If I get a 4 drive NAS .. does it take specific drives for a nas, or will std 3.5 pc drives work?

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Froggman

Froggman

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Im looking at the "WD my cloud EX4" Keep in mind I don't need the highest performance SSD out there; any old 3.5 HDD would do for now as I am just doing backups onto it and not so much running of of it, so I could upgrade the hard drives in the future

>my question 1 is does this NAS or do NAS in general require specific hard drives?
>my question 2 is what is the advantage to buying a NAS vs just sticking a few hdd in my pc?
 
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dgingeri


Well, the Seagate drives I'm dealing with are quite old, at 4-7 years old, plus I have a great many of them. 3-5 per week isn't horrible when you consider those. HGST and WD are just a lot better. I have a full DXi6700 56TB unit of Hitachi 1TB drives (12 drives in the node and 6X10 drives in the expansion...
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smorizio

smorizio

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reg hard drives and nas drives are the same. you can take a nas drive and put it in a stock pc without issue and you could put a reg drive in a nas. when it comes to nas drives there failure rate is lower then the cheaper home drives and most time have a longer warranty. on wd drives there red drives are nas drives for home users then there black drives are good drives too. seagate has one line of nas drives. and so does ibm/hitachi. with the small home nas the biggest issue is getting four drives that are the same..vendor and firmware. having a drive with another firmware can sometime cause nas issues.
 
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Rookie_MIB

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In general, any SATA drive should work in it just fine. That being said, generally a good idea is to put the same size drives in there. I've done some digging, and from a cost per gigabyte point of view, right now the 2TB drives can be be had for cheap. Average price for a new 2TB drive is about $55-60. I was thinking about buying some bigger drives for my NAS, but looking at it, the 2TB drives are really the sweet spot.

So - just buy one, stick it in. When you get a chance, buy another. Put it in. Pretty quickly you'll have 8TB of space (or less depending on your RAIDedness).
 
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Froggman

Froggman

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True, that is something to think about.
 
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Froggman

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So you have one? Well then I guess my question to you with personal experience would be: is there a real advantage, aside from quick easy disc replacement, to owning a NAS vs just shoving a few of these hard drives into my pc? Know what I mean? I don't own a NAS yet, just researching atm. Trying to figure out if say $300 is worth it if the only real advantage is quick replacement. Thanks
 
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Froggman

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Hmm some good things to think about, thanks. Love your avatar pic btw! XD
 
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dgingeri

dgingeri

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NAS drives have a better tolerance for vibration, mostly because they tend to have higher numbers of drives installed in the same enclosure. This means they'll perform better because the drives won't get caught trying to realign the drive head after a vibration knocked it off track. Also, NAS drives have something called TLER, or time limited error recovery. With most standard consumer SATA drives, if a vibration causes the drive to have to realign, it can cause the drive to take upwards of 30 seconds to recover. With NAS drives and TLER, if the drive doesn't realign the head properly within a second, it will trigger the head to go all the way to the starting point and retry the read operation, usually coming back successfully within the next half a second.

However, these type of things usually aren't a significant issue with 4 drive NAS units. It usually takes a full 8 drive unit or more to have vibrational problems. However, 4 drive setups can have issues if put on an unstable surface. Don't put it on carpet or on a table that only has a central pedestal. The most stable platforms would be on a file cabinet or larger dresser or cabinet, but even those can be an issue if on an uneven surface. Just make sure your platform is as stable as it can be.

I do recommend keeping to all one brand drives, as some drives will act unpredictably when operating with drives from another manufacturer. As fasr as brands go, I recommend using HGST (Deskstar or Ultrastar) drives for the best quality, and avoid Toshiba at all costs.

I work as a systems admin for a server software and hardware test lab, and I have a LOT of experience with drives. I figure I have roughly 2000 hard drives running in my local labs, plus I do administration duties for two labs in another state. Mostly, we have Seagate Constellation and Barracude ES drives around here, but I wouldn't recommend them. We also use a lot of HGST Ultrastar and WD RE3 series drives in the storage units around here. We have several hundred Engenio trays that take 16 Seagate SATA drives per tray for Fibre Channel RAID storage, but also many (40-50) Supermicro and Dell 12 drive trays that use an external SAS RAID controller, typically filled with WD or HGST drives. I replace about 3-5 Seagate drives per week, and I rarely have to replace a HGST or WD drive. I put this in to establish my credibility, so you know that I know what I'm talking about.
 
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Froggman

Froggman

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Damn. And yeah I wasn't aware seagate had that bad of a reputation. I have 3 atm and sofar haven't had any issues so fingers crossed. Like I said, I would like to upgrade in the future when costs allow. Right now Im trying to figure if its a good investment to buy the 4x NAS or just keep everything in the pc. As in, is there a $300 benefit to buying a NAS such as the EX4 I have been looking at? What do you think about that?
 
