Picking A Hard Drive For Your NAS: New Green Beats Old Speed
Comparing Temperatures And Power Consumption
To compare power consumption, we looked at the entire system, equipping our Synology DS409+ with four Samsung HD321KJ (320GB T166) or four Samsung HD103SI (1TB F2 EcoGreen) drives. Then, we measured power consumption at the wall socket while the NAS was initializing a RAID 5, when the unit was idle and once more with the hard drives powered down.
| Power Consumption DS409+ | Samsung Spinpoint T166 (HD321KJ) | Samsung Spinpoint F2 EG (HD103SI) |
|---|---|---|
| RAID 5 Rebuild (4 HDD) | 53W | 46W |
| Idle (4 HDD) | 50W | 40W |
| HDD Power Down ( 4 HDD) | 26W | 26W |
Depending on the test, the power consumption of the four 7,200 RPM drives and the four eco drives differs by between 7 and 10 watts for the entire system. Depending on how long you stick with one configuration, that can amount to somewhere between 60 and 86 KWh over the years.
Of course, that alone hardly justifies a hard drive upgrade. However, it is a factor to bear in mind when building a new NAS. The same goes for a drive upgrade to increase a NAS’ capacity. It’s actually a no-brainer, since the newer green drives aren’t only more energy efficient than the older ones, but faster as well.
Finally, the eco drives also produce less heat. Compared to their faster-spinning siblings, we found them to run between four and six degrees Celsius cooler.
Also I would like to mention from my own experience that heat can be a problem. I have a D-Link DNS323 and it cannot handle two server edition WD drives - it overheats.
- Bertus.
Other drives may experience RAID problems, burnout problems, etc.
If you want to salvage a NAS hard drive, you may be dealing with a Linux type partition.
What is the expected result? Yes, we guessed right, the new eco drive is outperforming the old performance drive in a NAS environment.
Unfortunately that comparison does not allow any conclusion whether a NAS needs a performance drive or not, it only tells us that a new eco drive is better than an old performance drive.
Sad...
otherwise NAS would think the drive is dead and give error if the drive went to sleep...
is this wrong?
the WD greens are not recommended for linux, which is used in most NAS. the greens still have a head parking issue, they have masked that issue with the latest firmwares, but not corrected it.
There are still no decent eco drives for NAS in the 2tb space.
Really, You don't have a 7200 RPM 1TB drive laying around to test?
The majority of these features that are mentioned (with the notable exception of print serving, which can be added) can be had by installing FreeNAS. I took an ancient comp, slapped a SATA PCI card in it, and had it running in 10 minutes doing everything. Including serving my xbox 360 with music!
I then proceeded to install linux instead so I could do crazier things like make the scanner accessible on any computer and of course printing too. It seems to be doing a pretty admirable job for what it is.
Far as I know, all Synology products use the same version of operation system. A scaled down, specialized version of Linux. I've had a 407e for about a year and it has worked flawlessly and is so easy to manage.
For those that don't want to spend the money on a cage, and have an old machine kicking around there is always the Freenas option (http://www.freenas.org/) which I hear works well.
As for this review... Mixing old and new drives in a comparision not designed to see the difference in old and new drives seems... Well pointless.
"If you're in the market for a storage upgrade, you have some important decisions to make. First off, there's the choice to build your own solution or buy one from an established vendor. If you choose the former path, know that there are tons of options, which we'll explore in a future story. Here, we'll be going down the latter path."
How far into the future are we talking? Obviously longer than six months. That would be an article I'd like to read.