Choosing the Best Hard Drive for Price per Terabyte or Gigabyte
One question that storage users who are more concerned about the longevity and future-proofing of their storage ask us is:
“HDD Price per TB (best cost Hard Drives). Is it better to get bigger size drives or smaller drives but more of them to achieve desired storage space?”
Yes, this is a popular question indeed, especially with bigger size hard drives. Those drives tend to be much more expensive per terabyte. It is often cheaper to get an additional drive which is smaller and gain the same total capacity (using two or 3 drives) cheaper.
How to calculate price per GB / TB?
If a 4 TB hard drive (let’s say 4000 MB, for simplicity’s sake) costs $50, how much is that per GB?
4 TB = 4000 GB $50 / 4000 GB = 0,0125 $/GB $0,0125 x 1000 = 12.5 $/TB
How to use the Price per Terabyte Calculator table below?
Below you will find our automatic hard drive price per TB/GB tool, designed to crawl many, MANY different eShops and divide their cost between the available storage. This allows us to rank/list these drives by the largest amount of terabytes youwill get for your money. This list includes popular hard drive manufacturers, such as Seagate, WD and Toshiba, allowing you to ensure that you are getting excellent value for money on your storage, as well as only choosing the most reputable HDD makers in the world. Before you head down there though, take a moment to quick familiarize yourself with a few key factors that will aid you in understanding how to understand what separates one HDD from another
CMR VS SMR HDDs
You can filter CMR drives only if you need better performance (more info). SMR drives are acceptable in RAID1/0 or no raid setup.
Seagate VS WD Hard Drives?
You can go brand specific such as Seagate, WD, and Toshiba. WD might offer things like OptiNAND
| WD Hard Drive Buyers Guide | Seagate Hard Drive Buyers Guide |
Home vs Business Hard Drives, is there a difference?
You can also choose a specific type of drives such as for home use you would use a filter (WD Red or Ironwolf. For business use in a NAS with 8 bays and above filter would look like WD RED Pro or Ironwolf Pro. For enterprise drives, you would choose Exos, HGST, Gold or Ultrastar. For surveillance, you would choose a filter “purple” or “Surveillance”. For simple desktop use you would choose Barracuda, Black or Blue drives. The colours are explained here.
6TB vs 8TB, or 10TB vs 20TB – Which is Best?
You may choose bigger capacity drives if you have fewer drive bays on your NAS. This limits your options for mixing drives smarter way. You might realise that bigger drives but fewer of them can actually be cheaper than smaller drives that use every drive bay.
| NOTE – Use the GREEN Bar (ideally for NAS users) to enter your number of bays, RAID failure protection level, budget and whether you want NAS optimized drives only |
| Note – Use the YELLOW Bar to filter the results by brand, price per TB range, strict capacity and recording method |
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LAST UPDATED: July 14, 2025 00:10
| $13.33 | Toshiba Toshiba MG04ACA 6 TB 3.5" Internal Hard Drive MG04ACA600E MG04ACA600E | 6TB | CMR | 80 | Link |
| $14.12 | WD Western Digital 8TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5640 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD80EAAZ WD80EAAZ | 8TB | CMR | 113 | Link |
| $14.66 | Seagate Seagate Constellation Es.2 St33000651ns 3 Tb 3.5 Internal Hard Drive - Sata - 7200 Rpm - 64 Mb Buffer ST33000651NS | 3TB | CMR | 44 | Link |
| $16.25 | HGST HGST Ultrastar He12 | HUH721212ALE600 | 12TB 7.2K RPM SATA-6Gb/s 3.5" 256MB cache Hard Disk Drive HUH721212ALE600 | 12TB | CMR | 195 | Link |
| $16.58 | Seagate DiscTech EMC 12TB Enterprise Hard Drive, 3.5-Inch SATA, 6Gbps, 7.2K RPM, 4Kn Compatible with Dell Isilon PowerScale 118000936-01 Seagate Exos X16 ST12000NM005G st12000nm005g | 12TB | CMR | 199 | Link |
| $17.5 | WD Western Digital 20TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 512 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD201KFGX WD201KFGX | 20TB | CMR | 350 | Link |
| $18.75 | Seagate Seagate 4TB HDD 5.9K RPM 3.5" 6Gb/s SATA Hard Disk Drive Model: ST4000DM000 DP/N: VF3T3 st4000dm000 | 4TB | CMR | 75 | Link |
| $19.22 | WD Western Digital 18TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 512 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD181KFGX WD181KFGX | 18TB | CMR | 346 | Link |
| $19.25 | Seagate Seagate Skyhawk AI ST20000VE002 - Hard Drive - 20 TB - SATA 6Gb/s ST20000VE002 | 20TB | CMR | 385 | Link |
| $19.25 | Seagate Seagate Exos X20 ST20000NM002D 512E/4KN SAS 12Gb/s 20TB 7200RPM 256MB Enterprise Hard Drive,Mechanical Hard Disk ST20000NM002D | 20TB | CMR | 385 | Link |
| $19.48 | WD Western Digital 10TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD101EFBX WD101EFBX | 10TB | CMR | 195 | Link |
| $19.69 | Seagate Seagate IronWolf Pro ST16000NE000 16 TB Hard Drive - 3.5" Internal - SATA (SATA/600), Mechanical Hard Disk ST16000NE000 | 16TB | CMR | 315 | Link |
| $19.99 | Seagate DBG 3.5in 7E8 Enterprise Dry Drive 18TB SATA HDD 7200RPM 6GB/S Mechanical Hard Drive ST18000NM000J ST18000NM000J | 18TB | CMR | 360 | Link |
| $20 | Seagate Seagate 2TB Pipeline HD SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST2000VM003) ST2000VM003 | 2Tb | CMR | 40 | Link |
| $20.22 | Seagate Seagate Exos X16 ST16000NM003G 16 TB Hard Drive - Internal - SATA (SATA/600) ST16000NM003G | 16TB | CMR | 324 | Link |
| $21.1 | Seagate Seagate ST18000NM003D 18TB Exos X20 SATA Hard Drive, 3.5" HDD, SATA 6Gb/s, 7200rpm, 256MB Cache, 512E, 4.16ms, NCQ ST18000NM003D | 18TB | CMR | 380 | Link |
| $21.77 | WD Western Digital 24TB WD Gold Enterprise Class SATA Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 512 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD241KRYZ WD241KRYZ | 24TB | CMR | 522 | Link |
| $22.17 | WD Western Digital 6TB WD Purple Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD - SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD60PURZ WD60PURZ | 6TB | CMR | 133 | Link |
