More Hard Drives or BIGGER Hard Drives - Which is Better?

hello and before we start today's video a quick disclaimer straight off the bat this video is going to be about whether you should go for bigger drives or you should go for more Drive should you go for 20 TBS or get yourself some fours and sixes and get a big old raid on the go there but before we before we highlighting the whole of today's video is going to be me on screen working on screen recordings this can be a lot easier to show you all the information to do with Drive pricing and drive capacity and rates and stuff if I do it on screen so I just didn't want you guys to think it was a cop out so I just sat there on my bed at home doing this video I'm definitely doing it here in the studio and in today's video I'm going to give you five good reasons why you should go for bigger drives and five good reasons why you should be going for lots of smaller drives there let's start that intro and get ourselves on that screen foreign [Music] of comparing big high capacity drives versus lots of smaller drives it's worth bearing a few things in mind for today's video first and foremost we are going to be using synology's own raid calculator several times in this video I'll try and link to it in the description but it should hopefully give you some idea about some of the mathematics that are involved in a lot of the ray configurations the next thing is on the right hand side of the screen there I've got the prices for Seagate ironwolf standard class so not pro drives here on the right hand side from 1tb to 18 TB and I've gone WD Red Pro from 4tb to 22 TB why I've gone for normal um Iron Wolf and Pro Series WD red will make sense later on in the video but we're going to need these calculations here on the right hand side A lot of times throughout this video to help you understand a lot of the points to a more finer degree and all of these are prices right now at the time of recording here on the 5th of January 2022 on Amazon there for all of that pricing structure so obviously if you're watching this in a few future those prices might be all over the shop and finally while we're going through this it's worth highlighting spend a lot of time figuring out where in this screen I was going to be because I'm recording this on OBS and I decided at the top left because I'm going to be using the full screen throughout this video so I apologize if occasionally my big old face here at the top on the screen is covering something there on that I'm trying to show you there so I apologize in advance so my first big point something I've talked about in other videos before but I think it's hugely overlooked it's actually the Savings in price that can be made when you go for more drives versus singular larger drives now to put that into perspective let's say first and foremost I'm gonna have to glance up my notes from time to time that you want to have 12 terabytes of storage let's say in your Nas it doesn't have to be an eight by but say you want 12 TB of storage you get your 12 TB there but bear in mind of course you've got to factor in your raid as well so if we go for a couple of twelves and we all talk a little bit more about that later on if you want to make sure that you've got both capacity and redundancy and you go for big drives you can see there that a couple of 12 TB drives in there factoring in an shr or a raid 1 for example will result in 12 TB of storage if you had to buy two 12 TB drives there so 12 TB if you go for the Seagate ironwolf it's 258 dollars so two drives there that's 500 and um 16 there but another way that you can achieve 12 TB if we get rid of these drives is to go for three 6tb drives so if you go for 360b drives you still get your 12 TB this time in a raid 5 configuration and the 6db is 158 dollars there so that would result in around about 400 and um um 470 uh 474 maybe my mat is off there by about ten dollars but ultimately you are spending less money per terabyte by going for more drives now you might think that's a fluke but in a lot of cases not all I'd say 60 or 70 of cases this logic runs true another example would be to go for say 18 TB drives so if you go for the 18 TB drives there and again they are 386 dollars currently on Seagate a couple of those to make sure you've got your range of safety net there you've got 18 TB there and you've spent you know getting close to 657 hundred dollars zero there about bear in mind again that these do not include shipping and do not include tax this pricing so again prices will be different around the world and also your local tax and shipping will apply so again that is to achieve 18 TB there but another way you can achieve 18 terabytes of storage is if you want to again use six TB so if you go for four six DB drives you've got your 18 TB there and 6 DB again was 158 so again you are spending a little over I think it's 632 I believe earn dollars there so again it's not a tremendous saving for you are saving money when you go for more drives over fewer larger hard drives there and again you can test that out and it's not always true but generally whenever you find