Disk Reliability Trade-Offs?

One, work with the HCL
Two If you can stand the price shock, go with enterprise drives
Three I stay away from the super high capacity drives until they have been around and have developed some real world reliability statistics.
4-6gb drives are too big for me to try.
That being said, I went with WD Red 2gb drives. They on the HCL, have a decent rep, Not too expensive. Buy an extra as an on hand spare.
I am running RAID 6
In my NV+ I ran enterprise class 1tb drives. over 5 years had no failures.
Back up your NAS, all drives fail.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-dri ... mber-2014/


As well as your offsite backups, keep an onsite backup, it makes disk unreliability slightly less of a concern.

Personally I haven't seen much evidence that enterprise drives are more reliable than consumer drives, though of course they are marketed as such.

I also haven't seen much evidence that higher density drives are more prone to failure. Tolerances of course are tighter with higher density, but that doesn't necessarily mean higher failure rates.

I've had good luck with the WDC Reds (and with WDC in general). I've had a lot more failures with Seagate, and over time have replaced failed Seagates with WDC.

I agree on the need for backup. The simplest way to back up a NAS is to another NAS. For instance, add an RN104 to the mix. RN104+RN314 with NAS drives would be more robust then RN314 with enterprise drives. The RN104 could use jbod, so it would only need two disks in your configuration.

Also, I am wondering why you are going with RAID-10 and not RAID-6?

IMHO these days products get rushed to market, early adopters are the new beta testers.
Perhaps it is just because I don't try to download the webz that recently announced 5 or 6tb drives are not that attractive yet.
If I have that amount of data I think I would distribute it across several devices rather than concentrate it on a couple of drives.

markwoll wrote:
...If I have that amount of data I think I would distribute it across several devices rather than concentrate it on a couple of drives.

I understand that is your preference (and probably shared by others). I'm just pointing out that I haven't seen any data that larger capacity drives fail more frequently than smaller ones. If someone has a reference that discusses this (either way) it would be useful to see it.

Here are a few suggestions :

1- place different orders to different retailers to be sure to have disks from several batches (you could even mix brands and models)
2- order one spare disk to replace a failing drive within minutes
3- take NAS models, less vibrations should improve their lifetime (and they are tested to run 24/7)
4- consider SSD, no mechanical part means less chances of failure I guess (haven't seen any real study on it though)
5- have several updated and tested backups. There are services like blackblaze or crashplan if you want to go cloud, otherwise have a NAS stored in a safe location a few kilometers away, disks copies in a bank safe...
6- avoid large volumes, they take more time to rebuild
7- consider raid 6
8- you of course want HCL drives

Yes if a disk runs faster and consume more electricity it will heat more. Saying that it would fail more often, I'm not sure of that. The only related thing I've seen is a google study that is quite dated...