What hard drive should you buy for your NAS?

[Dennis Wood]

My favorite post ever? http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-news/32321-which-hard-drive-should-you-buy-for-your-nas

With about 30 NAS hard drives in service for the last five years or so, of various sizes and makes, the hard drive data presented pretty much reflect our failure rate. I stopped buying enterprise drives a few years back and instead always buy 1 or 2 spares beyond what I need. This way when a drive fails two or three yrs down the line it is replaced with the identical model.

Interestingly, one TS-509 (backup rsync host only) has been running 5 years with 5 1TB green drives with zero failures.

What was very encouraging was the Hitachi data. I just purchased and loaded up a Qnap TS-470 pro with 4 x Deskstar NAS 7200 rpm 4TB drives at about $200 each..the first hitachi drives I've ever purchased. Hitachi calls these "Desktop NAS" drives and based on online customer reviews have consistent good reviews. Hitachi has no reservations recommending a "desktop" drive for NAS use..I like that. In the TS-470 NAS connected with a Netgear 10G switch, a four disk array (Deskstar 4TB) in raid zero (for testing only) is consistently exceeding 500 MB/s in both read/write operations using windows smb3 (windows 8.1) real world file operations. QNaP's QTS 4.1 brings SMB3 support as well as an asynchronous file I/O option..hidden under the advanced option in windows network services tab. Initial testing ..it works.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

When they originally published that claim (enterprise drives aren't better than consumer grade)....I fell out of my chair laughing. As did a lot of other seasoned techs that have been in the trenches for years.

Anyone partially familiar with computers will immediately spot the flaw in their test. "They're basing this on servers in a data center". Let me filter this down to laymens terms.
*A perfect operating environment
*Servers with high speed fans drawing a constant cooling breeze, of clean air
*Low humidity, low temperatures (typically 65* and <45%rh)
*Perfectly conditioned power feeds via good UPS, very clean power
*No bumping, no moving, no thumps.
*Properly grounded
*Servers are running 24x7x365

Nothing is pushing the drives to fail. Even the weakest of horrible drives have a good chance to "look good"....as long as they can power up once...they'll likely run fine since there's nothing to make them roll up their sleeves and push themselves.

I'm towards the end of a successful 20 year career in providing SMB support, remembering the days of those horrible Quantum Bigfoot drives...and their suicidal head crashing. In the past we also did some enterprise support.

Through the sheer volume of drives going through our care, in relevent recent years...I'll agree my once beloved brand "Seagate" having down down the reliability toilet. I still see their good enterprise ES series doing fine, but the 'Cuda drives I used to love...we stopped using them a couple of years ago.

Western Digital has become our favorite...but we learned to run far far away from their Blue drives...I flat out stopped installing them. Seen waaaaaay too many of them return..... However we love the Blacks and RE series....I think I can only recall 1x Black edition drive dying on us. And I cannot recall an RE failing. Barely 2 years into using Reds in the NAS's we deploy...so far they're doing fine. (yes technically they're not enterprise).

Hitachi...back in the earlier days of IBM Deskstars...I loved them. They tended to perform very well, when I was building custom gaming computers back in the days of 4.3 gig and 8....oh, I forget what actual size 8 gig drives were back then..8.6 I think? And then the firmware issue of the 40 gig drives...which earned the name "DeathStar" drive.

Anyways...I haven't seen Hitachi drives have the best reliability rates....I'd call them just average....or due to 1x recent case, below average. About 18 months ago put in a big 6x NAS in at a client, SuperMicro chassis. For a backup disaster recovery product. It came with all Hitachi drives in her. Just 2 weeks ago I replaced the 5th drive. Only 1x Hitachi drive left. Been replacing them with WD Blacks. She's in a cooled good environment on an APC.

My point being, without question, when used in the real world...there's a big difference between 1x year home grade and 5x year enterprise grade drives when it comes to reliability. I see it all day every day. And I've seen many other experienced techs say the same thing when that backblaze claim is discussed.

 

[thiggins]

I would think that many/most of your clients' NAS environments meet at least some of the criteria you cite for Backblaze, i.e. UPS, 24/7 operation, not being moved around?

 

[Dennis Wood]

My general thinking on the enterprise vs not goes like this:

The Hitachi 4TB Deskstar NAS is selling today for $199 - 3yr warranty.

The Hitachi Ultrastar is 4TB is on sale for $319 - 5yr warranty.

So given the price of 2 Ultrastars, I can buy 3 Desktar and have $40 left over. For a four bay NAS, I purchased 6 Desktar drives. When/if one fails, the spare is installed, and the outgoing drive is returned for warranty with no urgency. Getting a matched drive as we all know is pretty much impossible 3-4 years down the line, so given our pattern of use (4 NAS units, all in operation for 4-5 years), this strategy has worked well. With some pretty heavy use daily storing backups and replicating data, I'm very impressed with how all units have fared. 1 Readynas Business (6 drives), 2 x Qnap TS-509 Pro (10 drives), 1 x Qnap TS-639, (6 drives). Most of the failures have been Seagate ES2 and Seagate 7200 drives. Very few issues with WD drives over the period. On one of the NAS units, all drives were recently updated to double capacity, freeing up all of its drives for spares.

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
IBM drives used to be Hitachi made. How come no one uses Fujitsu drives? Like cars MPG
rating, drive MTBF is based on ideal operating environment. My back is mostly on mil-spec.
stuffs. I used to drop PDP 8 minis made for military from a chopper hovering at ~2-4000ft
for testing purpose. I still think true enterprise class devices are made for heavier duty.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

My general thinking on the enterprise vs not goes like this:

The Hitachi 4TB Deskstar NAS is selling today for $199 - 3yr warranty.

