My first home NAS! I need some advice...

[MichaelG]

Hi! I decided this week to use a NAS at home and bought the QNAP TS-251 with 8Gb RAM. I'm a newbie so there are some things I wanted to ask about setting it up... I'd appreciate if you could give me some advice about the following:

First, about choosing the hard drives - do they really need to be chosen from the compatibility table that I see at QNAP's webpage, or is this a recommendation? is there a risk to any of the components if I try a hard drive that isn't listed there?

Second, does it make sense to prefer a 10k enterprise drive for better performance, or is it an overkill for plain home use with about five users? the price at ebay is 80 pounds for an unused 10k drive, so it's as affordable as a 5.4k NAS drive.

Third and maybe a silly question, is there an advantage to choosing two identical disks (capacity, speed, even model)? I intend to use them for mirroring, in case that it matters. Or does it make sense to fit a faster drive to work with, and a slower drive for backup?

Thanks a lot for your help!

 

[thiggins]

Use two of the same make/model drives. WD Reds are usually the go-to suggestion and should be on the approved drive list. Resist the urge to reuse old drives. You have a new NAS, so give it new drives.

Enterprise grade drives will just be noisier and use more power with no performance advantage.

 

[MichaelG]

Thanks a lot Tim!

 

[mikolajek]

I support Reds recommendation. Surprisingly, even though it's the same company at the end of the day, I had issues with Seagate drives and I used to be a long-time Seagate user. The current IronWolf line has much better reviews, but I haven't decided to give them another run.

 

[sfx2000]

Hi! I decided this week to use a NAS at home and bought the QNAP TS-251 with 8Gb RAM. I'm a newbie so there are some things I wanted to ask about setting it up... I'd appreciate if you could give me some advice about the following:

First, about choosing the hard drives - do they really need to be chosen from the compatibility table that I see at QNAP's webpage, or is this a recommendation? is there a risk to any of the components if I try a hard drive that isn't listed there?

Those are tested and known by the vendor's engineering and development team - which means predictable performance over the life of the drives and the NAS.

Second, does it make sense to prefer a 10k enterprise drive for better performance, or is it an overkill for plain home use with about five users? the price at ebay is 80 pounds for an unused 10k drive, so it's as affordable as a 5.4k NAS drive.

Go off the list - you're on your own - and many of those 10K drives, they're data center recycles, recovered in the current shift from HDD to SSD in the data center environment - some ebay folks may suggest "certified", but many are pulls from old servers that were decommissioned...

Third and maybe a silly question, is there an advantage to choosing two identical disks (capacity, speed, even model)? I intend to use them for mirroring, in case that it matters. Or does it make sense to fit a faster drive to work with, and a slower drive for backup?

It's always best to have a matched group of disks in a NAS.