 2TB Seagate ST2000DM001 drives and I plan on getting two more of them to create a RAID 5 configuration and run the NAS under FreeNAS.

I was pretty confident about the drives (though I realize that they're consumer drives and not the enterprise level hard drives that are preferred) until I had 3 Seagate hard drives fail on me within 2-3 months of each other, one of these being one of the aforementioned 2TB Seagate hard drives. I've known that Seagate's reliability seems to be going downhill both from my own experience with them as well as the number of Seagate drives customers were bringing in that were failing/had failed. I've been recommending folks get Western Digital hard drives for about a year or so now, and folks seem to be happy with them.

To get to the point, I was roaming around the forums here and came across someone commenting about how Western Digital Blues don't like to be put in a RAID and they tend to perform poorly in that environment. Which got me to thinking about my NAS configuration and how I'm using consumer-grade Seagate hard drives. So my question is...am I okay with keeping the Seagate drives, and buying two more of them to complete my RAID, or should I postpone the project to save up some more money so that I can get better hard drives? If I need to get better hard drives, what should I choose? I'm not rolling around in money, so cost is a big concern to me. The performance of the NAS isn't a huge deal as I'm not going to be streaming any media from the NAS...it's just going to be a place to hold my backups and various other obnoxiously large files that I tend to collect for some reason. But I do want it to be reliable, reliability trumps performance. Of course I'm defining reliability in the context of the kind of data it's going to be holding - backups of my backups and other assorted junk (mainly a lot of backup images from certain customers/clients who seem to have an affinity for screwing up their Windows' installations).

Thanks!
 
For pure backups/reliability, you're better off backing up to different media types (optical discs, tape drives, scheduled offsite backups, etc) than you are dealing with a NAS. For performance, the Seagates you have should be fine, but keep in mind that you get what you pay for: they will not be as reliable as their enterprise counterparts, they will not last as long (theoretically of course -- any single drive COULD last 1billion years, but the MTBF of desktop drives is much lower than enterprise equivalents), and they will not be able to recover from errors as easily as enterprise equivalents, if at all.

Use NAS/RAID 5 for stuff you actually use, not for backups. Whether you get these Seagates or WD RE4s or SLC SSDs, all drives WILL eventually die on you. True reliability costs $$$, so pick your poison as far as "performance vs reliablity" goes and stick with it.
 
The reason I figured I'd go with a NAS is because I already have a storage server with ~6TB of space on it. I wanted a way to have additional backups of some of that data (including archived data from a 3TB drive on my main system) that was relatively fast (i.e. not a cloud backup scheme) and was reliable so I could keep my data as indefinitely as any data can survive (which is why I'm going with a RAID 5). I also wanted something that was relatively cheap. There are 4-bay NAS's out there that go for about the same amount of money as what I'm going to spending on my custom NAS, but I wasn't thrilled about the quality and QNAPs are really expensive.

I already backup the most important stuff to an ESXi virtual machine via CrashPlan, it's also backed up via CrashPlan to an external hard drive on my server, the utmost important data is backed up to both of those locations as well as CrashPlan's cloud storage option. So I've got backups pretty well taken care of. I guess what I should have stated in my original post is that I'm looking to archive my backups as well as keep customers' disk images. Right now I just don't have the space to hold everything that I need/want to hold.

You're right about optical/tape being the most reliable...but the average file size for what I want to backup is ~50-70GB with the larger files being upwards of 300GB, I haven't calculated what the smaller files average out to be. So even backing it up to blu-ray would be insufficient. I haven't researched tape backups...but from my experience with tape backups in the mid to late 90s they're noisy and take a long time, I also gather that it would be prohibitively expensive to backup the amount of data I need to be storing on it (about 4TB).

Thanks for the info :)
 
Western Digital REDs are designed from the ground up to be consumer level raid/NAS drives. I would recommend them.
 
Xinmosni said:
For pure backups/reliability, you're better off backing up to different media types (optical discs, tape drives, scheduled offsite backups, etc) than you are dealing with a NAS.
Click to expand...

Tapes and optical also degrade. Nothing will last forever. Also, you can do and offsite NAS to back to. I think a NAS is a great PORTION of backup. I don't suggest using RAID. I find it to be a waste of a drive, or two in some cases. Especially for backup since RAID is redundancy, not backup. And nice the NAS shouldn't be the only part of your backup solution the redundancy isn't needed. I use a NAS and I only turn it on when I need it so my drives aren't always in use. Then I have drives that I backup to and then keep offsite. I also have very critical data on an external drive that pretty much goes with me everywhere.
 
IMHO, I think the Red drives might be a waste of money and this coming from someone who was going to purchase 7 3TB versions for my NAS. Just get the cheapest drive you can find in the size you want.

If this is a backup, then RAID is nice to have because it provides redundancy with your backups. Although you should also store them to physical media; but as long as it's not "live" data and it's data you transfer/move for backup purposes then RAID can be used as a backup solution, just RAID in itself is not a backup.
 
I can understand the idea of RAID =\= Bcackup: BUT when it comes to mission critical data, you don't want any files on a non-redundant partition. Yes RAID is a pain in the ass, but it can save your ass in the event of a drive failure before you are able to actually 'back-up' data to a DL+ or M-disc.
 
I just got also 4x2TB WD Red connected via HBA to FreeBSD running ZFS virtual in ESXi. My current QNAP will be reset as a backup via Rsync; After I fully understand ZFS and decide on the RAID level.
 
Raid 6: it's inefficient, but it is advocated by all major HDD manufacturers and data centers as the safest small array.
 
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