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 selection. Both are on the approved list.
I've had good experience with the WD Red (2 and 3 TB, not 4-6 TB). They run cool, are acoustically quiet, and perform well, and have a 3 year warranty. I'm running 8 in various NAS, and have had no issues with any of them.
Personally I've never felt enterprise-class drives were worth the extra money. Though they are faster, they also run hotter. In practice I don't think you'll see much speed gain in a NAS, but you will certainly see higher drive temperatures and more power draw. They do have a 5 year warranty.
Thanks for your perspective! I was trying to justify in my own mind the extra expense of the enterprise class drives. I've had a ReadyNAS NV+ for over 5 years with 500GB enterprise drives and have had no failures, so that was one data point. the Second data point was the comments on various sites about the number of DOA's folks had with the 4GB Red drives and well as early failures (weeks to months).
There's no question that the Red drives are quieter and run cooler from the specs I've read.
You can't strictly speaking extrapolate their data to your readynas, but it is interesting that they feel the cost benefit ratio of enterprise class drives is not favourable. They also seem to like wd red.
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.
For home usage, I would say WD Red is the better option since the WD Se is designed for enterprise environments and for more demanding usage and may not be worth the extra money for your needs. In terms of heat and sound emissions, you can look for some comparisons onthe internet - the WD Red is more quiet and emits less heat due to the lower rpm and has higher MTBF (mean time between failures) in the majority of tests. On the other side, the WD Se has a higher workload (around 180TB per year compared to WD Red's roughly 150TB per year), higher rpm and has a longer warranty. Depending on where and what are you are using your NAS for, both drives should do the job for you. For home usage, I would suggest picking the WD Red 🙂
Hope this helps. If you have any questions, feel free to ask 🙂
