Discussion Looking for NAS HD suggestions

[DQ]

My NAS is closing in on being full. Right now I have (6) 8TB drives in it. I could buy an add on enclosure and put in new drives but I like the idea of replacing my old drives which have a lot of wear and tear on them. My thought is to work towards buying (6) 16TB (or maybe 18TB drives as the price sweet spot seems to be there) drives to double the space.

With that said my question to you media nerds is what make/model do you like best for this purpose?

Right now I am looking at WD Red or Seagate IronWolf Pro.

Thanks!

 

[cartman0208]

If it's only a choice between 16 and 18 TB, you should go for the one with the best price per TB.
As for the brand ... I'd always go for WD ... but that's more like an Android vs. Apple question

A good indicator might be this site:

Hard Drive Test Data

Hard Drive test data from the Backblaze data center. Backblaze is affordable, easy-to-use cloud storage.

www.backblaze.com

 

[posthasty]

WD Gold 22 TB

 

[DQ]

I went with 16-18TB because 16TB doubles my space (which I wanted at least double) and it looks like 18TB is just a bit more whereas the next step of 20TB goes way up.

WD Gold is way to expensive.

 

[cartman0208]

Funnily, where I live the 16TB Gold is only 5 bucks more then the 16 TB Red Pro.

 

[James]

With that said my question to you media nerds is what make/model do you like best for this purpose?

Seagate Exos X18. Noisy, but Enterprise grade with long warrenty. Very often much cheaper than IronWolf pro.

 

[cartman0208]

Same goes for WD Ultrastars, which I got for my NAS
I read some people have troubles with the warranty, but mine are registered with WDC and show their full 5y warranty.
And they are A LOT cheaper than Red's

 

[DQ]

Seagate Exos X18. Noisy, but Enterprise grade with long warrenty. Very often much cheaper than IronWolf pro.

I considered the Exos, I have some now. It just sits in my NAS so I don't care about the noise. Thanks for the tip!

 

[Watcher0363]

One word of warning, check the number days on your drive the moment you install them. I always buy Enterprise Seagate's. A little over a year ago I bought 2 18tb drives and 2 14tb drives from Amazon. All drives were from the same vendor I believe. Fast forward to last week when I decided I would upgrade the 14tb drives to 20tb. While checking on the health of the drives, I discovered that the 14tb drives had over 3 years of days on them, both in the high 1100 days. The two 18tb drives had about 350 days of use.

All the drives were suppose to be brand new. I doubled checked that I was buying brand new when I bought them. But a year later that clearly was not true. So I would say double check the number of days on your drives the moment you get them.

 

[cartman0208]

Huh? And they came in their sealed antistatic bag? Not just closed with some tape?

 

[tlpenn]

I have tried to learn more and more about how to store my data as well. I have for years used a 8-channel PCI-e card for my 4 RAID-1 drive arrays. Back in that time I used the WD black. They are filling up and my warranty is running out. I have always wanted to purchase a size that would not fill up before I ran out of warranty. Five years is about the best of warranties to hope for.

I purchased a Synology 1821+ (8-bay) and purchased 4, 16tB WD gold Enterprise drives...good sale for $300 a piece. I read the drive sizes bigger than these use a hardware modification that would cause the RAID logic to put an undue burden on the drives. I was hoping to find that link and post, but cannot.

Also, I read a well-documented article that warns about buying drives from the same production run....when you lose one, the others are not far behind. The best option is to split your purchase between two vendors. The drawback is (like me) the sale is not universal. I am planning on using the RAID-6 option, since I have 4 drives. Hope this helps.

 

[DQ]

I have tried to learn more and more about how to store my data as well. I have for years used a 8-channel PCI-e card for my 4 RAID-1 drive arrays. Back in that time I used the WD black. They are filling up and my warranty is running out. I have always wanted to purchase a size that would not fill up before I ran out of warranty. Five years is about the best of warranties to hope for.

I purchased a Synology 1821+ (8-bay) and purchased 4, 16tB WD gold Enterprise drives...good sale for $300 a piece. I read the drive sizes bigger than these use a hardware modification that would cause the RAID logic to put an undue burden on the drives. I was hoping to find that link and post, but cannot.

Also, I read a well-documented article that warns about buying drives from the same production run....when you lose one, the others are not far behind. The best option is to split your purchase between two vendors. The drawback is (like me) the sale is not universal. I am planning on using the RAID-6 option, since I have 4 drives. Hope this helps.

I am in the situation where my 6 bay is full and I can either add another unit with a few new and larger drives (and therefore another storage pool) or replace the drives I have with new larger drives. Either way is expensive and both have pros and cons. I have come to the conclusion I rather replace the current drives with larger ones as they have been in service for maybe a handful of years now. So if I get another unit and use both the well worn drives of the first unit will have a very high likelihood of failing. And I thought about just using unit 1 as a back of unit 2 but that won't be possible because it will not be large enough (the whole point is to get more storage) and then we are back to a high likelihood of failure.

Now backup IS an issue for me as well long-term. Right now I am cheating the system a bit and using 3 different external drives and sending different folders to different drives via synchronization. And that actually has been working awesome. But at a point not far in the future those drives will be too small to hold some of the larger folders that have the most content in them. So I am stuck with getting larger externals or another NAS unit and mirroring the size of the "production" unit but that will be more costly than even larger external drives.

This is turning into a very expensive hobby. I love it dearly and it's one of the few pleasures I allow myself but it's getting so expensive at a time when things are not great economically I am pondering giving it up.

