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Forum Discussion
Opinion on Drive selection for 516
Just purchased a new 516 diskless. I am looking at either the WD Red 4TB or the WD SE 4TB drives to populate the NAS. Can anyone offer an opinion based on your experience as to the pros/cons of either...
I would definitely avoid desktop drives and pick NAS drives, either WD or seagate (I've got 4*ST4000VN000 that have been on 24/7 for a year on my RN104 and show no sign of any future trouble).
First they have usually 1year additional warranty, second they draw less power and make up for the extra cost quite rapidly, third they are less noisy and heat less because they do not vibrate as much as other drives. Add to that the fact that they are tuned for NAS for head parking and RAID syncing, I just don't see the point of not spending some extra bucks that would be refunded on the electric bill anyway. So I just don't understand why blackblaze is not using them, I'm pretty sure this accounts for most failures with seagate drives. Seagate is known to have noisy drive, and noise is made by vibrations. That said the article is from January, I'm not sure if they had enough time to test NAS drives...
As for enterprise drives, I still feel they are too expensive. I'm not sure they are that useful nowadays either. There was a time when brand and model for drives were crucial. But now, there are only two manufactures and both of them do great job. So honestly, I would buy normal drives and invest the money in a spare drive, it will be cheaper in the end and you would have a drive for test purpose or backup that could actually fit the raid quickly if one drive was to have a problem. That way you could wait the replacement drive peacefully.
As said before, enterprise drives are faster, but given a normal speed of 100Mbytes/s for normal drives, with a 516 you would be at 600Mbytes/s which would be 5Gbit/s, so unless you are running it with 10Gbit/s ethernet or with at least 6 lines to the switch your network would be the bottleneck here (if not the CPU of the unit).
No matter what you choose as long as you avoid WD green drives (or seagate equivalent) you should be fine I think, but I believe NAS certified drives are actually hitting the sweet spot between price and performance.
First they have usually 1year additional warranty, second they draw less power and make up for the extra cost quite rapidly, third they are less noisy and heat less because they do not vibrate as much as other drives. Add to that the fact that they are tuned for NAS for head parking and RAID syncing, I just don't see the point of not spending some extra bucks that would be refunded on the electric bill anyway. So I just don't understand why blackblaze is not using them, I'm pretty sure this accounts for most failures with seagate drives. Seagate is known to have noisy drive, and noise is made by vibrations. That said the article is from January, I'm not sure if they had enough time to test NAS drives...
As for enterprise drives, I still feel they are too expensive. I'm not sure they are that useful nowadays either. There was a time when brand and model for drives were crucial. But now, there are only two manufactures and both of them do great job. So honestly, I would buy normal drives and invest the money in a spare drive, it will be cheaper in the end and you would have a drive for test purpose or backup that could actually fit the raid quickly if one drive was to have a problem. That way you could wait the replacement drive peacefully.
As said before, enterprise drives are faster, but given a normal speed of 100Mbytes/s for normal drives, with a 516 you would be at 600Mbytes/s which would be 5Gbit/s, so unless you are running it with 10Gbit/s ethernet or with at least 6 lines to the switch your network would be the bottleneck here (if not the CPU of the unit).
No matter what you choose as long as you avoid WD green drives (or seagate equivalent) you should be fine I think, but I believe NAS certified drives are actually hitting the sweet spot between price and performance.
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