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maddogfargo

maddogfargo

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It depends on how the NAS handles RAID. Some HDD manufacturers like WD deliberately cripple or disable RAID specific firmware support functions on their cheaper drives so you are forced to buy the more expensive drives. But if you NAS is a software raid, this becomes a non-issue.

Several years ago when I built my own SUN ZFS storage array, I went with Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB drives. These are not crippled in any way and will work fine for both hardware and software RAID.

You can also check storage specific forums where people building their OWN NAS discuss the issue and look for current SATA drives that are easy to use for RAID.
 
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dgingeri

dgingeri

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Well, the Seagate drives I'm dealing with are quite old, at 4-7 years old, plus I have a great many of them. 3-5 per week isn't horrible when you consider those. HGST and WD are just a lot better. I have a full DXi6700 56TB unit of Hitachi 1TB drives (12 drives in the node and 6X10 drives in the expansion units, for a total of 72 drives) that are 7 years old, and I haven't had to replace one yet. It's my main backup destination for my infrastructure VMs across 7 hosts and two file servers. Hitachi drives are really the best I have seen, by far. All our current DXi units are populated by HGST 4TB Ultrastar storage drives and Seagate 2.5" SAS drives for metadata. *For the sake of legal declaration: this is only my own opinion about drives, and does not reflect the opinions of Quantum Corporation. I am not making these statements as a representative of Quantum Corporation.

The big question on if you need a NAS is how many systems or devices would need to access the information. If only one system is accessing the information, then there really isn't a need to use a NAS. If there are only two, the drive could be shared from one to the other pretty easily. If you have 3 or more devices, it might be a good idea to use a NAS. If you just want external storage to keep the data safe in case of an internal hardware problem, then a USB enclosure might be a better choice, and cheaper.

http://www.amazon.com/ORICO-Enclosure-Support-Silver-9548U3-US-SV/dp/B00K0DRUVE/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1449864867&sr=8-5&keywords=4+drive+usb+enclosure

http://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-ProBox-HF2-SU3S2-SATA-Enclosure/dp/B003X26VV4/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1449864867&sr=8-3&keywords=4+drive+usb+enclosure

Just a suggestion.
 
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Froggman

Froggman

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@dgingeri
You've completely changed my thoughts on NAS. Yeah those links you provided I put in my wishlist, they seem like the much better option and actually I can afford much sooner! Yes it is for my one personal pc. I am a stickler for backing up and very paranoid about drive corruption/failure. So anyway, thanks for your link, it really seems like a much better and cheaper option. I know nothing about them but I would suppose when you insert the drives into the HDD enclosure and connect it to the pc, the pc will see in say my computer that there are 4 drives vs one big one. Cause if it saw one big drive then it is a raid setup. Yeah... this is showing my extent of storage knowledge. Anyway, thanks bro!
 
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dgingeri

dgingeri

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I didn't think to put in raid options. Here's one that will probably do well for that:
http://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-Technology-External-Enclosure-Storage/dp/B00DU66XJI/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1449866114&sr=8-13&keywords=4+drive+raid+usb+enclosure

The first ones I linked will just connect you to the drives themselves. You can do software raiding through Windows, but it is rather unreliable, from my experiences. The Silverstone unit I linked is a bit more expensive, but still much cheaper than a NAS unit, and does RAID 5 or 10. Silverstone is also a better known name than the others.

Of course, you could go more expensive than a NAS and get an external RAID adapter, like a Dell H830, for around $300 plus an 8 drive external enclosure for around $300. That would give you screaming performance, but high cost. :)
H830: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PERC-H830-8-CH-2GB-SAS-12G-SATA-6G-PCI-E-MY-0NR5PC-LSI9380-8E-/281847180767?hash=item419f66addf:g:8scAAOSwjVVV3lZg
Enclosure: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA8T934G2987&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleMKP-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleMKP-PC-_-pla-_-RAID+Enclosure+%2f+Subsystems-_-9SIA8T934G2987&gclid=CjwKEAiAhaqzBRDNltaS0pW5mWgSJADd7cYDP9YJ-nd7f8SJdPU7ZrRJbGzm6kGJKxuq6kF1zieGTBoCs8rw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds
 
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R

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Actually, my system is exactly what you're talking about. A PC with 5x2TB drives in RAID5. My NAS:

4u rackmount case.
Icydock 5 drive hotswap bay.
4gb ram
Celeron G3220
Gigabyte B85 motherboard.
5x2TB WD drives.
CentOS operating system.

The advantages of my setup are simple enough - everything is replaceable/fixable, OS is flexible and configurable. Downside is a learning curve.

Advantages of the setup you're looking to do is lower power draw, simpler system. Disadvantages are repairability, cost, and flexibility.
 
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Froggman

Froggman

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Ok thanks, thats good info to know
 
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