What Hard Drives Should you Buy for your Synology NAS?

all right how's it going y'all so in this video we're going to be talking about what hard drive should you buy for your synology nas this is going to be specifically for synology though it does more or less apply to the rest of the nasa operating systems qnap whatever you want to go with asus store but we are also going to be talking about specifically the synology hard drives and what effect that has on everything so pretty much everything should be true for other mass brands except for when we get to the synology hard drives because i would not recommend buying a synology hard drive over any other hard drive if you're not going to be putting in a synology all right so some disclaimers here i want to start by talking about before i ever started doing space rex so before i started space rex and before i ever got into synology when i was looking for my very first analogy the hard drive that i chose was a seagate iron wolf drive that was my unbiased opinion then and tends to me my unbiased recommendation now i have had a couple of companies actually send me hard drives for free but that was my opinion before i ever started space rex and as i've worked with him more i've never really had too many issues with seagate iron wolf drives and it tends to be what i recommend but before i started any of this the first hard drives i bought were sega iron wolf drives and that was from my research at the time all right so before we get started let's go ahead and just talk about really the three different categories of drive that you can go for when you are looking at buying nas specifically synology to ask all right and so the three categories you've kind of got here are shucking drives and so that's where you take a external hard drive enclosure like this which tend to be very cheap and you pull out the hard drive generally you want to try to guesstimate what hard drive is going to be in there based off of forum posts and things like that and you can actually get a lot of storage for really cheap then over here we've got the next here and that's going to be either your wd reds or red pros and your seagate iron wolves or iron wolf pros those are the main guys who are going to be making nas drives and i'd also throw in there actually the seagate exos but we're going to be talking about that later those are basically the design for mass storage drives that tend to be really designed to be an arrays of massive amounts of disks and then finally category three it's in a lot of ways very similar to category two and that's actually buying the synology branded hard drives so quick fact synology does not actually manufacture these i'd be worried if they did basically synology has a partnership with toshiba and toshiba who already makes enterprise drives basically makes the synology hard drive and synology gets to have its own custom firmware and just ensure that everything plays nicely it's not quite complete vertical integration because it's not like they're designing their own hard drives but with the amount of units they're selling they'd probably be pretty poor hard drives or be incredibly expensive and note sometimes that is your only option but we'll go ahead and talk about that in a minute here all right so first i want to start with the chucked drives so shucking hard drive is actually pretty simple basically just take a case like this this is a wd easy store a western digital easy store and you go ahead and say oh i got a great deal on this sometimes these can literally be half as expensive as nas branded hard drives with a nas hard drive in there and so what you do is you basically just rip open the case and pull out the hard drive which is what i've done here and so you can see they're almost all i don't think any of them especially this larger form factor are going to be the same hard drive layout you can just stick them right into synology that allows you to save a ton of money on space so as i said earlier sometimes you can literally find in this a western digital red drive or sea gates option i've seen exos and iron wolf pros in there why are they giving these away for so much cheaper so a lot of people will say that it's because they have to reduce stock in certain areas but in reality they're likely doing a process called binning so binning is a process of taking drives or any objects that don't quite meet spec and putting them in a lower spec option and so the advantage of these cases and why they are still sold cheaper than their other hard drives even though they have just the amount of storage and sometimes the exact same hard drives in there is because when you purchase this you are not a business probably you are not somebody who is really relying on this and if the drive fails even if it's in this closure which is who this is designed for it's not like the company is going to get that much bad pr because hey it's a cheap external hard drive enclosure not that big of a deal maybe i knocked it maybe this and so it's really a nice way for them to get rid of hard drives that are maybe a little bit more questionable while still making money back so these are not going to be hard drives that actually go through and are physically tested and then fail now that would be way too expensive if a hard drive fails they're just going to throw it out and so the way these manufacturing plants work is they don't do in-depth testing on every single drive that would take way too long and be way too expensive instead what they do is they do in-depth testing on a certain number from every single batch maybe it's the shift maybe it is a certain serial number range but they do that very specific testing per batch and this should give them an overall view as to how the entire batch is performing and allows quality control without being incredibly expensive and time intensive and so likely what these companies are doing is they go and say okay well this batch may have had a few issues they found more duds in this patch than they usually would and is outside of their standard deviation that they allow for a specific batch and so the majority of these drives are likely totally fine but maybe they're not maybe they're going to have an issue in a few years maybe something weird happened with manufacturing and so instead of throwing out the entire batch what they'll do is they'll test them and they'll just throw them in a case like this this way if the drive fails it is not besmirching the name of ironwolf pro it is not doing that instead it's just saying oh it's an easy store it failed who cares it's not that big of a deal and so you do tend to get more lemons in these drives but at the same time a shock drive can last just as long as a regular store-bought hard drive and in some ways especially buying from amazon that's a pretty protective case compared to just the paper bag i've seen some of these shipped in before so it's not the worst idea especially if you're on a budget though for businesses i would not recommend them you