using 4 or 6tb multipliers you find that the more smaller drives end up costing you less overall now it's all fair and well us talking about the money you'll save when you go for those individual drives but we have we can't ignore the fact that if you're going to be using more hard drives you're going to need a Nas with more Bays to put it in and as is with more Bays cost more money during this calculator we're looking at an um you know this thing here which I just realized has an unusual number of Bays there is no Synology I know of that's got that many bays in desktop in that shape but if you go for larger capacity drives so choosing a 20 TB Drive rather than a 10 TB drive you can get a smaller Nas rather than going for an outer lots of bass to put that into perspective this is the qnap ts264 the two Bay of the qnap 64 series Nas so you could put a couple of drives inside there and if you went for the two 20 or 10 TB drives it yes you're going to spend more money on the drives but as you can see here this Nas is 413 nine dollars if you go for the four bay version It's 573 dollars so going for the four by Nas is going to cost you more money it's also worth highlighting as well that the smaller Nas is you tend to find that they arrive with more memory these days by default and this is to do with memory shortages it's nothing to do with Traditional Values a hard drive specification values and Nas is just because of memory shortages and Chip shortages at the moment we're seeing a lot of two by Nazis that would have originally had two or four gig of memory being sold by default with eight gig modules there because of the shortages and the result is they can't force people to spend more money so you're seeing a lot of two values that normally should have two or four gig arriving with eight gig or sometimes even 16 gig for noticeably less than if you bought the upgrade on its own the result is that yes you're going to spend more if you buy two bigger drives rather than four or more smaller drives but you're saving money on the now so it actually can balance out and in some cases you actually save more money and get better value on a smaller Nas at the time of recording at least than it would be going for a bigger nasdair like this one which has got four gig of memory and costs more money so again where you're saving your money it's not cut and dry between the big and the small drives when you factor in the rest of the hardware architecture yes this is an obvious one but it is often said the problem with larger drives is all those eggs in one basket let's go back to our uh um calculator here let's say again let's go back to that original um one earlier on where we went for two 12 TB drives inside there we've got a couple of 12 TBS we've got our 12 DB of storage and we've got our one disc of redundancy but we're putting a lot of eggs in one basket there so even if we go for a single Drive the problem is still going to be that if we go for a bigger Drive let's say we cancel that out get rid of those and this time go for the 18 or even if you went towards 20 and 22 TB drives currently because you're putting all your eggs in one basket you're kind of forced to buy two drives because if you are buying a big drive because you plan on having a lot of storage capacity then that data must be quite important if you're going to be spending a lot of money so one one big Drive almost immediately necessitate a second one there and having all your eggs in one basket is forcing you to either have to double bubble your spending or you're now in a position where you're putting too much of your important data in one single drive there so do bear that in mind I know it's right and I know it's repeated often but there's no avoiding that the whole too many eggs in one basket philosophy is a very painful hurdle of larger hard drives yes continuing down that road it's not all cut and dry when it comes down to that point of failure because when the more hard drives you use you're actually expanding your point of failure and even though putting all your eggs in my basket with a big Drive didn't sound great the more hard drives you have the more potential point of value you have and if you have more than if you have significantly more drives then you have to start moving towards raid six and other Ray configurations even triple parity rates where you need to have redundancy levels that can keep up with multiple drives now what I mean by that is let's go for example if we go if we went for two 10 TB drives Okay so we've got two 10 TB drives now inside we've got our 10 TB of storage and 10 TB of redundancy now let's see if we win low low low and we decided to try to hit that number with two TB drives that were on the market because you do see tremendous savings around you you would have to get six two TB drives in order to have that one drive of redundancy and still have that 10tb but now you have spread out the point of failure and when you do buy bulk hard drives from any vendor from an eShop directly from the brand they don't go up to a shelf and pipe all of these drives from different boxes they pick them all