| $22.33 | WD WD Purple 6TB Surveillance Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD60PURX [Old Version] WD60PURX | 6TB | CMR | 134 | Link |
| $22.46 | WD Western Digital 12TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD121KFBX WD121KFBX | 12TB | CMR | 269 | Link |
| $22.5 | Seagate ST16000VE002 Skyhawk AI 16TB SATA 6.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive (ST16000VE002) ST16000VE002 | 16TB | CMR | 360 | Link |
| $22.56 | WD Western Digital 8TB WD Purple Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD - SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD85PURZ WD85purz | 8 TB | CMR | 180 | Link |
| $22.75 | Seagate Seagate Exos 7E8 4TB 512n SATA 128MB Cache 3.5-Inch Enterprise Hard Drive (ST4000NM0035), Mechanical Hard Disk ST4000NM0035 | 4TB | CMR | 91 | Link |
| $22.78 | WD Western Digital 22TB WD Gold Enterprise Class SATA Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 512 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD221KRYZ WD221KRYZ | 22TB | CMR | 501 | Link |
| $23.33 | WD Western Digital 6TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" -WD60EFPX WD60EFPX | 6TB | CMR | 140 | Link |
| $23.4 | Seagate Seagate Exos 7E10 ST10000NM017B 10 TB Hard Drive - Internal - SATA [SATA/600] ST10000NM017B | 10TB | CMR | 234 | Link |
| $23.54 | Seagate Seagate IronWolf Pro ST12000NE0008 12 TB Hard Drive - 512E Format - SATA 600-3.5" Drive - Internal - 7200RPM - 256 MB Buffer - Hot Pluggable ST12000NE0008 | 12TB | CMR | 283 | Link |
| $23.75 | WD Western Digital WD Ultrastar dc hc310 hus726t4tale6l4 - HDD - 4 TB - sata 6gb/s 0b36040 HUS726T4TALE6L4 | 4TB | CMR | 95 | Link |
| $24.15 | WD Western Digital 6TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD60EZAZ WD60EZAZ | 6TB | SMR | 145 | Link |
| $24.75 | Seagate SEAGATE ST4000VX007 Skyhawk 4TB Surveillance Hard SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Drive-Frustration Free Packaging (ST4000VXZ07) Mechanical Hard Disk ST4000VX007 | 4TB | CMR | 99 | Link |
| $24.88 | HGST HGST Ultrastar He8 | HUH728080ALE600 | 0F23267 | 8TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Inch | 512e | Instant Secure Erase | Helium Platform Hard Disk Drive HDD HUH728080ALE600 | 8TB | CMR | 199 | Link |
| $24.91 | WD WD 3 TB 3.5-Inch Desktop Mainstream WDBH2D0030HNC-NRSN WDBH2D0030HNC | 3TB | CMR | 75 | Link |
| $24.92 | WD Western Digital 12TB WD Purple Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD - SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD121PURZ WD121PURZ | 12TB | CMR | 299 | Link |
| $25 | WD Western Digital 12TB WD Purple Pro Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD - SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD121PURP WD121PURP | 12TB | CMR | 300 | Link |
| $25 | WD Western Digital 4TB WD Purple Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD - SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD40PURZ WD40PURZ | 4TB | CMR | 100 | Link |
| $25.5 | WD Western Digital 4TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD40EZRZ WD40EZRZ | 4TB | CMR | 102 | Link |
| $25.67 | Toshiba Toshiba 3.5-Inch 3TB 7200 RPM SATA3/SATA 6.0 GB/s 64MB Hard Drive DT01ACA300 DT01ACA300 | 3TB | CMR | 77 | Link |
| $25.73 | Seagate Seagate Skyhawk ST6000VX001 6TB 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - SATA ST6000VX001 | 6TB | CMR | 154 | Link |
| $25.79 | WD Western Digital 10TB WD Purple Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD - SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD102PURZ WD102PURZ | 10TB | CMR | 258 | Link |
| $25.9 | Toshiba Toshiba MG10ADA800E internal hard drive 8 TB 7200 RPM 512 MB 3.5" Serial ATA III MG10ADA800E | 8TB | CMR | 207 | Link |
| $26.42 | WD Western Digital 6TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, , 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD60EZRZ WD60EZRZ | 6TB | CMR | 159 | Link |
| $26.49 | Seagate Seagate Exos X20 ST20000NM003D 20 TB Hard Drive - Internal - SAS (12Gb/s SAS) - Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) Method ST20000NM003D | 20TB | CMR | 530 | Link |
| $26.66 | WD Western Digital 3TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD30EZAX WD30EZAX | 3TB | CMR | 80 | Link |
| $26.95 | Seagate Seagate - ST8000VX004 Skyhawk ST8000VX004 8 TB Hard Drive - 3.5 Internal - SATA (SATA/600) - Video Surveillance System, Network Video Recorder Device Supported - 256 MB Buffer ST8000VX004 | 8TB | CMR | 216 | Link |
| $27.4 | Seagate Seagate IronWolf ST10000NE0008 10 TB Hard Drive - 3.5" Internal - SATA (SATA/600) ST10000NE0008 | 10TB | CMR | 274 | Link |
| $27.47 | WD Western Digital 18TB WD Purple Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD - SATA 6 Gb/s, 256MB Cache, 3.5" - WD180PURZ WD180PURZ | 18TB | CMR | 494 | Link |
| $27.48 | HGST HDD 4TB 7200RPM SATA300 64MB ULTARSTAR HUS724040ALE640 (0F14683) - HUS724040ALE640 | 4TB | CMR | 110 | Link |
| $27.5 | WD WD Purple 4TB Surveillance Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD40PURX [Old Version] WD40PURX | 4TB | CMR | 86 | Link |
| $27.5 | Toshiba Toshiba MG04ACA400N 4tb 7.2k 64mb Sata 6g 3.5in Int Disc Prod Spcl Sourcing See Notes MG04ACA400N | 4TB | CMR | 104 | Link |
| $27.83 | WD Western Digital 3TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD30EZAZ WD30EZAZ | 3TB | SMR | 83 | Link |
| $27.83 | wd Western Digital 6TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5640 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 128 MB Cache, 3.5" -WD60EFZX WD60EFZX | 6TB | CMR | 167 | Link |
| $29.34 | Seagate Seagate 10TB IronWolf Pro ST10000NE000 NAS ST10000NE000 | 10TB | CMR | 293 | Link |
| $29.83 | WD Western Digital 6TB WD Red NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, SMR, 256MB Cache, 3.5" - WD60EFAX WD60EFAX | 6TB | SMR | 179 | Link |
| $30 | WD Western Digital 8TB WD Purple Pro Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD - SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD8001PURP WD8001PURP | 8TB | CMR | 240 | Link |
| $30 | WD Western Digital 14TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 512 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD141KFGX WD141KFGX | 14TB | CMR | 420 | Link |