don't get the same warranty a lot of times though sometimes you do and it's just going to be a little bit more likely to fail and i would not trust it for full-on business who really needs to make sure uptime is i mean saving 500 bucks on hard drive costs it's not that big of a deal to a business sometimes when if those drives have issues it can easily cost employees 10 times that over time if there are issues and so that shocking drives the one recommendation i do have is before you ever pull off the case because as soon as you pull off the case you're gonna have a lot of trouble actually returning the thing make sure to do an in-depth test on it to make sure it doesn't fail and so that shucked drives and as you can see i've done it before it's an easy way to get cheap storage and so now on to the specific nas drives so specific nas drives have a very key feature in them that regular hard drives do not have and so if you're going to be having more than two bays i would really make sure whatever nas drive you do get has what's called vibration sensors in there so if you have all the same hard drives all rotating at the exact same rate you can start developing what's called harmonics and so this is where they basically amplify each other and start causing more and more vibration because they're all spinning at the exact same rpm this can actually damage hard drives over time and the more hard drives you have in a rack or in a nas the more this is likely to happen and so nas drives all have this vibration sensor this vibration sensor detects the harmonics and will actually slow the nas drives down or speed them up to get them out of that harmonic keeping the nas drive from vibrating itself apart and so that can really expand the life span of them two is probably not necessary but anything more than that make sure you are getting the nas drives because it's just worth it more for you then you've got pretty much all three different classes so for seagate it's ironwolf is the lowest class of nasdrive then you go on to ironwolf pro and then you go on to seagate exos western digital has wd reds wd red pros and wd golds and so it's pretty much the exact same thing though i do want to say a quick thing about western digital drives so part of the reason why i've kind of stuck to my guns on not recommending western digital drives is because western digital did a few kind of shady things a couple of years ago probably about a year ago now they started shipping what's called smr drives in nas boxes so the western digital red drives and actually a lot of them even the larger versions were smr drives and they were not telling anybody so smr stands for shingle magnetic recording and so what that is is is it a more efficient storage technology that allows you to basically store more data on a platter by reducing the size of the right head to be smaller than that of the read head long story you can look up graphics and it helps explain a lot basically what an smr drive is is it's a normal hard drive and it will perform like a normal hard drive a cmr hard drive that's the conventional magnetic recording but sometimes if you've written a lot of data to it randomly it runs out of space and has to rewrite large portions of the entire disk before it can write any more data and so that is why smr drives can seem totally fine having totally normal performance in them until okay i've got to rewrite major portions of the drive and it can change the latency to taking minutes just to write small amounts of data to it and kills performance and once you multiply this by a raid so say you have eight hard drives in there anytime one of them is doing this the entire raid pool is slowed down to that entire speed and so it's not a great technology to have if you're in a nas for an external hard drive like this i don't care that's totally fine that is the perfect use case for smr it's a hard drive well hey who cares it's an external hard drive you're probably just dumping data to it but when you're having to write an operating system and run a raid smr is just not something you want to mess with and so western digital was actually quietly not telling anybody selling these hard drives as nas drives though they even though they should never have been associated with nas specifically zfs it can actually cause complete crashes and year-long rebuild times if you have an smr drive in your zfs pool and so that's something to completely avoid currently the only smr drives that western digital is selling as nas drives are six terabytes and below for wd reds but they didn't tell anybody and they didn't admit it and there was a lot of shady practicing going on there and that's honestly why i tend not to recommend western digital and that's kind of why i stay away from them western digital and seagate tend to have the exact same pricing for their hard drives but seagate hasn't done that there was a thing where seagate was selling their desktop hard drives their cheap desktop hard drives with smr that's fine but just do not put an smr drive in a raid it's a huge issue and that's why i really kind of stay away from that company now that's not to say if you've had great experience with western digital just make sure not to get those smr drives and make sure to get cmr drives all nasa should be running on cmr drives unless it's just like one drive and you really are just using it as like a dropbox pretty much then it's not a big of a deal but i would really recommend make sure you get the cmr drives because a lot of times you don't even save any money by buying the smr drive they adjust or dumping them on you without telling you all right and so now within those nas drives i'm just going to talk about seagate because it's a lot simpler and as i mentioned i don't really like western digital right now so within seagate there are three different options you've got for nas rated drives there are the iron wolves ironwolf pros and then there's the seagate exos and so the iron wolves are honestly fine for pretty much any consumer application really they don't have that much different the pros do tend to just have better warranties and also larger caches and a couple things like that but in reality you probably won't notice the difference too much in them for just consumer the one nice thing about the pros is you do get better data recovery and stuff and so i do it's nice to know with businesses where money is cheap downtime is very expensive to just upgrade to the pros because it's honestly going to give you less of a headache likely but for consumers i really don't think many people will actually need ironwolf pros just stick to the regular ironwolves though the prices have been crazy fluctuating now on to the very weird thing about the exos so exos are going to be a lot louder and draw more power than the ironwolf or ironwolf pros but are rated for much longer run times and are cheaper so i have no idea why they're cheaper but they are significantly cheaper a lot of time so honestly if you don't care about noise