wd red, ultrastar or deskstar for 24/7 NAS?

extrafuzzyllama

Limp Gawd
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Jul 29, 2010
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I am trying to decide which drive to choose for a 24/7 NAS.
I am looking for a 12 drive setup but just wanted opinions if I should pay extra for the ultrastars or go with the deskstar or wd red drives. I was looking to get 3tb drives since the wd red only has a 3tb and no 4tb size. also plan on setting up in raid.
 
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for a RAID in a home environment the best choice is WD Red.

just don't forget a UPS so one can get clean shutdowns.
 
I know its not on your list but I have had very good luck with the Seagate LP 2tb drives and their 4tb drives as well. They have been on Adaptec RAID cards, PERCs, and on LSIs in ZFS RAIDZ3 volumes.

Also, I've had Seagate 1tb 2.5" drives 24/7 on SmartArrays in refurb Proliants and they've been fine. I've been a bit of a Seagate fanboy lately given their price/performance.
 
Go Green, see sig, save a ton of money.
12x 2TB WD Green array pushes 2.2GB/s Read and solid 660MB/s Write (in RAID6 on 1882 Areca)

Array has been expanded and gone through OCE torture five times, no drops. Stable 24/7 for 3 years now, no drops, one failure.
 
ST4000VN000 seems to beat WD Red in performance and get good reviews. I will stick with those myself.
 
Go Green, see sig, save a ton of money.
12x 2TB WD Green array pushes 2.2GB/s Read and solid 660MB/s Write (in RAID6 on 1882 Areca)

Array has been expanded and gone through OCE torture five times, no drops. Stable 24/7 for 3 years now, no drops, one failure.
Did you change the Greens in any way (e.g. wdidle3 or something else) and if so, what settings did you use?
 
Shouldn't you figure out if you are going to go hardware or software raid before deciding on the hard drives? If software such as ZFS, then any drive would do, but if it's hardware, then something with error checking would be needed so the drives don't drop out of the array constantly due to back blocks.

In my case, I have hardware raid and got Hitachi drives, both 2TB and 4TB with a LSI 9285-8e raid card. The 2TB has been running with no issues for almost 2 years, and I just recently got the 4TB, but so far so good.
 
I don't recommend green drives for RAID, plus they are slow. Always had good luck with Seagate, and for some reason a bunch of people complaining about the RED drives recently and them failing.
 
I personally don't trust RED since one failed in my hand after several months of using.
Green is slower than Red? Not so sure but what I know for sure is Green reliable and cool in NAS. Been using Green over 2 years without any issue. Also been using new models of Seagate (3TB and 4TB) in my home media server. No complaint at all.
 
I personally don't trust RED since one failed in my hand after several months of using.

You do realize that statistically this is meaningless. Now if you had 100 thousand drives and 10 thousand of these died in the first year that would make me worry.
 
thanks for replies.
I haven't decided on HW or SW raid but have been thinking of going with a custom build or maybe a synology NAS.
 
Another vote for WD Red drives.

Currently using two of the 2TB Reds, both of them are still going strong.

Edit: They just passed their 128th day of continuous operation :D
 
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Determine whether you need TLER. If your storage solution requires TLER, you need WD Red or comparable, which is TLER-enabled. If your storage solution is superior and does not require TLER, then get a simple Green or equivalent drive.

For those solutions not requiring TLER, choosing WD Red is actually slightly dangerous in the event you lost your redundancy. TLER basically disables your last line of defence against bad sectors, which I'm not very favourable of.
 
thanks for replies.
I haven't decided on HW or SW raid but have been thinking of going with a custom build or maybe a synology NAS.

Synology's are pricey, but omfg I love mine. I've owned two, and they are rock-solid and just work. I suggest the + series. I have a huge rack system at home with 25 disk arrays, but I still use my Synology consistently because the bundled software is damn awesome, and gets constant updates.
 
Synology's are pricey, but omfg I love mine. I've owned two, and they are rock-solid and just work. I suggest the + series. I have a huge rack system at home with 25 disk arrays, but I still use my Synology consistently because the bundled software is damn awesome, and gets constant updates.

what drives you have running in yours?
 
Sorry to threadcrap but I'm such a noob when it comes to transcoding. Correct me if im wrong, If i buy a synology box, I wouldn't be able to stream any high bitrate 1080p files to my iphone/ipad unless the synology box was streaming a format like mp4 to those devices or those devices were talking to the synology box with the same kind of app like plex?.I honestly would love to just buy a 1512+ or 1812+ model if it was simple plug play and transcode.
 
Sorry to threadcrap but I'm such a noob when it comes to transcoding. Correct me if im wrong, If i buy a synology box, I wouldn't be able to stream any high bitrate 1080p files to my iphone/ipad unless the synology box was streaming a format like mp4 to those devices or those devices were talking to the synology box with the same kind of app like plex?.I honestly would love to just buy a 1512+ or 1812+ model if it was simple plug play and transcode.

those 2 models are capable of handling MKV
 
what drives you have running in yours?

I use the mainstream Seagate 7200RPM drives - ST3000DM001. Had them running 24/7 for over a year now with no issues.

I have 8 X 3TB in a Synology 1512+ with the DX513 expansion for ten total bays. I'm fairly positive both the 1512+ and 1812+ models will do 1080p in plex. Synology has a Plex package that works pretty well.

Check Synology forums for final verification, but I'm 95% sure the plus models will transcode 1080p.

If you're trying to decide between the 1512+ and 1812+ you should only look at the bays, they both perform identically. It depends on the space you need, but I highly recommend running RAID6 if you're using massive drives and don't have a backup.
 
I would go desktsar handsdown. I have seen thousands of WD/seagate drives fail in the DC. Hitachi's have stayed a live much better.

bh phopto and video has a really good price on 4 TB coolspin ones too for $151.99:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/835055-REG/Hitachi_0S03359_4TB_Internal_Hard_Drive.html

I bought 3TB ones for $109.99 each a few weeks ago. The coolspin ones are about the only low power/RPM drives that will work even with hardware raid controllers.
 
I would go desktsar handsdown. I have seen thousands of WD/seagate drives fail in the DC. Hitachi's have stayed a live much better.

bh phopto and video has a really good price on 4 TB coolspin ones too for $151.99:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/835055-REG/Hitachi_0S03359_4TB_Internal_Hard_Drive.html

I bought 3TB ones for $109.99 each a few weeks ago. The coolspin ones are about the only low power/RPM drives that will work even with hardware raid controllers.
Cool. Are they running with unmodified firmware or did you make any changes? (Any issues with excessive head parking like the stock WD Green?)
 
Cool. Are they running with unmodified firmware or did you make any changes? (Any issues with excessive head parking like the stock WD Green?)

un modified/stock firmware. I am runnin 30x3TB coolspin in an array that sees heavy activity and 2 years of use so far and no disks have had any failures or re-allocated sectors or pending sectors. I also have another 8 in a colo box running well and another 16 in a mythtv box that haven't been deployed as long but all of them are on hardware raid controllers and have no issues.
 
I have a Synology DS2413+ with 12x3TB WD RED drives, works great, had it for over three months, no issues with it. Use it as primary storage for my movie collection, streams MKV files over my gigabit network no issues. I would highly recommend WD 3TB drives, the ones in this NAS were in use in previous NAS's and I had no issues with them then.
 
Got 2x 2TB WD Red's and they seem pretty good only had for a few weeks now, but built into my existing raid array fine. Had 2 drives die in a raid 6 array.
 
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