from the same case of 20 or 24 or 30 TB cases now if there is a fault in a hard drive due to a manufacturing error if there's a fault due to materials or poor mechanical workmanship during the mass production process there's every possibility that it isn't just affecting that one drive it could have affected the batch hence the terms run around a bad batch of drives if you go to the back play stats you do hear that so the result is that if you do have multiple drives you will open the door to multiple points of failure and that's why you're then forced to have to consider maybe a right six so with a raid six now we're going to have to increase our drives and add another 2tb drive to maintain that within that rate six environment so by having multiple drives although you're not putting all your eggs in one basket you are then opening the door to multiple points of failure this point is a little bit more nebulous but smaller hard drives because they've been around in the market a lot longer you tend to find a lot more special offers on them bigger hard drives being a lot newer there are fewer in the markets they've just been produced the result is that larger hard drives very rarely get the same level of offers and savings that you see on smaller hard drives there so with the Organo websites like Newegg that are more aggregate in their offers or you go to things like Amazon where you can look at a drive and then decide by looking on the right side of the screen that you want to view the offers that are available the result is let's go for say a four TB drive there that you can find out different offers that are in the market for smaller hard drives you generally find deals during Black Friday Prime day a lot more uh common on the smaller capacities out there than you do find on the bigger ones which means if you are going to go to the multi-drive route that opens the door to even more savings being possible when compared we're going to fewer but larger hard drives overall again it's another slightly nebulous point but one that I think is starting to become a little bit more um you know public aware is energy consumption now hard drives are not the greediest in terms of power consumption but it's worth highlighting that the bigger Nas you go for because you've got more drives the more energy it's going to consume and therefore much more it's going to cost you in power normally you find the bigger the nas the bigger the PSU that's inside obviously that is uh like it's like a bandwidth thing it doesn't guarantee that you can use that maximum amount of power but you find more aggressive CPUs and more aggressive cooling systems and therefore large analysis to accommodate more drives use more power but it also extends to the drives themselves if we go into uh WD red spreadsheet let's find it somewhere on here we can see that whether you're looking at 22 DB drives or scaling down to the lower capacities power usage 1.7 1.8 1.85 if we make our way down to the lower capacities the power is still 1.7 1.8 and the result is that if you go for fewer larger hard drives you're actually using less power up yes it's very small because we're talking about smaller drives but that combined with the impact of a larger ride array to utilize more drives results in uh using lots more smaller hard drives consuming a little bit more power which you know can add up to whether it's for money reasons or energy conscious regions reasons it's worth highlighting the more drives equals more power use another thing that often gets overlooked is about performance both internally and externally and if you use more drives it actually increases your performance quite substantially again let me explain we're not going to worry too much about capacity in this example but let's go for four TB drives now if we had a couple of four TB drives in here we're going to ignore capacity for a bit we're going to focus just on those when you are reading and writing to the drives in the right raid configuration such as the Raid 0 you can have it so that when you're reading and writing you are writing and reading from two disks simultaneously depending on the raid configuration again raid one with mirror disks and Ray zero with combining them together so again there's benefits either side of the Seesaw but if you've only got two drives there you are accessing two drives at once with all of them speeding spinning together now if you go for a larger configuration a larger rate such as a raid 5 or a Radix yes the system does need to calculate the power 30 day today in the background in order to maintain redundancy but modern generation analysis have really improved upon those calculations and the impact on the CPU and resources resulting in much lower resource hit when calculating the rate the result is that the more drives you have the faster the performance and those of you that have got modest 4X devices like the ds923 Plus or the ts-464 which have pcie upgrades to allow you to add a 10 gpe connection there on the ring I don't know how well that's appearing they're on screen for you the result is that having those extra drives means