Seagate Ironwolf Pro vs WD Red Pro vs Synology HAT5300 Hard Drives - Which Should You Buy?

hello and welcome back to my video which i'd like to call how long before me and my mad arms knock one of these very expensive hard drives over i'm just getting this out of the way right now that if in the course of this video i end up knocking one of these over by accident i'm gonna leave it in i'm not even gonna cut it out it's me the fall that kicks over one of these drives so when that happens do cheer me in the comments i'll put a link to that in the description for other people to see but otherwise let's crack on [Music] hello and that's right today we're going to be comparing three kinds of hard drive right now if you're looking at some of the larger capacity solutions out there in the market from synology from qnap and from others or simply building your own nas using something like true now's chances are that when you do set things up first on day one you want it to last and one of the things you want to last is your sheer capacity you over spec you look at how much date you've got how much you're going to expect for in the years to come and you want to make sure you've got enough now all three of the brands here on the table are popular nas drives they are used in different now systems some slightly more centered on one brand than others of course and in today's video i'm going to be going through their good points their bad points their virtues what i like what i don't and ultimately help you decide miss them um which one is best for your setup we will be breaking this down into the following ways capacity pricing hardware specifications universal selling point usps and noise because the noise is going to be a the amount of noise these make is actually going to be a very big factor once you go to the larger capacities but i'm getting a little bit ahead of myself obviously everything we talk about is chapterized if you look in the description and the line bar on the bottom of youtube you can skip ahead to what's most important to you but let me introduce our contestants here on my left presumably all right i can't remember how this comes out on the edit we have the synology h80 5300 this is their own branded drives now these are actually toshiba mg0607 and o8 drives now i'm not going to talk too much about the hardware specs because we'll touch on those later on but this is synology's own range of hard drives these are drives that are specifically designed for their systems there's nothing stopping you really utilizing them in that is from other brands but it would be very very foolish for reasons that i'll talk about later on but this is their own range of drives next up we've got the wd red series now wd red series uh for the sake of this video we are talking about the pro series predominantly in this we're not talking about plus or standard we're not talking about gold or ultra star we're talking about the wd red pro series from western digital again they're nas talent tailored series of drives for the more enterprise system with eight or more drives inside it's been around now for many many years they are geared in a much higher gear both in terms of performance and endurance than traditional wd red drives and they're available in large capacities as well now seagate again wd seagate seagate wd and a battle as old as time itself they have their own range of professional uh large-scale capacity nas hard drives the iron wolf pro series from seagate again they have their own universal selling points their own ticks and dots which we'll talk about later on but these three are today's drives of choice let's crack straight on capacity when it comes down to it if you're already looking at drives like these three capacity was very much on your buy list yes all three of them are actually available in smaller capacities but a lot of the time those smaller capacities are there to fill much larger systems with multiple drives at once bottom line when you are already looking at the pro series capacity is one of those buying factors for you whether it's price or not now between the three of them the in terms of available capacities there is a very clear not first place and that synology is there synology drives currently are available in 4 tb 8 tb 12 tb and 16 tb now those are still four pretty standard class capacities there they only recently introduced the four tb there which for me was really surprising it was one of my early complaints about the series that they only arrived in no 8 12 and 16 tb when everyone knows that the sweet spot when it comes to drives in a nas is generally the 4 to 60 b mark in terms of price versus the amount of capacity you get for how much people generally generate but still those are some big gaps in between there one two 6 tb 14 tb and of course the bigger capacities as you go higher when you hit towards you know 18 and 20 tbs have been recently released by some brands who are some brands well of course it's cg and wd they've always kind of been at the front of that and they have again available all of the capacities from 2tb to 20 tb in their pro series for both ranges now i mentioned earlier on that the synology series there also arrives a arise i should say uh originally as toshiba mg series why is that important because toshiba unveiled recently the mg09 series i believe might be the la and that was an 18 tb drive and