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Kimius's avatar
Kimius
Aspirant
Jul 02, 2011

Which drives to get for new ReadyNas?

So I need a new NAS. This is going to be expensive...

TL:DR at bottom of post

A bit of background info first. I have an NVX Business edition that I've had for a little over 2 years. I got it with 2 1tb drives because that was the only bundle available at the time, and immediately replaced them with 4 1,5tb Seagate drives off the HCL. This unit has been behaving a little strange from day 1, with the unit periodically deciding to hang during startup, before even showing any lights beyond the blue power button. Hard shutdown would then be required to fix that, and the next power-on works fine. This happens maybe once every month or so, and has done so since I got the unit.

I called Netgear support once to get some help with it but was basically ignored, with the only advice being to pull all the drives, put the original drives back in, doing a factory reset and seeing if that would help, which would take me weeks to test. Being unable to use the unit or access my data for weeks on end is not acceptable, so that idea went out the window. I'm guessing the unit is outside warranty now, so that means new unit to fix the problem, but it's rare enough that I've decided to just live with it.

However, recently I learned that the unit is having more problems. For a few weeks now, when I copy files to the unit it will sometimes hang for several minutes, with nothing being accessible. Not even the web admin pages respond. Usually I need to reboot the unit to fix it, or wait upwards of 5 minutes. I originally thought the problem was with my pc, but I just noticed that the drive activity light goes berserk whenever the unit hangs. SMART status says the drives are fine, firmware upgrade did nothing either, so I'm guessing it's the motherboard that's having problems.

At this point I cannot trust the unit anymore. I've been burned by data loss often enough that I won't trust anything that works less than flawlessly. I am working on backing up all my data off the NVX to an NV+ that I've had for many years without problems. So now I need a new NAS to replace the unstable NVX.

Despite my bad experience with Netgear support, I still like them enough that I will stick with them for at least one more purchase. Stability issues aside, the NVX was great. I've decided to get another NV+ though, simply because it's cheaper and, in my experience at least, more reliable. performance doesn't matter too much since these units will eventually become offsite backup for a custom built NAS with a ton of drives. I might be persuaded to get an ultra 4 just to check it out, but I don't really see the point.




So here is my problem. I need to upgrade to 2tb drives for both the new unit and the old NV+, and I am stuggling with choosing which drives to go for. The HCL shows 6 drives to choose from. The cheapest three are not viable, with the following reasoning:

Seagate Barracuda LP - ST32000542AS: not available anymore.
WD Caviar Green - WD20EARS: can't guarantee that I will get the right revision.
Seagate Barracuda LP - ST2000DL003: massive problems with firmware, avoiding like the plague.

That leaves me with 3 choices, the Hitachi Deskstar, the Seagate Barracuda XT or the Hitachi Ultrastar. I'm leaning towards the Ultrastar, because it's the only actual enterprise raid disk of the three and should be much more reliable, but it's really expensive. The other ones are rated for "desktop RAID", but that's just RAID 0 or 1, if I've understood correctly.


So what should I go for? I can afford to get any of them, but because I need to upgrade my old NV+ and the new NAS i'm getting at the same time, that makes 8 drives. With the prices on the Ultrastar being so high, it's hard to justify. Do I really need enterprise RAID disks, or will the desktop RAID disks be enough?



TL:DR

Which of these 3 drives should I go for with an NV+?

Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 2 TB
Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 2 TB
Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB

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