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Need HDD Advice for NAS

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I have been looking to set up a NAS at my house and am planning to purchase the Synology DS212 within the next couple of days. This is a diskless NAS so i've been doing some research on HDDs for the DS212 and am looking for some advice.

I am looking to get two 2TB HDDs (run in either RAID 1 or SHR) for the NAS and have been leaning towards getting two Samsung F4 HD204UI's. I will be using the NAS for media storage/streaming and nzb downloading. Are these drives recommended for such a setup, or is there something better out there people would recommend? I have heard wonders about the RE4's but those are a bit more than i'm looking to spend, whereas the price of the F4's are more in the range i'm looking at.

Thanks for the help!

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All mechanical drives are pretty mutch the same nowadays. Any performance difference between disks will be too small to realise. As long as thay are not 5400RPM drives you will be just fine. There's really no reason to go overboard.

ngrego said:
All mechanical drives are pretty mutch the same nowadays. Any performance difference between disks will be too small to realise. As long as thay are not 5400RPM drives you will be just fine. There's really no reason to go overboard.

The Samsung HD204UI is actually a 5400RPM drive, but for a 2TB HDD that's 7200RPM you're looking at between 2 and 3 times the price. Would the network speed bottleneck the NAS before the HDD speed does?

Another thing to note is the Samsung has a higher storage density (667GB per platter) than a lot of the other HDDs out there, but I'm unsure how much that will compensate for slower transfer speeds associated with lower RPM. I've also come across reviews/advice (although I'm unsure how true this advice is) stating that for a NAS, a 5400RPM drive is often better as its power usage is lower and the drives are quieter, and the speed of a 7200RPM drive isn't as necessary for a NAS as it would be for an OS HDD.

From what I can see with my setup a gig connection can transfer a file at about 120 MB and a single drive can transfer at about 80 MB to one you need to look up what the max throughput of the thing is aaand looks like it is 45MB :( 
Source: Your link

Cons: Finicky -- Could not get decent speeds when in RAID 0 (only 8MB/s download) using 2 pulled from Goflex units and formatted Seagate 7200RPM Barracuda drives. Ironically after formatting and reinstalling I am at 45MB/s download and 78MB/s upload in JBOD configuration. If I was in the 70MB/s on Read and Write I would be ecstatic as read is a bit more important for streaming

If you get it get the low power (Like Western Digi Green) 5400 RPM as it wont matter for speed.

Thent
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thently said:
From what I can see with my setup a gig connection can transfer a file at about 120 MB and a single drive can transfer at about 80 MB to one you need to look up what the max throughput of the thing is aaand looks like it is 45MB :( 
Source: Your link

Cons: Finicky -- Could not get decent speeds when in RAID 0 (only 8MB/s download) using 2 pulled from Goflex units and formatted Seagate 7200RPM Barracuda drives. Ironically after formatting and reinstalling I am at 45MB/s download and 78MB/s upload in JBOD configuration. If I was in the 70MB/s on Read and Write I would be ecstatic as read is a bit more important for streaming

If you get it get the low power (Like Western Digi Green) 5400 RPM as it wont matter for speed.

Thent


I'm not seeing the same terribly low throughput speed (45MB/s) you claim to have found. According to this benchmark on the charts section of this site, the average read throughput of the F4 is actually 100.69MB/s, with a maximum of 139.73MB/s and a minimum of 58.64MB/s. Write throughput speeds were very similar.

I'm also a little confused as to why your JBOD config would have faster transfers than a RAID 0 configuration (I was under the impression that RAID 0 had increased performance over separate HDDs?).

Is there a 2TB HDD that you would recommend for my usage? It may be worth noting that while I would like to use it for media streaming, it would really only be used to stream to a single device at a time...although on occasion I'd potentially like to stream to two separate devices simultaneously. What kind of read/write throughput would I need to stream an HD movie (usually x264, so only 7-15GB for 1080p)? I'm guessing that 100MB/s average would be more then plentiful for a compressed video stream?

Bacillus said:
The Samsung HD204UI is actually a 5400RPM drive, but for a 2TB HDD that's 7200RPM you're looking at between 2 and 3 times the price. Would the network speed bottleneck the NAS before the HDD speed does?

Another thing to note is the Samsung has a higher storage density (667GB per platter) than a lot of the other HDDs out there, but I'm unsure how much that will compensate for slower transfer speeds associated with lower RPM. I've also come across reviews/advice (although I'm unsure how true this advice is) stating that for a NAS, a 5400RPM drive is often better as its power usage is lower and the drives are quieter, and the speed of a 7200RPM drive isn't as necessary for a NAS as it would be for an OS HDD.



The network will definately slow you down more than the HDDs in your NAS.
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