| $30 | WD Western Digital WD Bulk WD10EURX 1TB AV GP SATA 6Gbs 3.5", 1 TB WD10EURX | 1TB | CMR | 30 | Link |
| $30 | Seagate Seagate Video 3.5 HDD Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive - 1000GB (ST1000VM002) ST1000VM002 | 1TB | PMR | 30 | Link |
| $30.08 | Toshiba Toshiba P300 HDWD240UZSVA 4TB 3.5" 5400RPM 64MB Cache SATA III Internal HDD HDWD240UZSVA | 4TB | SMR | 120 | Link |
| $30.62 | WD Western Digital WD4000FYYZ ENTERPRISE 4TB 7200RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5 internal hard drive WD4000FYYZ | 4TB | CMR | 122 | Link |
| $30.7 | WD Western Digital 3TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" -WD30EFPX WD30EFPX | 3 TB | CMR | 92 | Link |
| $32 | WD Western Digital 3TB WD Purple Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD - SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD30PURZ WD30PURZ | 3TB | CMR | 96 | Link |
| $32.14 | WD Western Digital 14TB WD Gold Enterprise Class Internal Hard Drive - 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 512 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD141KRYZ WD141KRYZ | 14TB | CMR | 450 | Link |
| $32.5 | WD Western Digital 4TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD40EZAZ WD40EZAZ | 4TB | SMR | 130 | Link |
| $32.5 | Toshiba Toshiba X300 12TB Performance & Gaming 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive - CMR SATA 6 GB/s 7200 RPM 256 MB Cache - HDWR21CXZSTA HDWR21CXZSTA | 12TB | CMR | 390 | Link |
| $32.86 | WD Western Digital 14TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 GB/s, CMR, 512 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD140EFGX WD140EFGX | 14TB | CMR | 460 | Link |
| $33.33 | WD Western Digital 6TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD6003FFBX WD6003FFBX | 6TB | CMR | 200 | Link |
| $33.33 | wd Western Digital 6TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD60EFRX wd60efrx | 6tb | cmr | 190 | Link |
| $34.5 | WD WD Purple 2TB Surveillance Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD20PURX [Old Version] WD20PURX | 2TB | CMR | 69 | Link |
| $34.88 | Seagate Seagate IronWolf Pro ST8000NE001 8TB Internal 3.5" SATA 6Gb/s 7200rpm - 256MB - with 2 Years Rescue Data Recovery Service Plan ST8000NE001 | 8TB | CMR | 250 | Link |
| $35 | WD Western Digital 4TB WD Red NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, SMR, 256MB Cache, 3.5" - WD40EFAX WD40EFAX | 4TB | SMR | 140 | Link |
| $35.87 | HGST HPE HGST 2TB HUS724020ALS640 0B26887 7.2K SATA 6Gbps 3.5" LFF HUS724020ALS640 | 2TB | CMR | 69 | Link |
| $36.25 | WD WD Gold 4TB Enterprise Class Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM Class SATA 6 Gb/s 128MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD4002FYYZ WD4002FYYZ | 4TB | CMR | 144 | Link |
| $36.25 | Toshiba Toshiba N300 8TB NAS 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive - CMR SATA 6 GB/s 7200 RPM 256 MB Cache - HDWG180XZSTA HDWG180XZSTA | 8TB | CMR | 290 | Link |
| $36.33 | Seagate (Old Model) Seagate Surveillance HDD 8TB 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive (ST8000VX0002) ST8000VX0002 | 8TB | CMR | 291 | Link |
| $36.42 | Seagate Seagate IronWolf ST6000VN001 6 TB Hard Drive - 3.5" Internal - SATA (SATA/600) - Storage System Device Supported - 7200rpm - 256 MB Buffer St6000vn001 | 6TB | CMR | 219 | Link |
| $37 | seagate Seagate ST2000VX017 2TB Skyhawk 5400 Hard Drive ST2000VX017 | 2TB | CMR | 74 | Link |
| $37.22 | Synology Synology HAT5300-16T 16 TB Hard Drive - 3.5" Internal - SATA (SATA/600) HAT5300-16T | 16TB | CMR | 595 | Link |
| $37.66 | WD Western Digital 3TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD30EZRZ WD30EZRZ | 3TB | CMR | 113 | Link |
| $39 | Seagate Seagate 1TB Desktop HDD Hard Drive - Internal (ST1000DM003) st1000dm003 | 1TB | CMR | 39 | Link |
| $39.14 | WD Western Digital WDBFTM0040BSL-WESN external hard drive 4000 GB Silver WDBFTM0040BSL | 4TB | SMR | 157 | Link |
| $39.5 | Seagate (Old Model) Seagate 4TB Surveillance HDD 6Gb/s Internal Hard Drive (ST4000VX000) ST4000VX000 | 4TB | CMR | 158 | Link |
| $39.58 | Synology Synology HAT5300 HAT5310-8T 8 TB Hard Drive - 3.5" Internal - SATA (SATA/600) HAT5310-8T | 8TB | CMR | 317 | Link |
| $39.75 | Toshiba Toshiba X300 6TB High Performance Internal Hard Drive 3.5’’ SATA. 7200rpm, 128MB Buffer, 3 Yr Warranty (HDWR460UZSVA) HDWR460UZSVA | 6TB | CMR | 238 | Link |
| $39.77 | WD WD Green 6TB 3.5-Inch SATA 6.0Gb/s IntelliPower 64MB Cache Hard Drive (WD60EZRX) WD60EZRX | 6TB | CMR | 239 | Link |
| $39.99 | Toshiba Toshiba MAIN-47587 3.5-Inch 1TB 7200 RPM SATA3/SATA 6.0 GB/s 32MB Hard Drive DT01ACA100 / HDKPC03 dt01aca100 | 1TB | CMR | 40 | Link |
| $40.75 | Seagate ST8000NC0002 Enterprise NAS 8TB 3.5" SATA 7200rpm Internal Hard Drive ST8000NC0002 | 8TB | CMR | 326 | Link |
| $41 | WD Western Digital 3TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD30EFRX WD30EFRX | 3TB | CMR | 120 | Link |
| $43.33 | WD WD30EZRX Western Digital Caviar Green Hard Drive WD30EZRX WD30EZRX | 3TB | CMR | 80 | Link |
| $43.4 | WD 8 TB SATA WD80EZAZ-11TDBA0 5400rpm 256MB 3.5" Hard Drive WD80EZAZ | 8TB | CMR | 347 | Link |
| $43.75 | Seagate Seagate Exos 7E8 ST4000NM005A 4 TB Hard Drive - Internal - SAS (12Gb/s SAS) ST4000NM005A | 4TB | CMR | 175 | Link |
| $44.75 | WD Western Digital 2TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, , 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EZRZ wd20ezrz | 2TB | CMR | 90 | Link |
| $44.92 | WD WD Black 6TB Performance Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 128MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD6001FZWX WD6001FZWX | 6TB | CMR | 269 | Link |
| $45 | WD Western Digital 3TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 128 MB Cache, 3.5" -WD30EFZX WD30EFZX | 3TB | CMR | 135 | Link |
| $45.75 | WD WD Gold 6TB Enterprise Class Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM Class SATA 6 Gb/s 128MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD6002FRYZ WD6002FRYZ | 6TB | CMR | 275 | Link |
| $47.3 | WD Western Digital 4TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD4003FFBX WD4003FFBX | 4TB | CMR | 189 | Link |
