DS409 But Which Drives?

[Fish4Fun]

I am setting up a new NAS. I have had a Terastation setup as a 1.5TB Raid5 for several years, but it is aging and nearly full. I would love to populate a new DS409 with 1.5TB or 2TB drives, but the failure rate on the high capacity drives I have been looking at seem VERY HIGH! Online reviews show failure nightmares in 20-30% of respondents. Statistically this is simply untenable in a NAS I want to be rock-solid. My Terastation has run 24/7 since the day I bought it, with 0 drive failures; it would be my hope to have the same experience with the drives in the new NAS.

Choosing the DS409 is a no-brainer. Selecting the drives for it is proving frustrating. I would love some advice and/or input regarding drive selection with an emphasis on reliability, capacity and price in that order. Speed is not really an issue. The NAS will be used for media storage/streaming and file backup, the network itself will be the main bottleneck.

Thanks in Advance,

Fish

 

[Fish4Fun]

Wow. I would have expected someone here to have an opinion (good or bad) on large capacity drives, LOL I spent some time looking at the 500GB and 750GB drives, and to be fair the negative reviews on them are statistically similar to the 1TB and 1.5TB reviews. Oddly, this is somewhat comforting to me. I guess the best solution is to back up everything on stand-alone drives and then un-mount them and put them in zip lock bags. This, combined with RAID5, should provide a reasonable amount of assurance.

I am currently considering the SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD154UI 1.5TB as a good compromise of capacity and price. I would love to hear some feedback on these drives or any other 1TB to 2TB drives from people who have setup RAID5 servers/NASes. I sure wish choosing reliable drives were as easy as selecting the box to put them in! The DS409 reviews @ newegg were all 5 eggs except 2, one guy gave it 4 eggs because it didn't support RAID10, and the other gave it 3 eggs because Synology support was unwilling to help him solve an XP client issue. All drive reviews seem to include DOAs and Failures:-(

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Fish

 

[thiggins]

SATA drive reliability has a lot to do with how they are used. Generally, SATA drives don't hold up well over the long term if they have to do a lot of seeking (head jumping from track to track). SATA drives like big, continuous files.

Temperature is also a killer for drives.

Remember, most reviews (especially from tech-oriented folks it seems) tend to be negative. Most people don't take the time to write positive reviews.

Be sure whichever drive you choose is on the NAS's recommended drive list.

 

[Fish4Fun]

thiggins,

Thanks. The SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD154UI 1.5TB is on the recommended list, something I am glad I checked. In theory it is fairly "cool". While I will use this NAS for document back-up, the bulk of the storage is media and media streaming, so should be mostly large continguous files. Having said all of that, I am still a bit concerned about the DOA and short life feedback, but that seems to come with all drives, as you mentioned.

Again,

Thanks for the response.

Fish