BUYING DRIVES
For yourNAS
If you opt for a barebones NAS enclosure, you still have to fill the appliance with drives. This doesn’t necessarily mean filling a four-bay unit – you can start with two drives in a RAID1 configuration and add more – but you are looking at an investment of between £100 and £1,600, with the latter price assuming your NAS can accommodate four 12TB drives.
While you can fill a NAS with standard desktop drives, we recommend resisting this approach. Desktop drives are built for the needs of desktop applications and a single user over an average working day; they aren’t designed for 24/7 activity with multiple users and workloads involving many simultaneous read/ write operations. Specialist NAS drives are optimised for these conditions and workloads, prioritise resilience over raw throughput and have features such as vibration sensors and vibration dampening that are designed to keep the drive working for years.
They also have advanced power management to minimise consumption while running all day and may, like the IronWolf Health Management features in Seagate NAS drives, hook into the management consoles of popular NAS OSes. These can give early warning of problems and allow you to prevent data losses. You don’t get this stuff in desktop drives.
Drill down into the specs and you’ll discover that where, say, a Western Digital Black desktop drive is designed to handle 300,000 load/ unload cycles in its lifetime, a Western Digital Red desktop drive will handle 600,000. The three most widely available NAS drives – the WD Red, Seagate IronWolf and Toshiba N300 – promise one million hours mean time between failure (MTBF) and workloads of 180TB/year.
Even if you’re filling your NAS on the cheap, avoid the smallest, cheapest 1TB drives. Not only do you run the risk of running out of space too soon, but they tend to come with small 16MB caches instead of the 64MB caches found on the 2GB and upwards drives.
Does your choice of drive make a big difference in performance? Running CrystalDiskMark and times tests on the Synology DS918+, we found no significant speed differences between a pair of 2TB Seagate Ironwolf drives and a pair of 6TB WD Red Pro drives, although distinctions may emerge under more stressful multi-user workloads. In a home or small business NAS, Ethernet and CPU performance are more likely to cause bottlenecks than your choice of hard disk. It’s all about reliability.