| $47.44 | WD Western Digital Caviar Blue 640 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 16 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD6400AAKS WD6400AAKS | 640GB | CMR | 30 | Link |
| $48.33 | Seagate Seagate Skyhawk Surveillance ST3000VX009 3TB SATA 6.0 Gb/s 256MB Hard Drive ST3000VX009 | 3TB | CMR | 145 | Link |
| $48.48 | WD Western Digital 6TB WD Gold Enterprise Class Internal Hard Drive - 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD6003FRYZ WD6003FRYZ | 6TB | CMR | 291 | Link |
| $49.42 | WD WD Red Pro 6TB 3.5-Inch SATA III 7200rpm 128MB Cache NAS Internal Hard Drive (WD6002FFWX) WD6002FFWX | 6TB | CMR | 296 | Link |
| $50 | Toshiba Toshiba X300 4TB Performance & Gaming 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive – CMR SATA 6 GB/s 7200 RPM 256 MB Cache - HDWR440XZSTA HDWR440XZSTA | 4TB | CMR | 200 | Link |
| $50.05 | Seagate Seagate Barracuda XT 3 TB 7200RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Bare Drive ST33000651AS ST33000651AS | 3TB | CMR | 150 | Link |
| $50.48 | Seagate Seagate, Built-in HDD 3TB SATA 6.0 GB/S 5900rpm MB, ST3000VN000 ST3000VN000 | 3TB | CMR | 151 | Link |
| $55 | WD WD WD20EZAZ Blue 2TB 5400RPM Class SATAIII 256MB 3.5" Desktop Hard Drive wd20ezaz | 2TB | SMR | 96 | Link |
| $55.16 | seagate NUJDCNO 4TB 6TB 8TB 12TB 14TB 16TB 3.5''' Inch Enterprise HDD 7200RPM SATA 6Gbps 256MB Cache Internal HDD(12TB ST12000NM0558) ST12000NM0558 | 12TB | CMR | 662 | Link |
| $59.5 | WD Western Digital 2TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EFRX WD20EFRX | 2TB | CMR | 106 | Link |
| $63.5 | WD Western Digital 1TB WD Purple Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD - SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD10PURZ WD10PURZ | 1TB | CMR | 64 | Link |
| $63.77 | WD Western Digital Red Pro 4TB 3.5-Inch 7200rpm 64MB Cache NAS Hard Drive (WD4002FFWX) WD4002FFWX | 4TB | CMR | 255 | Link |
| $68.67 | Seagate Seagate Barracuda ST6000DMA03 3.5 Inch 6000 GB Series ATA III Hard Drive st6000dma03 | 6TB | SMR | 412 | Link |
| $69 | WD Western Digital 1TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD10EZRZ wd10ezrz | 1TB | CMR | 48 | Link |
| $71.24 | WD NUJDCNO 1-4TB Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 128 MB Cache, 3.5" -WD40EFZX(WD20EFZX(2TB)) WD20EFZX | 2TB | CMR | 106 | Link |
| $77.25 | WD Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB SATA III 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Internal Desktop Hard Drive - WD2002FAEX WD2002FAEX | 2TB | CMR | 140 | Link |
| $80.29 | Seagate Seagate ST31000528AS 1TB Hard Drive ST31000528AS | 1TB | CMR | 80 | Link |
| $83 | WD WD102KFBX Hard Disk Drive, 10TB Red Pro NAS Hard Drive WD102KFBX | 10TB | CMR | 286 | Link |
| $85.2 | Seagate Tucus Multitool Accessories - ST4000VN008 4TB SATA 5.9K 3.54inch 64MB Ensure in box. Promised to send in ST4000VN008 | 4TB | CMR | 341 | Link |
| $91.88 | WD Western Digital 1TB WD Gold Enterprise Class Internal Hard Drive - 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 128 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD1005FBYZ WD1005FBYZ | 1TB | CMR | 92 | Link |
| $93 | WD 2PR7551 - WD Red WD10EFRX 1 TB 3.5quot; Internal Hard Drive WD10EFRX | 1TB | CMR | 88 | Link |
| $99.99 | WD Western Digital WD WD1003FZEX 1TB 3.5IN Internal HD TF3650 1 TB WD1003FZEX | 1TB | CMR | 83 | Link |
| $110 | Seagate Seagate ST3500418AS 500GB Hard Drive ST3500418AS | 500GB | cmr | 40 | Link |
| $117.94 | WD Western Digital WD5003AZEX 500GB 7.2K RPM SATA-6GB/s 64MB 3.5" HDD WD5003AZEX | 500GB | CMR | 47 | Link |
| $126.2 | Toshiba Toshiba P300 500GB 7200RPM 3.5" SATA HDD 'Bulk' (HDWD105UZSVA) HDWD105UZSVA | 500GB | CMR | 63 | Link |
| $178.13 | WD Western Digital WD3200AAJS 320GB Hard Drive WD3200aajs | 320GB | CMR | 29 | Link |
| $299.55 | Seagate Generic Moimi Remote Control - 9RZ168-047 WHD721-80C 9RZ168-197 CSL-G ST91000640NS 1TB Can Provide Goods Photos 100% in BOX ST91000640NS | 1TB | CMR | 271 | Link |
What is the cost of 320GB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £26.95 [UK] $29.42 [US]
What is the cost of 500GB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £14.99 [UK] $39.99 [US]
What is the cost of 640GB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £121.17 [UK] $30.36 [US]
What is the cost of 1TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £22.99 [UK] $30 [US]
What is the cost of 2TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £39.99 [UK] $39.99 [US]
What is the cost of 3TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £63.09 [UK] $43.99 [US]
What is the cost of 4TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £67.99 [UK] $75 [US]
What is the cost of 6TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £110.99 [UK] $79.99 [US]
What is the cost of 8TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £118 [UK] $112.98 [US]
What is the cost of 10TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £169.89 [UK] $194.77 [US]
What is the cost of 12TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £145.61 [UK] $195 [US]
What is the cost of 14TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £219.06 [UK] $420 [US]
What is the cost of 16TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £219.99 [UK] $315.1 [US]
What is the cost of 18TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £283.99 [UK] $345.99 [US]
What is the cost of 20TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £422.72 [UK] $349.99 [US]
What is the cost of 22TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £526.92 [UK] $501.05 [US]
What is the cost of 24TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £614.96 [UK] $522.47 [US]
What is the cost of 8GB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £159.2 [UK]
What is the cost of 250GB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £46.2 [UK]
What is the cost of 750GB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £109 [UK]
What is the cost of 1.5TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £92.03 [UK]
What is the cost of 5TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is £173.64 [UK]
How much can 320GB hold?