The Hitachi Ultrastar is 4TB is on sale for $319 - 5yr warranty.

So given the price of 2 Ultrastars, I can buy 3 Desktar and have $40 left over. For a four bay NAS, I purchased 6 Desktar drives. When/if one fails, the spare is installed, and the outgoing drive is returned for warranty with no urgency. Getting a matched drive as we all know is pretty much impossible 3-4 years down the line, so given our pattern of use (4 NAS units, all in operation for 4-5 years), this strategy has worked well. With some pretty heavy use daily storing backups and replicating data, I'm very impressed with how all units have fared.

For the self sufficient and capable such as yourself...that way of thinking works fine, and can cost-justify itself. Plus you're likely aware of occasional monitoring of its status.

For many other people that have to hire someone to do it...and for businesses such as I cater so, they hire an IT guy to manage it. If a drive fails, the IT guy has to make a trip out there, and the cost is more than washed away with that probably minimum of 150-200 bucks "labor" charge.

That's assuming that the failed drive got noticed. As most of us can nod our heads in agreement to, the status of the hard drives in a smaller business will often go unknown until something totally and completely fails. It's crazy how many times I've seen servers totally fail because....1 drive of a mirror or RAID 5 volume died many months or years ago...nobody noticed because the server kept running due to RAID doing its job...and then a second drive failed, causing the server to fall over.

Yes true servers have ways of sending alerts through their management software, and we have our N-Able MSP/RMM tool to monitor our "managed" clients that pay us each month to oversee their stuff. But there are many businesses that do not...they go cheap...not realizing how important (aka valuable) their data is until a server crashes hard and they're out of production for a week or so...or worse.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I would think that many/most of your clients' NAS environments meet at least some of the criteria you cite for Backblaze, i.e. UPS, 24/7 operation, not being moved around?

Only in some cases...while I do have some larger clients with larger NAS units in proper server rooms, NAS units rule the smaller side of the SMB world. Meaning...typically they're found in the smaller networks that are workgroup/peer to peer networks. No real server...no active directory.

So they'll often be found on the end of some desk, occasionally buried under a stack of paper. Or worse...down on the floor, under a desk...on top of a carpet, foot traffic nearby, sometimes getting kicked, clogged with dust. Likely just plugged into a cheap woods brand surge strip instead of an UPS.

'Course if I set it up, it'll get put in a safe spot, with an APC behind it, and a lecture given about keeping it open, exposed, not buried under paperwork and magazines and brochures that will cause it to overheat.

Do most people think to "backup the NAS"? Nope!

Anyways...train getting a bit off the main track here...my original point was "I clearly, nearly every day, see a difference in reliability between consumer drives and enterprise drives".

I can see Dennis's point...that he can purchase ~twice the amount of consumer drives for the same price as a few enterprise drives, and replace them frequently himself, and come out spending less at the end of XXX amount of years. From what I've read of his posts on these forums, he's an above average person as far as his IT skills. For most of the rest of the world...see my prior replies. There's a price to pay for the disruption in productivity caused by downtime. And there's a higher price to pay to have it repaired.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks Stonecat. Can always count on you for an in-the-trenches view!

 

[Dennis Wood]

The cat makes a good point . Coming from the enterprise world where my team serviced border sites, an outage meant a 4 hr drive..therefore remote KVM, multi redundant servers coupled with dual redundant storage arrays were standard...and all gear was definitely enterprise. Border staff were only responsible for tape rotation. All sites had identical hardware..and we still had single server outages for several days in one case due to a failed PERC controller, and once due to a system fan failure that stopped a server failover...vendor SLA agreements were broken more than once. I've had eight years in that world.

My first business was pretty much all SMB and I can attest to the typical less than ideal situations there. With active directory now completely standalone capable with the latest samba flavour,many NAS units may soon be office AD servers too..so the impact of downtime needs to be assessed.

Good disaster planning for SMB is a good opportunity for IT providers to set themselves apart from competitors and hopefully raise their income levels doing it. At least that would be my take if I back in that role.

When a drive fails in a qnap NAS it beeps incessantly and drives my staff a bit nutty. The email I get does help, but it's the beeping that gets immediate attention. Having the spare drive on hand is instant peace of mind. My view on this stuff is a bit of hybrid thinking based an a mix of trench, corporate and now personal business requirements. We have a great team here at Cinevate that allows me to indulge a bit in the IT world for our own needs.

 

[LinAdmin]

Blackblaze have now published detailed data about different products of various manufacturers. Very interesting reading!

Update: They now even have statistics about failure rates of various models and manufacturers.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/backblaze/~3/H5gCLWTW04o/

 

[margolbe]

Do you really need NAS drives for software based RAID?

I understand the need for specialty NAS drives for Hardware RAID. However, outside of the longer warranty for the NAS drives, are there any real advantages over non-NAS drives for software RAID systems used by Synology, QNAP, Asustor, etc.?

 

[stevech]

I understand the need for specialty NAS drives for Hardware RAID. However, outside of the longer warranty for the NAS drives, are there any real advantages over non-NAS drives for software RAID systems used by Synology, QNAP, Asustor, etc.?

It is said that the WD Red drives have slightly different firmware and longer warranties. I can't say. But longer warranty isn't worth much, I suspect, as it adds a lot of cost. And you still get, if you RMA, a 'recertified' (used) drive with lord knows how many RPMs on it.

My NAS has one green drive and one standard. Both Seagate. Both 7200RPM, both 2TB. I don't use RAID (use two volumes); no need to match.
No issues in some 2 years' use.