that much i would really look at the exos just when you are buying an exos drive you need to triple double check and make sure that you're buying a sata exos drive there are two different types of hard drives they're sas and sata sata is what is in pretty much every computer you've ever used likely and sas is what's in servers so if you have a sas hard drive you can only plug it into a sas computer so all synologies except for the upper echelon of rack models specifically the sas models are sata hard drives and so just make sure you buy a sata drive because the exos do come in both methods but sometimes you can save like 30 percent getting a better rated hard drive if you go for an exos rather than iron wolf i don't know why that is but my next build is definitely going to be exo's because i've got a room for it anyway and so i will get much better performance out of that long term and save a ton of money so another thing i would do is right now with covid and cryptocurrencies and supply chains and everything supply of hard drives is very very very random so for all of this i would recommend waiting it out and honestly don't be tied to a specific brand unless you need to be once you do buy one brand of hard drive i would recommend staying in that brand for the duration just you don't want to mix hard drives in a raid weird stuff can happen it's just way better to only ever deal with one specific company whenever you can but if you're just starting out keep a look on on different pricing because they can be wildly different and honestly supply is just coming and going for random nasas all right and so now onto the synology option so as i said earlier synology makes its own hard drives now well partners with toshiba to make hard drives and honestly for businesses that i'm consulting with i tend to recommend the synology hard drives it's one of those things where nobody's ever been fired for buying a dell so it's the exact same thing synology hard drives will give you the best compatibility with the synology nas they do have some technology in there that optimizes the communication between the drives and so if you've got a ton of concurrent users you can get better performance even with that out of the way they're priced pretty similarly or at least they used to covet screwed up all the pricing and so right now they might be more expensive than the ironwolf pros and so if you're a larger business i still would recommend synology but if you're a small like two or three person business it's probably not worth it but if if they're within your budget i would actually recommend the synologies because if you start upgrading your nas there are the larger nas models are now requiring use for synology hard drives and i don't want this video to be about the politics on whether or not that's okay basically my opinion on it is pretty simple for the enterprise units i'm talking the xs plus or any of the bigger rack mounted ones that's fine i totally get having synology requiring those hard drives because honestly businesses have a lot more money to give and also cost a lot more money in r d for how many units are sold so i'm totally fine with synology doing that on their upper echelon units honestly the hard drives are priced incredibly reasonably anybody who compares it to what dell does dell will charge you three times as much for a hard drive if you buy it from them synology charges maybe an extra 50 bucks so it's really worth it and you do just guarantee compatibility synology stance is they want to guarantee that synology hard drives will be compatible with any synology and no business will ever run into a case where they purchase a hard drive even though it was approved on their list and it doesn't work so i have had a legitimate time where i had a client who purchased a nas drive i think it was actually a seagate but don't quote me on that i don't quite remember he purchased a nas drive that was on the synology compatibility list however the drive he purchased had a firmware update that synology had not tested yet that nas drive then caused a ton of issues with him and the nas he had purchased even though the drive was on the list the firmware upgrade ended up having some issue i don't quite understand how that works personally it's sata it should just be a simple communication but for whatever reason it caused an issue there and legitimately he had to send back the units and get different hard drives and so for a business that's actually really bad and so i do get where synology comes from when they say we want to ensure that there is an option to guarantee compatibility because you know synology is not going to push out a firmware that breaks synology drives at least you hope not that's my quick stance on it but for businesses who do think they are going to be upgrading to rack units and larger ones by the synologies now they are not going to cause you issues i've worked with them before and it's honestly just going to be easier down the line because synology is requiring this that's just a fact of it with large units synology is currently requiring those there are also been great drives and honestly i've never had any issues with them the one downside of them is honestly supply chain stuff so one thing that is unfortunate is when you're requiring a specific hard drive and supply chain stuff hits as hard as it has recently there have been cases where i've not been able to find anywhere on the internet selling synology hard drives and so that's another reason why businesses always buy a spare hard drive and stick it on top of the nas because you never know what supply chain stuff stuff's gonna happen the exact time your raid goes into degrading mode and now you just can't buy a hard drive it's one of those things you definitely want to invest in that so yeah those are really all the different options you've got and so it really comes down to how much you're willing to pay and how stable your data needs to be and how stable your nas needs to be the last little bit of an option is you've got two different options you have to have 5600 speed rpm drives or 7 200 rpm drives 7 200 rpm drives for nasa's are going to be a little bit louder draw a little bit more power but are going to be faster especially in random reads so if you don't have an ssd cache it it's gonna you're going to notice the difference between the 72 and the 5600 rpm drives though if you're just a home user and you're dumping data to it over one gig connection just buy the 5600 if it's any cheaper it's really not going to be a big deal at all to most users it's just when you're going 10 gig above and having multiple clients hitting it that you would notice those speed differences all right well that's going to be it for this overview go and leave any of the tutorials you like see me make in the comments below and have a good one bye [Music] you

Channel: SpaceRex

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Length: 21min 0sec (1260 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 21 2022