320GB can hold around
106667 MP3 songs
OR 64000 5MB Photos
OR 21333 FLAC audio files
OR 457 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 38 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 6 Blu-ray
OR 0.32 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 500GB hold?
500GB can hold around
166667 MP3 songs
OR 100000 5MB Photos
OR 33333 FLAC audio files
OR 714 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 59 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 10 Blu-ray
OR 0.5 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 640GB hold?
640GB can hold around
213333 MP3 songs
OR 128000 5MB Photos
OR 42667 FLAC audio files
OR 914 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 75 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 13 Blu-ray
OR 0.64 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 1TB hold?
1TB can hold around
333333 MP3 songs
OR 200000 5MB Photos
OR 66667 FLAC audio files
OR 1429 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 118 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 20 Blu-ray
OR 1 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 2TB hold?
2TB can hold around
666667 MP3 songs
OR 400000 5MB Photos
OR 133333 FLAC audio files
OR 2857 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 235 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 40 Blu-ray
OR 2 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 3TB hold?
3TB can hold around
1000000 MP3 songs
OR 600000 5MB Photos
OR 200000 FLAC audio files
OR 4286 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 353 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 60 Blu-ray
OR 3 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 4TB hold?
4TB can hold around
1333333 MP3 songs
OR 800000 5MB Photos
OR 266667 FLAC audio files
OR 5714 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 471 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 80 Blu-ray
OR 4 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 6TB hold?
6TB can hold around
2000000 MP3 songs
OR 1200000 5MB Photos
OR 400000 FLAC audio files
OR 8571 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 706 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 120 Blu-ray
OR 6 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 8TB hold?
8TB can hold around
2666667 MP3 songs
OR 1600000 5MB Photos
OR 533333 FLAC audio files
OR 11429 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 941 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 160 Blu-ray
OR 8 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 10TB hold?
10TB can hold around
3333333 MP3 songs
OR 2000000 5MB Photos
OR 666667 FLAC audio files
OR 14286 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 1176 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 200 Blu-ray
OR 10 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 12TB hold?
12TB can hold around
4000000 MP3 songs
OR 2400000 5MB Photos
OR 800000 FLAC audio files
OR 17143 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 1412 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 240 Blu-ray
OR 12 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 14TB hold?
14TB can hold around
4666667 MP3 songs
OR 2800000 5MB Photos
OR 933333 FLAC audio files
OR 20000 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 1647 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 280 Blu-ray
OR 14 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 16TB hold?
16TB can hold around
5333333 MP3 songs
OR 3200000 5MB Photos
OR 1066667 FLAC audio files
OR 22857 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 1882 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 320 Blu-ray
OR 16 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 18TB hold?
18TB can hold around
6000000 MP3 songs
OR 3600000 5MB Photos
OR 1200000 FLAC audio files
OR 25714 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 2118 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 360 Blu-ray
OR 18 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 20TB hold?
20TB can hold around
6666667 MP3 songs
OR 4000000 5MB Photos
OR 1333333 FLAC audio files
OR 28571 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 2353 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 400 Blu-ray
OR 20 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 22TB hold?
22TB can hold around
7333333 MP3 songs
OR 4400000 5MB Photos
OR 1466667 FLAC audio files
OR 31429 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 2588 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 440 Blu-ray
OR 22 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 24TB hold?
24TB can hold around
8000000 MP3 songs
OR 4800000 5MB Photos
OR 1600000 FLAC audio files
OR 34286 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 2824 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 480 Blu-ray
OR 24 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 8GB hold?
8GB can hold around
2667 MP3 songs
OR 1600 5MB Photos
OR 533 FLAC audio files
OR 11 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 1 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 0 Blu-ray
OR 0.01 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 250GB hold?
250GB can hold around
83333 MP3 songs
OR 50000 5MB Photos
OR 16667 FLAC audio files
OR 357 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 29 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 5 Blu-ray
OR 0.25 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 320GB hold?
320GB can hold around
106667 MP3 songs
OR 64000 5MB Photos
OR 21333 FLAC audio files
OR 457 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 38 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 6 Blu-ray
OR 0.32 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 500GB hold?
500GB can hold around
166667 MP3 songs
OR 100000 5MB Photos
OR 33333 FLAC audio files
OR 714 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 59 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 10 Blu-ray
OR 0.5 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 640GB hold?
640GB can hold around
213333 MP3 songs
OR 128000 5MB Photos
OR 42667 FLAC audio files
OR 914 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 75 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 13 Blu-ray
OR 0.64 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 750GB hold?
750GB can hold around
250000 MP3 songs
OR 150000 5MB Photos
OR 50000 FLAC audio files
OR 1071 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 88 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 15 Blu-ray
OR 0.75 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 1TB hold?
1TB can hold around
333333 MP3 songs
OR 200000 5MB Photos
OR 66667 FLAC audio files
OR 1429 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 118 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 20 Blu-ray
OR 1 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 1.5TB hold?
1.5TB can hold around
500000 MP3 songs
OR 300000 5MB Photos
OR 100000 FLAC audio files
OR 2143 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 176 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 30 Blu-ray
OR 1.5 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 2TB hold?
2TB can hold around
666667 MP3 songs
OR 400000 5MB Photos
OR 133333 FLAC audio files
OR 2857 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 235 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 40 Blu-ray
OR 2 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 3TB hold?
3TB can hold around
1000000 MP3 songs
OR 600000 5MB Photos
OR 200000 FLAC audio files
OR 4286 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 353 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 60 Blu-ray
OR 3 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 4TB hold?
4TB can hold around
1333333 MP3 songs
OR 800000 5MB Photos
OR 266667 FLAC audio files
OR 5714 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 471 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 80 Blu-ray
OR 4 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 5TB hold?
5TB can hold around
1666667 MP3 songs
OR 1000000 5MB Photos
OR 333333 FLAC audio files
OR 7143 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 588 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 100 Blu-ray
OR 5 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 6TB hold?
6TB can hold around
2000000 MP3 songs
OR 1200000 5MB Photos
OR 400000 FLAC audio files
OR 8571 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 706 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 120 Blu-ray
OR 6 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 8TB hold?
8TB can hold around
2666667 MP3 songs
OR 1600000 5MB Photos
OR 533333 FLAC audio files
OR 11429 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 941 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 160 Blu-ray
OR 8 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 10TB hold?
10TB can hold around
3333333 MP3 songs
OR 2000000 5MB Photos
OR 666667 FLAC audio files
OR 14286 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 1176 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 200 Blu-ray
OR 10 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 12TB hold?