toshiba's roadmap has already shown that 20 tb drives are arriving anytime now which means i do not give it long before the enterprise mg drives from toshiba will arrive with that synology firmware and the badging there so synology drives arrive in greater capacities but still the fact that a lot of the middling capacities in between which allows buyers to scale the amount of storage that they want to go for and provision their budget against the internal hardware when they're buying a full complete nas solution is something that is a miss on this they've clearly gone for those drive capacities for a reason but for me it's they've picked those four they've gone we can only have a certain number of skus or early doors and they pick those knowing full well that although the other ones may not be as popular they still have a following and when you're looking at synology solutions in 2022 that arrive such as the 12 by ds242 plus and rack mounts they're arriving with 12 16 and 24 and indeed that 60 base solution that we've already talked about the hd 6500 not having that range of capacities is a bit of a bummer for some yes those are good capacities for let's say in terms of capacity it's an absolute no-brainer that it's a joint first place there for wd and seagate for their respective red pro and iron wolf pro series next up let's talk about pricing because for all of our talk about capacity most of these drives can be broken down into a price per terabyte kind of deal there now what i mean by price per terabyte is because these drives in in their respective versions right now we're only going to look at the pro series from the iwolf and red series and the hat series we're not looking at the has sas based drive just that when we look at these three drives and their pricing you generally find that the price per terabyte is pretty consistent regardless of the capacity you're going for even the newest releases despite their newness generally still follow within about one to two dollars pounds or euros the same price per terabyte throughout the capacities there was a blip a little while ago with chia that kind of ruined that for a little while but things seem to have recentered there in the background now in order to calculate the price per terabyte on these three series what i've done is look at the largest capacity available from each which is generally still even by a little margin the most expensive and divided that by the number of terabytes that you've got on offer so we've not looked at the tooth or whatever capacities we've looked at the 16 tb and the respective 20 tbs of these brands here and then what we've done is looked at three retailers that list these drives in their respective regions so in terms of the us i looked at new egg and when it came to the h8 5300 it worked out 39 per terabyte and when it came to the uk i looked at scan and that worked out 38 pounds per terabyte and with amazon with amazon germany i looked at their pricing and there's a little higher at 46 euros per terabyte in germany now how did that calculate across the board with the same retailers well unsurprisingly these two were markedly cheaper not hugely in some cases but definitely lower in price and indeed things got lower in price and therefore better value per terabyte as we move in this direction i'm sure it's on screen but just in case it isn't when it came to the wd red pro it was 26.31 31 pounds 90 and 38 euros 90 respectively for their individual regions and there at the lowest price in every single consistent tier was the seagate iron wolf pro at 25 45 27 pounds 20 and 31 euros 45 so in terms of pricing when it came to per terabyte of those retailers and others that i looked at including ccl and box in the uk as well as amazon in different regions ultimately it came down to the pricing was the best there on the seagate ironwolf pro with a market inc marked increase on the sonology drives perhaps trading on their uniqueness within the nas industry and within technology systems and that kind of proprietary path forward with a lot of higher tier buyers but still we can't ignore the saving there on the seagate next up let's talk about the hardware and the performance because when it comes down to it and i'm sure you're already aware when you've been looking at spec sheets on my other videos where we've actually delved into the performance of these drives there's actually very small margins of difference in just terms of performance or even sustained port performance in shorter spans plus they've all got their own kind of we do this that and the other this is why our drive is the best for nas so before we go down the road of comparing them i think it's important to highlight before we get to the hardware some things they've got in common just so we can all agree that we have addressed that first and foremost all of them have got vibration sensors temperature sensors and uh general cash and rv sensors built into them in one shape or form they've all got proprietary methods in the same way they've all gone for proprietary compression techniques to fit the data onto the platters they've all got that on there so regardless of which one you get you're going to get a drive that can self-regulate in the more enduring and heavy performing areas of say a large rack mount i mentioned the platters they all have nine platters inside the amount of on each platter will differ because