WTB: NAS for streaming Media

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Forums › Offers and Wanted › WTB: NAS for streaming Media

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speshnz

84 posts

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#1808439 28-Jun-2017 19:14

JimmyH:

I'm not an expert. I'm not even an IT guy. But I did some reading before dripping money on a NAS and 4x6TB drives to go in it 2 years ago (and another 2x6TB drives subsequently), since I was spending a fair chunk of change.

The advice from the NAS makers, the advisory guides, and gurus on the forums was pretty consistent. Namely, that green drives in a hardware RAID is asking for trouble. So I paid the circa $20 per drive (at the time) extra to get NAS-rated drives and hopefully reduce the risk of issues. All I can say, based on a sample of 1 setup, is that my setup has been running with nary a problem for 4 years now.

@gnnb - I think you were being sarcastic, when I was trying to help you. I'm not sure what I did yo annoy you so much. Plus, I'm also not sure that the Manakau Institute of Technology (MIT) even teaches system engineering?

But if you want to risk your data on drives that aren't rated for your use case, then I wish you luck. Personally, I would replace them PDQ if the data stored was difficult to replace, and would make doubly sure I had good backups until I did.

The disks in question are on the supported list for that particular NAS.....

nakedmolerat

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#1808494 28-Jun-2017 20:38

JimmyH:
gnfb:

Hmmmm The good or the bad news I dont have a clue what you are talking about fortunately the TLER?? does not seem to be causing any problems as the whole thing works wonderfully well as a storage bin for all my junk (media) and I can access it from any of the devices or mac or pcs that I have connected to it. Have been doing so for months!

Goodness imagine if what you said had been true LOL it would have completely screwed up any ability to sell the unit . Good job there are people like you around keeping us all honest well done!

They won't cause any problems - until they do.

Green drives are designed to be used individually and to be energy efficient. They have aggressive head parking and high TLER (time- limited error recovery). Basically, when your hard drive needs to perform a read operation and that sector is bad the hard drive will go into error recovery mode. That is what you want in a desktop drive - park the heads when not in use, and have a couple of goes at reading data if there is a read error. However, in a striped array using hardware RAID it isn't.

When a hard drive is in error recovery mode the hard drive will not respond to commands from the computer, such as another read or write operation. The RAID controller can interpret this as a failed disk and boot it off the array. For RAID environments, it's important to have a very low TLER to prevent a drive from being removed from the RAID by the RAID controller. Drives designed for NASes work this way, green drives don't.

That means you can have an unstable array that keeps rebuilding. Furthermore, you can't RMA the drives because they keep dropping out of your array. The are behaving as designed and will pass all diagnostics fine.

Head parking is a different issue. My understanding is that Green drives park the head after 8 seconds, which causes a higher number of on/off cycles in NAS or Server operations, and means that the drive will likely fail faster. Again, NAS drives are designed for this type of environment.

Just a comment on these Green drives. I had 4 Green drives on my trusty Thecus N4200. It took 7 years before they failed.

cshaun

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#1808554 29-Jun-2017 00:55

Many of these consumer NAS products are software RAID. The drives are on the supported list so almost certainly completely fine.

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