12TB can hold around
4000000 MP3 songs
OR 2400000 5MB Photos
OR 800000 FLAC audio files
OR 17143 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 1412 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 240 Blu-ray
OR 12 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 14TB hold?
14TB can hold around
4666667 MP3 songs
OR 2800000 5MB Photos
OR 933333 FLAC audio files
OR 20000 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 1647 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 280 Blu-ray
OR 14 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 16TB hold?
16TB can hold around
5333333 MP3 songs
OR 3200000 5MB Photos
OR 1066667 FLAC audio files
OR 22857 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 1882 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 320 Blu-ray
OR 16 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 18TB hold?
18TB can hold around
6000000 MP3 songs
OR 3600000 5MB Photos
OR 1200000 FLAC audio files
OR 25714 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 2118 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 360 Blu-ray
OR 18 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 20TB hold?
20TB can hold around
6666667 MP3 songs
OR 4000000 5MB Photos
OR 1333333 FLAC audio files
OR 28571 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 2353 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 400 Blu-ray
OR 20 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 22TB hold?
22TB can hold around
7333333 MP3 songs
OR 4400000 5MB Photos
OR 1466667 FLAC audio files
OR 31429 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 2588 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 440 Blu-ray
OR 22 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 24TB hold?
24TB can hold around
8000000 MP3 songs
OR 4800000 5MB Photos
OR 1600000 FLAC audio files
OR 34286 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 2824 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 480 Blu-ray
OR 24 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
Actual size of 320GB drive?
320GB HDD can have around 298 GB usable storage space
Actual size of 500GB drive?
500GB HDD can have around 466 GB usable storage space
Actual size of 640GB drive?
640GB HDD can have around 596 GB usable storage space
Actual size of 1TB drive?
1TB HDD can have around 931 GB usable storage space
Actual size of 2TB drive?
2TB HDD can have around 1.863 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 3TB drive?
3TB HDD can have around 2.794 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 4TB drive?
4TB HDD can have around 3.725 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 6TB drive?
6TB HDD can have around 5.588 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 8TB drive?
8TB HDD can have around 7.451 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 10TB drive?
10TB HDD can have around 9.313 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 12TB drive?
12TB HDD can have around 11.176 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 14TB drive?
14TB HDD can have around 13.039 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 16TB drive?
16TB HDD can have around 14.901 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 18TB drive?
18TB HDD can have around 16.764 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 20TB drive?
20TB HDD can have around 18.626 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 22TB drive?
22TB HDD can have around 20.489 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 24TB drive?
24TB HDD can have around 22.352 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 8GB drive?
8GB HDD can have around 7 GB usable storage space
Actual size of 250GB drive?
250GB HDD can have around 233 GB usable storage space
Actual size of 320GB drive?
320GB HDD can have around 298 GB usable storage space
Actual size of 500GB drive?
500GB HDD can have around 466 GB usable storage space
Actual size of 640GB drive?
640GB HDD can have around 596 GB usable storage space
Actual size of 750GB drive?
750GB HDD can have around 698 GB usable storage space
Actual size of 1TB drive?
1TB HDD can have around 931 GB usable storage space
Actual size of 1.5TB drive?
1.5TB HDD can have around 1.397 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 2TB drive?
2TB HDD can have around 1.863 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 3TB drive?
3TB HDD can have around 2.794 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 4TB drive?
4TB HDD can have around 3.725 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 5TB drive?
5TB HDD can have around 4.657 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 6TB drive?
6TB HDD can have around 5.588 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 8TB drive?
8TB HDD can have around 7.451 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 10TB drive?
10TB HDD can have around 9.313 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 12TB drive?
12TB HDD can have around 11.176 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 14TB drive?
14TB HDD can have around 13.039 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 16TB drive?
16TB HDD can have around 14.901 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 18TB drive?
18TB HDD can have around 16.764 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 20TB drive?
20TB HDD can have around 18.626 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 22TB drive?
22TB HDD can have around 20.489 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 24TB drive?
24TB HDD can have around 22.352 TB usable storage space
How do I find the actual hard drive size?
The hard drive capacity calculation method of the Manufacturer is: 120GB=120,000MB=120,000,000KB=120,000,000,000 bytes; while the hard drive capacity calculation method of is: 120,000,000,000 bytes/1024=117,187,500KB/1024=114, 440.9MB/1024=111.8GB.
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SPECTACULAR PRO level explanation!
For us puny mortal consumers closely listening —this was enterprisely illuminating… and frankly, Drivine. ????✨
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Is this really relevant now with the price of SSD’s coming down? Could we have an update with M2 and Esata SSD’s?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I usually go for bigger drives because the cost of smaller drives is always much higher per TB, I generally look for a cost of 11-12 USD or 16-17 CAD per TB as a good value I paid about that for 2 18TB x18 EXOS drives One for my NAS and one for my Desktop/Workstation a few years back from server part deals before they raised the prices up so high it was not worth it anymore. I also do not need redundancy since the data on my DIY NAS is all just media on Jellyfin and some files I have backed up elsewhere. It’s also got a 500GB SSD cache just for good measure.
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Man, please, say that: NNNN(clack)iccce! (8D
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Plot twist, they were secretly “refurbished”
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
There is a huge difference missing between exos and ironwolf pro
Exos is delivered as is, ironwolf pro come with the health monitor feature and a several year free data recovery promise in warranty case
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Is this info still accurate in 2025?
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Right now I am buying off used 500GB HDDs off local market and building a 12 disk array. Works out quite cheap and enough supply is available to buy extra as spare. I am doing this not because I prefer 500GB but because the price is very cheap and available in plenty. I switch it on only twice in a week for taking backups, so small drives doesnt matter much.
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The entire point of having a NAS is max porn storage so I’m going 28TB drives! YOLO
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Remember how processors became more powerful ? Not by increasing processing power per processor, but by increasing number of processors, I.E. cores. Same with the disks: more smaller disks, configured as RAID volumes, with redundancy and striping, managed by hardware accelerated controllers where required.
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Thanks
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As a sysadmin friend told me: it all comes down about price – think how much are you willing to pay in case your RAID goes down.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
A lot of hand waving about nothing. The best way to do it is start with a 4 bay or more NAS, and buying 2 of the largest drives you can afford. Run that in RAID 1 (mirroring) until you fill it up. Then add another matching sized drive and switch to RAID 5 or SHR, your space will double. Run that till you fill it up and add one more matching sized drive. Now you’re at max capacity of the array (for a 4 bay) and you fill that up. Then you either buy a NAS with more bays, or you start swapping drives out for larger drives.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
You talk about enterprise being noisier but then you have tested the synology hat500 vs both red pro + IronWolf pro and Ultrastar + exos, finding the synology equal to both red pro and Ultrastar which should mean those two WD driver are equally loud? Wouldn’t that make NAS drives equal to enterprise in loudness? Which would make the enterprise pain better?