of the overall capacity such as the 20 tbw red there being 2.2 tb per platter but still nonetheless at their largest capacity they're all nine platters there they're all using uh cmr conventional magnetic recording or pmr if you want to be old-school um and they all have a performance benchmark of around 260 to even as high as 285 megabytes per second now they've all reported slightly different but when we've done our testing it's been a pretty consistent with a margin of error of about eight to ten megs difference between them so to be frank i'm not going to say any one of these drives is high performing or give them some sort of massive power on the back for being six megabytes faster in testing we're not going to do that they've all got five years of warranty which is good and they've all effectively got a drive that is based around high performance in an enterprise level environment they can all be used in small and as is but they'd be a tremendous waste of their talents and another reason that we'll get on later on at the end of the video but when we dig a little deeper at some of the more traditional hardware specs um they're all 7200 rpm in terms of onboard cash um the synology and the wd have both got 512 megabytes that's half a gig of cash on board with the seagate largest capacity at 256. um on top of that in terms of their workload the wd and the cd pro series have got a 300 terabytes uh annual workload rating whereas the synology more enduring at 550 terabytes workload annually so again nearly double the potential enduring workload on the synology drive per year which is definitely a dick for me on top of that they've all got um 600 000 load unload cycles so that's power on power off rated four that's absolutely fine but another area of distinction between them is to do with that mean time between failure a stat i don't really like to harp on about but some people's do still hold it in some kind of credence and between the three of them um the synology by a country mile it's mean time between fallout 2.5 million is you know unquestionably the highest there with 1 million rated on the wd red pro and 1.2 million rated on that seagate iron wolf pro there so i think in terms of overall hardware architecture the see i'm sorry the synology http 5300 country mile again it's when it comes down to the hardware you are getting a better drive and if you looked at the 16 tb of all of these side by side which is something we're not doing because we're looking at each range generally overall i think it would be argued that that drive there certainly is the better hardware you're getting right now next up let's talk about universal selling points i mentioned earlier on i wasn't really going to touch on a lot of the brand rhetoric and slogans what i'm going to try and focus on is just the things that i think end users will actually take advantage of things that end users will care about that is unique to each of these drives if we start with the synology the predominant advantage of the synology drive has always been that if you're using a synology drive in a synology system you're using a drive and it's firmware that is being designed in you know to be working with the very systems it's going in the firmware on other brands as good as it's going to be in general now settings it will never really be parallel to the software that it's going to be utilized within it needs to be designed within a multitude of different service systems ago when it comes to the synology system working within synology nazis i'm sorry the synology driving synology nas is that firmware can be very very specific about its hot points and how the system that it's in is going to interact with it and i mentioned that firmware because not only is it on board but there are firmware updates much like firmware updates for synology sorry antigua and wd drives but unlike those you can update the firmware on a synology hard drive from within the synology system without powering the system down something that you just simply can't do with third-party drives with these you will need to disassociate them from the pool you will need to then use a docking station and update the firmware independently or if you're running a private server or a trueness server there are ways around that but still nonetheless firmware upgrades are much more individual more time consuming a lot more hassle than they are on the synology system having that all built in another universal buying and selling point for this is that when you're looking at the synology drives you're clearly buying it for a synology system and therefore a lot of retailers will allow you to get better bulk purchasing whether you're going to be going for the something known as deal registration when a retailer are working with a business will contact the brand themselves as a if you're buying a certain quantity or value a product give you a little bit of a discount there or that's typically retailers if you buy in bulk will give you a lovely business discount there something that i think these drives because they're being bought with the synology system offer in a way that these drives can't to the same degree now what are the downsides you can't use it with a non-technology system i say khan course you can i could slam that inside a qnap if i wanted to but it would be pointless one it would largely make the warranty pointless these drives