Synology HAT5300 12TB HDD
The NAS maker starts selling its own NAS hard drives. But, should you be buying them?
Synology has been synonymous with NAS for some twenty years but it’s never made the drives that actually go inside its devices. Now, it’s selling branded, NAS-optimised hard disks and locking some of its NAS buyers into using them. What’s going on?
First up it’s worth examining the reasons for buying a dedicated NAS drive. The firmware is optimised for NAS workloads with error correction features helping avoid failures. Physical hardware vibration control is often included, they’re quieter, they’re rated to significantly higher failure tolerances, consume less power and come with longer warranties.
Such technology naturally takes many years to perfect and so Synology is using third-party drives – from Toshiba – and adding its own firmware and branding. This firmware also communicates directly with Synology’s DSM operating system and can be upgraded/ updated accordingly.
Plonking old hard drives in a NAS can generate noisy vibrations that affect performance, potentially shorten the life of every component inside the NAS and threaten data integrity. To this end, Synology has taken the nuclear option and is not just banning non-NAS drives from working in its forthcoming mid-range (and above) devices, but it will now require third-party specialist NAS-drives to be Synology certified. It’s done this, “In order to ensure consistent and reliable operation of our solutions.” This won’t be retroactively applied to existing NAS boxes but Synology adds, “Installing non-validated drives will result in Storage Pools being unable to be created [and] SSD cache cannot be created using non validated drives.” Note: if you use a Synology Expansion Unit (to add extra drives) then it will inherit whatever firmware locks the parent NAS has.
What’s rather irksome is that while Synology’s new drives are available in 8, 12 and 16TB flavours, the maximum capacity of current, certified, third-party drives is just 4TB! While we expect the likes of high-capacity Seagate NAS drives to soon be certified, only time will tell what certification requirements will do to pricing and how this will affect the market.
We’ve suffered from noisy Synology NAS boxes ourselves and using specialist drives certainly makes a difference. Installing two of Synology’s 12TB drives in a four-bay model saw annoying vibration noises caused by old predecessors transform the noise from an irritating, 40-60dB fluctuating drone (the noise equivalents of whisper-quiet and a standard conversation) to a steady 40dB when idling. The inherent pops and whirrs peaked at 50-60dB but, unless it’s constantly under load in a quiet home or office, it’s not distracting.
We ran some Windows-based tests to establish baseline performance: the formatted capacity of a 12TB drive is 10.9TB and CrystalDiskMark shows they’re capable of impressive (for a mechanical drive) 258MB/s read and write speeds. This, especially in a RAID, will easily mitigate bottlenecks in most home and SMB environments.
Toshiba’s parent 12TB drives aren’t widely available in Australia, but Seagate’s comparable Iron Wolf rival costs around $500. In the face of this Synology’s price tag of $700 is unappealing. But, for forthcoming mid-to-high-end Synology customers, it might soon be the only option.
NICK ROSS
Too expensive and too-little evidence to justify locking out similarly specified rivals