Maybe the noise argument only applies to consumer drives vs NAS/enterprise? Or even just to 5400rpm? Or maybe # of platters is the only factor?
Without answering these questions that segment in the video just adds to the noise (pun intended)
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I’m new to this. I get how 2 18TB drives equals 1 18TB RAID. I don’t get how 4 6TB drives equal 1 18TB RAID. To me, that only makes sense as a 12 TB RAID. How can one 6 TB drive manage to play defense for 3 entire drives of the same size? Wouldn’t there have to be SOME data loss in the event of a drive failure? I’ve yet to see anything actually explain how this magic works.
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parity is for losers, YOLO
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Great video, one point missed is capacity / money spent. with some drives you get more per dollar spent then with others
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I think the obveous answer is more big hard drives. – last year I put together a 36 bay server chasis, currently with 3x 8 disk raidz2 vdevs (2 16tb and 1x 14tb), and I’ve got room for 1 more vdev worth of disks to expand.
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6TB HDD seems to be the sweet spot on sound cost and power use.
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I personally prefer a few large capacity drives. Get a NAS with multiple bays and buy 2 or 3 16TB drives. When you need more storage buy another drive and add it to the pool. Drives also get cheaper over time.
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Most pro drives have slightly higher performance I think?
I know they’ve done a lot of rebranding where stuff like the segatte beracudda and western digital blue which are kinda crap budget basic hard drives are being marketed as mainstream.
If that’s your reference point yeah it makes sense. But those are budget, and normal consumer devices exist above that, and then above that is pro and enterprise stuff like the segate exos, or the wd hellistar
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They tend to basically be the same specs but pro drives do tend to be ever so slightly faster. And both are usually rated for the same endurance but sometimes enterprise drives are rated higher.
Also, pro drives are a lot quieter while enterprise drives sound pretty awful. They sound like they’re broken by default since in a data center it doesn’t matter and other things are much louder.
If you can go pro drives. If data integrity are key and noise doesn’t matter like in a far away nas go enterprise. I like enterprise because you get pro level performance but you can get them very very cheap buying those they made but didn’t sell or buying used ones especially if it’s not mission critical like a mass game drive.
And you can buy 3 refurbished hard drives for the price of 1 new. If you just have a parity of raid 1 so for for a 4 bay nas you could have 2 die on you at the exact same time and not lose data. RAID 1 also is very easy on a cpu.
I’d feel pretty safe having a mass backup of 2 refurbished or lightly used enterprise drives both having the same data. I use ssd anyways but I have some old hard drives so I just use those as backups expecting they’ll die any day now.
All things with moving parts die. Don’t expect more than 5 years out of a new hard drive.
And the scary thing about buying a bunch of new hard drives is hard drives tend to fail at the same time. By getting refurbed and lightly used you’re getting different dates. Also a good company like server part deals will actually do a 30 hour burn in to confirm they work even on open box (you can ask that they don’t) but it guarantees you don’t get a bad drive on arrival which happens all the time with new drives.
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They tend to basically be the same specs but pro drives do tend to be ever so slightly faster. And both are usually rated for the same endurance but sometimes enterprise drives are rated higher.
Also, pro drives are a lot quieter while enterprise drives sound pretty awful. They sound like they’re broken by default since in a data center it doesn’t matter and other things are much louder.
If you can go pro drives. If data integrity are key and noise doesn’t matter like in a far away nas go enterprise. I like enterprise because you get pro level performance but you can get them very very cheap buying those they made but didn’t sell or buying used ones especially if it’s not mission critical like a mass game drive.
And you can buy 3 refurbished hard drives for the price of 1 new. If you just have a parity of raid 1 so for for a 4 bay nas you could have 2 die on you at the exact same time and not lose data. RAID 1 also is very easy on a cpu.
I’d feel pretty safe having a mass backup of 2 refurbished or lightly used enterprise drives both having the same data. I use ssd anyways but I have some old hard drives so I just use those as backups expecting they’ll die any day now.
All things with moving parts die. Don’t expect more than 5 years out of a new hard drive.
And the scary thing about buying a bunch of new hard drives is hard drives tend to fail at the same time. By getting refurbed and lightly used you’re getting different dates. Also a good company like server part deals will actually do a 30 hour burn in to confirm they work even on open box (you can ask that they don’t) but it guarantees you don’t get a bad drive on arrival which happens all the time with new drives.
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Speed vs heat/noise/power consumption
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Like you may mention this yourself, but the funny thing is that if your building your own NAS ITX cases are actually more expensive, ITX motherboards are more expensive, so when building your own NAS is actually often the same price or cheaper to have the ability to have more drives, but that comes at the cost of the cases not being made to be compact so they do take up more space.
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To save everyone a lot of time: Here’s what chatGPT had to say about this :
More Drives vs. Bigger Disks for NAS
Factor More Drives Bigger Disks
Performance More drives = higher IOPS & throughput (RAID benefits) Fewer drives = less overall performance
Redundancy Better redundancy with RAID (e.g., RAID 5/6/10) Fewer drives = Higher risk of multiple failures
Capacity Growth Easier to expand by adding drives (if NAS supports it) Can be limiting unless you replace all drives
Power Usage More drives consume more power Fewer drives use less power
Cost Efficiency More small drives can be cost-effective at times Bigger drives may have a lower $/TB cost
Failure Risk More drives = higher chance of individual failures Fewer drives, but longer rebuild times if one fails
RAID Rebuild Time Faster rebuilds (especially in RAID 5/6) Longer rebuilds = higher risk of failure during recovery
General Recommendations:
If you prioritize performance & redundancy, go with more drives (e.g., RAID 10, RAID 6).
If you want higher capacity with fewer slots, use bigger disks.
If you have limited NAS bays, opt for the largest disks you can afford.
If your NAS supports ZFS (like TrueNAS), more drives help with redundancy and performance.
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Big drives are good until you go full retard and use some 20tb drives then one fails and you wait week for array rebuild and in the meantime next fails
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Just shy of two minutes in, and already something needs addressing.
IronWolf drives are currently more expensive than the more capable Exos drives of the same capacity. Always check between NAS and enterprise versions of a particular brand before choosing, though don’t go with standard NAS for WD because of SMR (which I’m sure will be covered at a later point in this video).
I guess the main point is, when in doubt, look for enterprise versions of a drive first, then see if the NAS versions are cheaper. Then make sure those NAS versions don’t have some crippling drawback like SMR.
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Hi 🙂 Can you share what NAS would you advise to be used with 2 Seagate EXOS 7E10 drives? Thank you!