and their support are geared around them you being utilized in sonology systems and if you use them outside of the supported list of ways it can be used if you hit a fault it then comes down to you or synology proving that the fault wasn't caused by the drive in a non-synology system and i'm aware they are sata drives they are toshiba drives we are still talking about standard sata protocol but it's going to be still potential hurdles in your support or warranty claim and support ticket synology state that support tickets have gone um a registered support tickets have gone down with the release of their new drives and again how much i want to believe that there's always going to be the cynic in me that goes well of course they're going to be synology are telling me that there's been support tickets down on their latest drives that have only been compatible um limited uh compatibility on their most recent releases and therefore this we don't have enough long-term data to compare but still nonetheless synology felt happy enough to publish this online so there must be at least some kind of statistical evidence they can point at same goes when they were comparing performance of these drives against alternative drives bearing in mind the architecture of this drive is more enterprise it's more like an ultrastar it's more like an exos the result is that of course that performance is going to be very very high particularly compare against these but again that sustained performance that we touched on earlier for me is what really stood out now when it comes to wd red i could highlight things like naswear i'm not going to because obviously naswear is great but i've kind of already mentioned that in terms of vibration and system internal monitoring there which all of these drives have that's for me anymore it's not enough of a universal selling point i will talk about opting and the fact that this drive has a little bit of flash memory on board that is used to store metadata index data that sort of thing to make general access and iop access improved there in the background which again lovely stuff there do recommend it and again if it goes to larger scale deployment you're going to feel the benefits on that with these drives in a bulk again you do tend to find the wd red pro and standard red but although we're not going to touch on that much appear up with a higher via reliability um on the back blaze i say that because toshiba does rank quite well a lot of the time on the back blaze ratings which i know are still a bit relative we'll get to that in a moment but the synology drives haven't really featured on there so i'm not prepared to class the successes of the toshiba drives as the same as the synology drives if synology are making it abundantly clear that this is an improved version of that drive but i will say for the backblaze stats even though wd seems to rank quite well on there they are still relative tests based on the relative quantities they have on their individual servers with their quarter by quarter analysis so again that great rating that it seems to have in back place for the most part is still incredibly relative to the number of drives that they are utilizing there on top of that um when it comes to warranty i will say that although all three of these brands provide warranty which seems to be very quick turnaround in personal experience the warranty turn around on wd for what i've heard when i've worked in e-retail to my own experiences to working with clients and customers the wd warranty and return policy is the fastest and we are still talking the odd day here or there but generally wd still seemed to hold a lot of drives that sit there for warranty replacement so their rma service and support and return around seems to be considerably faster than anyone else once you break it down now one thing i will say against them and we've already touched on this earlier but i'm going to go into a bit more detail is they are far less competitive in their pricing wd red pro drives and their pricing not only that the most expensive overall they have the fewest price drops and the only time you ever see price drops is big key sales events black friday boxing day sales promotional seasonal events but only the big ones generally their drives are on offer anywhere near as much as all the other drive brands out there and you find that you may buy a wd red drive and suddenly something like black friday comes along and you realize you could have saved an absolute packet these deals are a lot more sprinkled out there with a lot of the other brands particularly seagate which moves us there to this end of the table they're universal selling points that i've talked about in the past one ironwolf health management which means that much like smart smart when you are looking at and monitoring the health of your drives they've got an additional service with more parameters and more hotpoints built in known as the ironwolf health management system that runs additional checks on the drive in the background which can be done on the schedule and monitors the health of the drive over time this can also be linked to warranty services as well for faster turnarounds and notifications of when your driver is in trouble on top of that you've got three years of data recovery services we can go down to the forensic level in the rescue recovery services included with the drive