that you can fully saturate 10 gpe whereas if you only had two drives inside with only two drives being read and written to so if you went for the same series Nas which again has that pcre upgrade slot as well the result is going to be that you won't be able to hit the same height so again a much overlooked feature of multiple drives is just higher read and write performance as more drives are being accessed at any given time let's talk about noise that is right because there's actually kind of a quibble and a dig to be made against both big drives and multiple drives when it comes to the old eardrums now let's start off with whether you've got multiple drives if you are going to have multiple drives so if we go ahead and slam in uh some 8tb drives here if we slammed in five ATB drives in a Firebase like the DX uh DS 5 15 22 plus I can say right now that the more drives you use the more ambient noise is going to be generated as multiple drives with let's go for the disc there as they've all got platters that are spinning there in the background they've all got the little r on the actuator dancing between each of the platens there the result is that those larger conglomeration of droids is going to make more noise indeed the larger the nas you have to occupy the more drives the more fans that are on there the more active coolant as the work in conjunction with the passive Cooling and just generally the minute you go bigger than about four or five Bays they all are metal these Nazis so they all start to make a little bit more ambient noise as they work with it the hum the were and the clicks of the drives and the general vibration there so more drives can equal more noise however at the same time if we remove all of our ATB drives it's also worth highlighting that if you went ahead and installed a couple of 18 TB drives inside larger Enterprise grade drives actually make more noise now I've talked about this on my channel more and more and I feel it's a fact that is still not really known as much as it should be I hate seagulls um it is that larger capacity drives in Enterprise or Pro Series States they've got larger cash they've got more platters they've started using helium so therefore they can make the platters thinner and get more inside to spin up slow down the movement of the actuator and the arms even Enterprise grade drives that start to arrive with dual actuators or triple stage action where the actual mechanics of the arm are actually moved up and down as it has to move around the disc a lot more efficiently the result is that these drives make more noise in operation yes you'll have fewer drives and therefore the combined multiplying factor of noise will be reduced but it that hum were vibration noise is going to be replaced with a different kind of noise with fewer larger drives if you definitely if you exceed eight or ten TB the result is these drives make a lot more clicks they make a lot more spin noise so what you get instead of vibration and something that's being Amplified through the NASA chassis itself you get drives that sound like they're broken they're not but they sound by traditional senses like they are do look at my videos on NAS drive noise look at any Drive above 10tb or any pro or Enterprise grade tier that's your exos that's your Ultra star even synology's own hard drives which are built on Enterprise grade hard drives they are Enterprise grade and sound like it so again it all they're both going to be noisy sets if you have lots of drives or you have two big drives and the ultimate answer is to go for fewer smaller drives but that's not really helping anyone how is it now this again is slightly nebulous but one that is becoming truer and truer with every passing year and we're finding more and more because of the construction of enterprise-grade hard drives and the work that goes into them and the fact that it's very hard to make a non-enterprise drive um you know in the way it's constructed um without you know going higher capacity and Enterprise construction the result is that more and more brands are only releasing larger capacities in Pro that's why on the right hand side of the screen I was sure to include standard Seagate and WD Red Pro the reason being that with WD red if you want to go a standard class drive you can only go up to 14 TB if you want to exceed 14 TB you have to go pro so when you go pro it act you then accessing the larger capacities but unfortunately Pro Series drives are noisier they're more more power consuming and not by a huge degree but they are noticeable and more expensive overall now there are deals out there with non-pro drives but there's still no avoiding that Pro Series drives if you want to go for a bigger capacity you're kind of having your arms tied behind your back in some cases that you've got a GoPro now this is not a universal rule if you head over to Seagate for example Seagate still to this day are still producing non-pro large-scale drives so if we make our way into the Seagate listings there for non-pro so let's go for a standard class there and we can look on Amazon for example and go right the way