 

[Esphyx]

This is turning into a very expensive hobby.

Oh, I'm in the same situation, I feel your pain... Thinking about going from 4 to 6 bay myself but haven't decided yet. And your backup situation I recognize as well, if it makes you feel any better my backup solution is even worse I've replaced my drives once, but I'm thinking of more bays this time due to NAS EOL and the drives are not too old yet.

So you're going to replace one drive at a time and rebuild?

 

[RedFox 1]

I am in the situation where my 6 bay is full and I can either add another unit with a few new and larger drives (and therefore another storage pool) or replace the drives I have with new larger drives. Either way is expensive and both have pros and cons. I have come to the conclusion I rather replace the current drives with larger ones as they have been in service for maybe a handful of years now. So if I get another unit and use both the well worn drives of the first unit will have a very high likelihood of failing. And I thought about just using unit 1 as a back of unit 2 but that won't be possible because it will not be large enough (the whole point is to get more storage) and then we are back to a high likelihood of failure.

Now backup IS an issue for me as well long-term. Right now I am cheating the system a bit and using 3 different external drives and sending different folders to different drives via synchronization. And that actually has been working awesome. But at a point not far in the future those drives will be too small to hold some of the larger folders that have the most content in them. So I am stuck with getting larger externals or another NAS unit and mirroring the size of the "production" unit but that will be more costly than even larger external drives.

This is turning into a very expensive hobby. I love it dearly and it's one of the few pleasures I allow myself but it's getting so expensive at a time when things are not great economically I am pondering giving it up.

Go through your collection and find all the titles that you downloaded and will never watch, I know the feeling, but I do it on a constant basis, I free up 6 to 8 TBs all the time. All my storage is NVMe so don't feel bad.

 

[DQ]

Go through your collection and find all the titles that you downloaded and will never watch, I know the feeling, but I do it on a constant basis, I free up 6 to 8 TBs all the time. All my storage is NVMe so don't feel bad.

I actually came up with a final solution. Still expensive but it's a workable and now complete plan.

My NAS is a 6 bay currently populated with with (6) 8TB drives in a RAID5 (I care more about storage than performance).

My plan is to retire those well worn drives with (6) new 18TB drives (more than doubles my space and 18TB seems to be where the sweet spot is for price).

Then I will buy a relatively inexpensive simple JBOD box (4-8 slots depending on features vs price) and let it all run as independent drives. The idea is to use the old 8 TB drives as backup drives in the JBOD box. I will use DrivePool to put them into the same pool as independent drives as my current WD USB portables creating 1 huge drive pool that should cover the new space for backup. That gets backed up via GoodSync from NAS to DrivePool.

That should cover everything for some time.

 

[RedFox 1]

I actually came up with a final solution. Still expensive but it's a workable and now complete plan.

My NAS is a 6 bay currently populated with with (6) 8TB drives in a RAID5 (I care more about storage than performance).

My plan is to retire those well worn drives with (6) new 18TB drives (more than doubles my space and 18TB seems to be where the sweet spot is for price).

Then I will buy a relatively inexpensive simple JBOD box (4-8 slots depending on features vs price) and let it all run as independent drives. The idea is to use the old 8 TB drives as backup drives in the JBOD box. I will use DrivePool to put them into the same pool as independent drives as my current WD USB portables creating 1 huge drive pool that should cover the new space for backup. That gets backed up via GoodSync from NAS to DrivePool.

That should cover everything for some time.

sounds like a good plan.

 

[DQ]

sounds like a good plan.

I think it is. Still costly, but all obstacles are solved ultimately in this scenario. The sync/backup was my biggest hitch but upon finding DrivePool (and buying it) I am good to go.

 

[Esphyx]

Thanks for the JBOD / Drivepool suggestion DQ, I will look into that as well.

 

[DQ]

Thanks for the JBOD / Drivepool suggestion DQ, I will look into that as well.

Glad it might be helpful.

It might help to understand why I went that way.

Over time one of my preferences has become not do traditional backups where a backup program snags all your data every so often and slaps it in 1 big file. There is no reason for that kind of activity as the collection only needs to be scanned and the changes backed up vs moving the whole thing every so often because 99% of it does not change. So I ended up using GoodSync (great application) just to sync changes nightly from NAS to Back up drives. This has the added benefit of super simple restores where you can just literally copy your files back manually from back up drive to NAS all or in part.

For some time I have been sending some folders manually (via Goodsync) from NAS to back up drive 1 and then these other folders go to backup drive 2 and so on. This was not sustainable and I needed a better way. Windows StorageSpaces can pool drives together for free. But in it's simplest config it will not address drives individually it stripes across them essentially in a RAID 0 type of situation. I did not want this because if 1 backup drives goes the whole array goes. So I found DrivePool. For $30 it cannot be beat. It's just a driver that makes mounts a new drive letter and behind that driver letter is all your external drives. And the drives are treated individually behind the drive letter and there is no striping. It's algorithm takes care of that on the fly per rules you set. In it's simplest for it just auto tries to keep usage on your external drives even by space free. This makes for a confusing first sync as it will use larger drives first until the larger drives free space falls below the free space of smaller drives.

So using these apps in this manner you can add/remove drives to DrivePool and it just shrinks and or enlarges the pool and again restores are just a file copy. The JBOD system was an easy way to utilize what will be my old drives as back up drives and still address them individually for DrivePool.

 

[cartman0208]

Interesting tool ... so what happens if one disk in the pool fails? Couldn't find that at a first glance...