which should not be sniffed out we talked about it many many times on the channel the cost of data recovery services is not cheap you should never buy a drive based on how much data you're going to put on it or how well it's going to the capacity of the drive should buy the drive and the capacity you're looking at based on how much that data is worth ultimately how much it's going to cost you if you lose it and free up to forensic level data recovery services right the way down to mechanical taking the drive apart included cannot be sniffed that particularly when this is the lowest price drive there on the table same goes there is multiple offers out there that you do see arriving online with lots more promos knocking around even during these times of hardware shortages what do we not like well has the highest power consumption i find typically obviously when it comes to the enterprise tier on xbox and stuff that is debatable but on top of that their warranty process although they have uh the data recovery services on there and ironwolf health management i think a lot of users knew seagate you know around 10 to 12 years ago when they were having slightly higher failure rates than other brands out there and although they've you know pretty much got rid of those failures and their statistical issues they were going through at that time a lot of people still associate seagate drives with those times i've got long memories just look up any wd versus seagate debate on reddit and you'll see what i mean still a great drive now but those old haunting ghosts of the past that have never really left them ultimately between them we can't really pick one or the other based on their universal selling points because they're quite distinctive between them but i hope between those three i've helped you decide which one of those threes won the round for you right so next up and our final part of the comparison is going to be about noise now most people that utilize drives like this may be utilizing them in a rack mount system that's already got fans going nuts and cooling systems and you're not really going to hear them but that's not always the case some of you might be utilizing these drives in four six or even eight bay desktop systems the result is that if you are in even relative close proximity to this system you're gonna hear it you're gonna hear these drives more than anything in most cases until you surpass an eight bay system the drives are noisier than the system by a country mile now as you can see here on screen we've got the ds420 here we've removed three of the bays and we've installed the drives in these trays and what i'm going to do is do a heavy benchmark for each of the drives side by side one by one and we're going to shut i'm going to show you which one is the noisier of the three so the first drive we're going to try is the synology we're going to put that technology in there and that synology is in bay one uh sorry bay two the wd red is going to be in bay three if i can put that in there and see what i'm doing finally in bay four is the seagate iron wolf pro now before you highlight it in the comments i'm well aware that there is a capacity difference between these three drives unfortunately i wasn't able to secure the same drive from all the same drive capacity from the three drives or utilizing the drives i had here in the studio however if you do look at the spreadsheets for each of these drives and you look at their record reported decibel rating you will find that they do list very similar decibel ratings on each of their capacity tiers respective of their own pdfs so for now if you can just cut me some slack on the capacity difference between them you will find that these drives regardless of the capacity you go for once you're above around 10 tb they're very similar in the clix hums and words to their own respective ranges so on my screen here on the laptop i've now got all three drives listed so the first drive i'm going to do uh benchmark on is the synology drive there in beta once i begin the benchmark operation i'm going to stop talking for around 15 seconds so you can hear the drive and it's testing there also you're going to see the decibel meter there on screen which is flicking while i talk and finally when you hear that noise do bear in mind that this is a sustained both um read transfer operation and iops related transfer this is an example of peak access not completely atypical normal domestic access is not going to be as high as this but we have to test a maximum noise scenario so i'm going to go in and run the test in three two one go it would help if i put the password in first i'm gonna leave this in three two one go and there you go i stopped the test so yeah you see what i mean about how noisy these drives can get that is pretty atypical okay so now we're gonna go for the drive in bay three this is going to be uh some performance there on the wd red pro drive let's run that test get the password in bit of relative silence and begin so once again pretty darn noisy right again very similar in terms of their noise despite the fact that the uh synology their drive is the one that's rated for a higher tb rate in there which again very impressive indeed so now we're going to go to that third drive there this is the seagate drive there so we'll get the password put in a little bit of relative silence and begin now i can't