down to if we click along we can actually I believe get to 14 16 there might even be bigger drives now in the non-pro series this is not being very responsive at all um but right now you can go ahead and find non-pro Seagate drives for a larger capacity so for example in the non-pro States you can even get up to 18tb non-pro this is something they've been slowly whittling down and there are fewer non-pro larger capacity drives but if you look at Toshiba you look at WD and Seagate other ranges and you look at things like Barracuda you do find that more and more we're seeing that larger capacity drives are being locked to Enterprise and pro tiers because of their construction simply being not possible to make them non-pro so do bear that in mind if you're looking at bigger drives to factor in that cost of electricity and the noise that we've already discussed finally this much like our Point earlier on about noise is going to kind of impact on you and how you see buying modern technology because it should also be said that if you go for smaller capacity drives you're kind of missing out on some of the newer um technology and newer innovations that are going into storage that are improving performance stability and just overall capacity if you go for larger drives and we are talking 18tb and above at least predominantly now and certainly in the next year or two when we go towards 26 TB and even 30 TB newer generation drives are arriving with technology such as optinand on the WD platform opting out for those aren't aware is on their disks they have a small area of flash storage I believe 64 gig and that area of storage is then used to house data for the drive itself metadata index data and more that isn't taken away from the other platters and allows the platters to be Fuller by the extra degree and on those 10 platters 2.2 TB each larger capacity that's something that's just not available under 18 or 20 TB sun goes for some of the recording technologies that are coming out such as hamr heat assisted magnetic recording and eamr energy assisted magnetic recording being utilized on drives and when we go towards Seagate again we look at Mach 2 giving us larger capacities and double performance in the majority of cases all of these Innovations are not available on the smaller drives there it is one of the reasons why the newer drives are a bit pricier because they've got to get an Roi on that RND but still nonetheless you're going to be missing out on those Innovations if you go for the smaller drives however before you write it in the comments Graham Malcolm or whatever your name is you're right there is a school of thought that the last thing you want to do is jump on new technology until it's had a decent amount of field test thing let the other mugs let there let them lose their Data before you jump on board that's right there is a seesaw here where there is the idea that you might be missing out on this Tech but there's also the counter argument that you didn't want to be there at the front line anyway you wanted the technology to have a few years in the spinner to see and irk itself out work out the bugs before you put you and your precious data on there there is an argument either side there but ultimately that is it this has been is it better to buy bigger drives or more drives is there a point I've missed is there something you disagree with is there enough points that I've missed to make a follow-up to this video I've really enjoyed making this video and this is one that I've wanted to make for about a year or so thank you so much for watching if you did enjoy this video hopefully there will be a link to the written guide below which I will update as more points arrive other than that click like if you've enjoyed the video it really helps me out subscribe if you want to learn more if you need free advice use the free advice section over on now's comparing below it's the big blue button on the right hand side of Nas compare's website use the free community Forum asking as Compares with me my colleague Eddie and the rest of the nas Community who will answer your questions and if you found this video helpful and you are going to buy from Amazon anyway please go in the description and use the links to Amazon to take you there it won't cost you anything extra and anything and I really do mean anything that you buy will result in a kickback coming to NAS Compares or it's just me and Eddie running this and it will allow us to keep doing what we do thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 41,983

Keywords: BIG HARD DRIVES VS MORE HARD DRIVES, HARD DRIVE NOISE, HDD COST, HDD ELECTRICITY USE, HDD POWER USE, LARGE CAPACITY HARD DRIVES VS MORE DRIVES, NAS HARD DRIVES, NAS HDD NOISE, NAS HDDS, PRICE OF HARD DRIVES, PRICE OF HDDS, PRICE PER TERABYTE, RAID 0 SPEED, RAID 0 VS RAID 1, RAID 0 VS RAID 5, RAID 1 SPEED, RAID 1 VS RAID 10, RAID 1 VS RAID 5, RAID 10 SPEED, RAID 5 SPEED, RAID 5 VS RAID 10, RAID 6 SPEED, RAID 6 VS RAID 5, SEAGATE VS WD, SMALL HDDS, WD VS SEAGATE

Id: SUXOiNRfD0w

Length: 26min 25sec (1585 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 13 2023