Which disks to buy for a 5 bay NAS?

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jarledb

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#306664 11-Aug-2023 12:45

Looking to expand my NAS with 5 new drives.

Currently have WD Red Pro 6TB drives. Have been looking at getting 8TB (or bigger) drives.

Are WD Red Pro still good drives to get? Something else I should be looking at? And should I get higher capacity drives? I see it is possible to get up to 20TB WD Red Pro drives.

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Dynamic

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#3114597 11-Aug-2023 12:47

WD Red are still our go-to drives for a NAS. We've not had any experience that makes us look elsewhere.

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timmmay

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#3114646 11-Aug-2023 13:07

I once read that it's a good idea to get drives from different brands or at least different batches from the same manufacturer, that way they're less likely to fail at the same time taking all your data with them. But of course you have a backup of your NAS, because RAID is not a backup.

fe31nz

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#3114867 11-Aug-2023 23:36

When you get up to 16+ Tbyte drives, the enterprise class drives can actually be cheaper than the NAS drives. If you want to go that big, take a look at the Seagate Exos drives - they are usually the cheapest by a good margin. Enterprise class drives should be even better than NAS drives like Red Pro for longevity and tolerance to vibration and so on, so I have always been surprised that the NAS drives often cost more - a lot more. Maybe it is just that massive data centres buy enterprise drives in such huge numbers that they can be cheaper as a result of that.

I have recently had both my WD Red WD60EFRX 6 Tbyte drives fail, within a year of each other. They were nothing like as old as some WD Green 2-4 TByte drives I am still using, so as they were supposed to be higher quality drives, I was not expecting trouble from them. They were not Red Pro though - IIRC they were bought before Red Pro was invented. I replaced the first with a WD DC HC550 18 Tbyte drive and the second with a Seagate Exos ST20000NM007D 20 Tbyte drive, both enterprise class with 5 year warranties.

RunningMan

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#3114883 12-Aug-2023 07:28

@fe31nz this could be your issue. Seems WD may be marking drives as failed when they haven't.

Dratsab

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#3114990 12-Aug-2023 12:27

RunningMan: Seems WD may be marking drives as failed when they haven't.

The follow-ups by SpaceRex and NASCompares indicate the problem is a specific testing regime (WDDA - Western Digital Device Analytics) which was being utilised by Synology, and now QNAP. The drives were being marked as 'warning', rather than 'failed', some time after power-on hours exceeded 3 years. Funnily enough that's just after the warranty on many drives runs out. The disks that support WDDA in DSM are listed here. However, Synology have already deprecated (walked away from) use of WDDA so it shouldn't be an issue. You can also disable WDDA through the DSM control panel or via SSH.

In QTS, it seems QNAP are presenting the warning as an advisory and are monitoring the situation around WDDA.

Anyway you look at it, despite WDDA being able to be ignored, it's really, really bad of WD to be doing this. The vast majority of people using WDDA enabled/supported drives will have no idea of this and are likely to just go out and, probably unnecessarily, purchase replacement hard drives.

Yoban

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#3115033 12-Aug-2023 17:10

Hi there - just completed a similar exercise due to a failed 6TB WD red which was close to 8 years old. I have 12TB Seagate IronWolf Pro as was on special at the time and could not get my favourites being Toshiba N300.

One thing to note is the noise of the Pro range - certainly a bit more than the N300. Like others the Enterprise range are a cheaper option and I looked at that from Toshiba, but possible increase in noise put me off not realising Seagate Pro would be that nosier.

Seagate Pro comes with 5 year warrantee

Yoban

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#3115035 12-Aug-2023 17:14

Yoban:

Hi there - just completed a similar exercise due to a failed 6TB WD red which was close to 8 years old. I have 12TB Seagate IronWolf Pro as was on special at the time and could not get my favourites being Toshiba N300.

One thing to note is the noise of the Pro range - certainly a bit more than the N300. Like others the Enterprise range are a cheaper option and I looked at that from Toshiba, but possible increase in noise put me off not realising Seagate Pro would be that nosier.

Seagate Pro comes with 5 year warrantee

Good deal on at the moment https://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-N300-3-5-Inch-Internal-Drive/dp/B07N8WP6VC?th=1&language=en_US¤cy=NZD

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#3115057 12-Aug-2023 18:13

I am running 4 X 5-bay Synology NAS units, all populated with WD Red NAS drives (8TB or 10TB - all HDDs are at least 5 years old.)

None of the WD Reds have failed.

NOTE: I have 8 x surplus WD 6TB Red NAS drives (the older "shingled" ones), all used and in good working order, and free to a good home.

Collect from Wellington or pay shipping only.

EDIT: The 8 drives have now gone to a new home. 🙂

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danielparker

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#3115059 12-Aug-2023 18:21

PMed

nzkc

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#3115111 12-Aug-2023 19:05

timmmay:

I once read that it's a good idea to get drives from different brands or at least different batches from the same manufacturer, that way they're less likely to fail at the same time taking all your data with them. But of course you have a backup of your NAS, because RAID is not a backup.

I would like to reiterate this. I once bought a number of WD drives and they were all from the same batch. Must have been a pretty poor batch because they all failed quite quickly/early. I dont want the message here to be "avoid WD" because Ive had success and failures with all brands. No, the message is try to mix batches.

Also +100 (and more) to RAID is not a backup! Big lover of Backblaze here so recommend them. Really cheap and their service is great. And yes I have had to recover from failures using them. The (somewhat) small price to pay to them is so so worth it.

fe31nz

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#3115200 12-Aug-2023 23:39

RunningMan:

@fe31nz this could be your issue. Seems WD may be marking drives as failed when they haven't.

No, I do not use the WDDA software and my drives were rather older than just three years. They were showing SMART errors for bad sectors, and when I used ddrescue to copy them, there were some unrecoverable sectors.

fearandloathing

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#3115278 13-Aug-2023 14:29

I just mix 50% Western Digital and Segate.