see the decibel meter there on screen but it sounded to me like that seagate drive was by far the noisiest of the three i'm a little closer to it of course but i am closer to it by around four centimeters once you really work out the difference there ultimately between the three of them i don't think there's an enormous noise difference between them the seagate drive was certainly the noisiest i didn't really notice a tremendous difference when i was looking at the difference between the synology and the wd drive there and again even though there was a difference between them and the distance between this phone and that system was you know less than an inch each time but still right there for me i think by far the noisiest was the seagate and the wd and the synology there i'd say pretty much away were largely identical we are doing a much deeper analysis of sound testing with different kinds of operations very very soon but apart from that let's carry on so what do we think well i don't think it goes without saying that the synology drive is still in terms of hardware architecture internally still the best drive of the three here on the table in terms of the design there in sight i do think they're let down a little bit by those capacities they're not offering there and maybe some of the decisions that the brand has made on some of their newer releases and the 2022 enterprise and hyperscale series have kind of those changes in support and compatibility have tainted people's opinion of these drives in some ways i don't think we can argue that they're bad drives i think they are fantastically well designed drives there and certainly designed for enterprise and high um kind of durability use as well as clearly being made in parallel with synology systems can only be a benefit to them but they're still the most expensive drive here on the table and until they get some larger capacities out there or more diverse capacities i still think that kind of competition versus the likes of wd and seagate is never really going to be final when it comes to wd and seagate however it has to be said that synology's value for money and what you get for your money with those additional recovery services can't really be oh you know be ignored regardless of the capacity you're looking at there or whether you're going pro or non-pro it's still the best value option here on the table and for a number of people when you're reaching that capacity as well as when you're thinking about the you know safety of your data in terms of if you have a catastrophic failure the seagate is the better option in terms of health management and recovery right now wd is still the long-standing popular choice of the three and although it costs a little bit more it has to be said that they've got a much kind of heavier established um historical support in the market which can't really be ignored additionally unlike the other brands with seagate offering their pro and then exos series and synology only offering this enterprise here wd and this pro series also arrive as wd gold with other tweaks and improvements as well as ultra style as well so when you do go for the pro series you are getting a pro series nas drive and you've still got options within their portfolio to really change where your money's going and we touched in other videos how some of the ultrastar and wd gold drives cost less than this but prioritize other areas of enterprise level storage and between the three of them they're probably the more long established and more diverse portfolio choice between the three but this has been comparing the synology 5300 series versus the wd red pro series versus the seagate ironwolf pro series i know it's been a long video but we really have to touch on these in as many details as we can and for the sort of money you're going to be spending on this setup for your home or business surely an extra 10 to 20 minutes of your time will be worth it in the long run thank you so much for watching if you've enjoyed this check me a like it really helps me understand what i'm doing right and wrong if you want to learn more as we delve deeper and deeper into this subject of storage as the years go on do click subscribe we do a video every day and there isn't much in data storage that we don't talk about here myself and eddie on nas compares and finally use the free advice section linked in the description or link to the nas compare article where we go into way more detail about noise and performance on these drives as well as buy links in the description there that if you use those to buy the drives for yourself it won't cost you any extra and it helps support me and eddie here on nas compares make more and more guides and the free advice for others otherwise thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 50,348

Keywords: BEST SYNOLOGY HARD DRIVE, HAT5300, HAT5300 SYNOLOGY HDD, HAT5300 VS SEAGATE IRONWOLF PRO, HAT5300 VS WD RED PRO, IRONWOLF VS HAT5300, SEAGATE IRONWOLF PRO VS HAT5300, SEAGATE IRONWOLF VS SYNOLOGY HAT5300, SYNOLOGY COMPATIBLE HARD DRIVE, SYNOLOGY HA5300 VS SEAGATE IRONWOLF, SYNOLOGY HA5300 VS WD RED, SYNOLOGY HARD DRIVE COMPATIBILITY, SYNOLOGY HAT5300, SYNOLOGY VS SEAGATE, SYNOLOGY VS WD, SYNOLOGY VS WD RED HDD, WD RED PRO VS HAT5300, WD RED VS SYNOLOGY HAT5300, WD VS SEAGATE

Id: mTDZ_2RQ1J8

Length: 33min 29sec (2009 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 26 2022