My 2-bay NAS uses Hitachi/HGST drives. They have been running for 10+ years now, and obviously need to be replaced. What would be a good brand/type to replace them with, eg: what do you use ?
I don't trust the "best NAS drives" searches any more, because I spent all morning and ended up nowhere.
A little help would really be appreciated 😁
Don't overthink it - most brands are pretty similar and you will hear both success and horror stories for every single brand, it's all anecdotal experience at this point. You can read www.backblaze.com for some statistics if you want.
You should still try to get specific NAS drives (compared to 'Desktop' drives for example). They are usually running cooler, meant for 24/7 operations, massive reads, and support RAID specific S.M.A.R.T. metrics.
Myself I am still loyal to WD Reds (in spite of the atrocious SMR scandal that resulted in a class action). Just make sure to avoid SMR models and you'll be fine. I've been running those in all kinds of NAS environments, sizes etc.. and had only good experiences. They are pretty trusted. Some people prefer Seagate Ironwolf, and they can sometimes be found cheaper.
Used WD Reds in the past and using Seagate Ironwolfs now. Both brands work perfectly for NAS applications. If you want to save some money buy some shuckable USB drives. They are often cheaper then buying the bare drives only. I bought these a couple of times: https://www.amazon.nl/Seagate-Expansion-Deskt … B0889C91T3?th=1. They contained Seagate Ironwolfs which were a lot cheaper at that time then only the bare drive.
I've been using Seagate Ironwolf for years. Recently switched to exos.
Usually switch every 3-4 yrs since that's when I typically run out of space.
Have had no issues with Seagate and the warranties are good and honored rapidly the few times I've sent drives back.
My prefs seems to go to the WD UltraStar (because I have HGST UltraStar now) but this could just be in the name
I had my eye on WD/Seagate DC (datacenter) disks. But i don't know if these are different (longevity) or just an extended warranty slapped on.
I normaly combine WD RED and PURPLE drives. One is aimed at NAS the other is at surveillance systems.
WD all the way. Gold or Purple, Didn't have Red but this is for NAS or like.
Cheers,
Great Northern aka Canada.
Either WD Red/Red Pro (non SMR models) or Seagate IronWolf Pro will do unless you have a very specific use case. I have used both over the years and have had no issues . If you are accessing data over a single 1 Gigabit link on the NAS, drive performance is pretty much irrelevant. If you are using link aggregation or have a 2.5Gbps or faster NIC on the NAS, and need/want more speed, it's a different story .
Pretty much any shuckable external drive will very likely have an SMR HDD inside these days. Exceptions do happen, but I wouldn't bet on it .
That being said, as an experiment, I bought 2 dirt cheap Seagate 8TB external drives which had SMR HDDs in them, shucked them about 2 or 3 years ago and set them up as a RAID-1 array (mdraid). The initial silvering took a little while, but they have been running flawlessly since then (have about 2TB on there currently). My workloads are mostly read heavy, so sustained write performance is not something I need, though I have not noticed any slowdowns during multi-gigabyte write operations either (pretty much always saturation the 1Gbps link). Also, if one of thee drives dies I can always rebuild the array with a CMR drive (and then possibly swap out the other SMR drive for a CMR one), if I want to . I have not committed anything important/irreplaceable to this array, but, at this point I don't feel like it would be a significant risk if I did .
That being said, I would never use SMR drives for
a) write-heavy workloads
b) any kind of parity RAID or ZFS
I have a pretty large pile of dead drives, most of them being Seagate . This is not including the multiple dead Seagate drives that I've taken apart for the magnets / to let my kids have some fun taking them apart.
I've bought used Hitachi\HGST drives the past few years and haven't had any fail yet. I just retired 2x 2TB drives because I was running out of space. Replaced them with a Water Panther Arsenal 12TB drive that I bought used. The sustained reads and writes are pretty high on this Water Panther drive.
I had a WD Red at one point and if I remember correctly it started having issues losing the partition data. Guessing the board was going bad. Also had a WD Blue die. Was in a family member's computer and it not only stopped working but the drive started vibrating really badly.
Took it apart to see what happened and the platter had very badly warped. Never seen another drive do that.