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Is another one coming this was great 🙂
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Many smaller drives in raid config require a more expensive NAS with more HDD slots and also uses more power than a couple of big HDDs. You can even run single large HDD 24/7 with scheduled rsync tasks to avoid using the second drive too much and extend it’s lifetime. In most home NAS cases you don’t need 24/7 access to the NAS, as it’s mostly there to provide media streaming when you’re free after work. And for this specific use case a couple of larger disks in raid1 or noraid with rsync makes more sense and helps to reduce electricity bills.
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I’ve been researching NAS for a while, and when I build one, it will be big.
For now, i have a single 20tb hdd, in a single bay enclosure.
I only put 4k video of which I have a low res back up, and once I’m ready to build the nas, ill transfer everything over.
I just have to cross my fingers between now and then 🙂
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Might add some of the refurbished drives from Amazon or perhaps other locations that people might trust to save even more cash for those who might spend the extra on redundancy
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which are more noisy? enterprise or pro?
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everything’s good until drive crashes, what is the best way to backup in 2024 on a measly budget?
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I’m looking at getting a DAS, I guess this info still applies
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Skip to 3:13 for the actual video.
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Do you not have enterprise mechanical drives starting ~12tb that replace atmosphere with an inert gas that reduces sound, friction, and power?
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this is a pretty detailed overview of the advantages and disadvantages so everyone can make up their own mind
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More is faster and more reliable using a raid array with two drive redundancy
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I think you got most of it, what you maybe have not talked about is that if you use RAID 6 can you buy different drives at different times from different brands and over time slowly switching drive out as you see fit, you do never have to put the system offline, and you do never have to copy one large drive to a new one. In short, just feed a new HDD once in a while and the system will never go down.
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Why do you say TB every time? Why don’t you just say terabyte like a normal person?
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I started with 6 6TB. Wish I got larger drives. Cheaper per TB and more efficient. That said, I got dual parity for my important files and now 24TB drives for media that I can simply redownload.
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I can guarantee you that nothing is as cheap as used SAS drives pulled from servers. 12TB for 60-80 dollars is kinda hard to beat.
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I have 2 wd gold 16TB drives mirrored and love them. Quiet and responsive. Wicked warranty too.
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+ point for smaller drives, if 1 fails out of warranty. its cheaper to replace and getting that raid going again.
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Infomation is good but too much fluff in the video instead of providing succinct information. Maybe creating a script would help instead of rambling and repeating the same point again and again?
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Amazingly comprehensive research. Thank you!
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Easy answer…more big hdd is good
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so my solution after this video was: big and many. ????
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Virtualised NAS: 2 pools of 4Tb x3 with 60Gb RAM (read cache) + NVMe special device mirror (50Gb) for small blocks (<128k)
Prioritised sound so they are 5900 vs 7200rpm with rubber tray mounts
Checkout the Backblaze HDD failure rates (manufacturer, capacity) especially before believing the marketing for _Enterprise_ or _Pro_ drives
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what if i get refurbished bigger drives
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The only proper solution is more hard drives that are bigger. I don’t want to put smaller hard drives because it just eats up space that a bigger hard drive can go into instead.
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No 1 NAS rule, use different suppliers, NEVER take 2 or 4 from the same brand
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Who ever had to copy a 8TB that made strange sounds, understands Einsteins relativity theory
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A very informative video for sure.
I’m at the point where I am slowly upgrading my offline nas… my nas is a repurposed PC. It is a repurposed PC with space for 10 spinning rusts (with 5in adapters) and 4 2.5in drives.
And the kicker, is that it’s all sitting on windows storage spaces.
My problem is, I can not move to something like truenas or w/e because all my stuff is on storage spaces already. I do not have enough free space to do a local copy, and I couldn’t figure out how I could download from a cloud provider from truenas so I was kind of screwd and had to revert back to windows =(
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1. In a NAS, reliability is #1. These WD Red, Red Pro and WD HC enterprise drives are using helium. 2. Use CMR even up to 24TB sizes. When i bought my WD 10TB HC drives, at that time > 10 TB used SMR. SMR???? don’t rhink about it. #2 warranty. No matter what the price, check that your vendor is a certified vendor or WD may say YOU get no 5yr warranty. THIS IS BIG. Check before you buy. If the price seems to good to be true, duh…avoid these vendors.
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great video, thanks.
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Lots of good points for both sides but you didn’t answer the question:”Which is better?” Please make a video with the conclusion and thus the answer. If you don’t have an answer it is just clickbait and you should have chosen a different title.
That being said I liked thevideo.
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i have 2 slow ones. Is there any way to add faster ones but don’t make the whole system as slow as the 2 slow ones?
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22tb ironwolf pro and I still have 2tb left to fill lol
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I have HDD’s of various sizes. 2TB 4TB, 6TB, and 16TB.
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Stop saying froo !!!
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Another point to consider is when the inevitable drive failure happens…
How long does it take to rebuild the array?
My 12TB RAID5 array takes ~23 hours to parity check or rebuild a failed disk.
The bigger the disks, the longer the rebuild. If your bought a batch of disks from the same retailer at the same time (common thing to do)… will a 2nd disk fail during the rebuild?
So another tip – buy your disks from different retailers (2 from here, 2 from there kind of strategy)… hopefully you will get disks from different manufacturing lines or at least different batches to reduce the likelihood of simultaneous failures.
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They sell enterprise drives as a white box offer sometimes. The warranty isn’t as good but I think its the same drive.
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I would say more drives, more chances at redundancy and rpms somewhat combine with raid so the speed increases.
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Thank you for this video sir! Good as always
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Based on a 6 or 8 bay Synology system, whats the best size drive for reliability in Seagate drives..?
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I think the “redundancy” feature needs revision; replace it with minimum and maximum number of drives and a tick box if it needs to be an even count for raid 1 or 10.
When I enter redundancy “1” it just gives me large single drives which is no redundancy, (I actually want raid 1 or raid 10, but a single drive is wrong even for raid 5)
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More like *always* cheaper. In Scandinavia at least, I have never once seen pro drives cheaper than Ultrastars or the even cheaper Exos drives.
To me there’s absolutely no reason to ever get pro drives over the better enterprise drives.
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I have 20tb of games to clone and not sure which way to go lol
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Another specific advantage, related to the advantage of simultaneous reads & writes on multiple disks, is that you can tune a RDBMS so it purposely spreads data across multiple drives and even platters to optimize access, especially for searches.
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Sadly I’m seeing this a year late. Anyway, I don’t think you hit reliability as might relate to density. I’ve wondered if an ultra-high-density drive can really and consistently have as few errors as lower-density drives, and if it is much more sensitive to movement and shock.
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Dude your pool of teeth is degraded. You still have some redundancy but you need to add new teeth and resilver ASAP or you won’t be able to chew anymore.
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16tb drives is my sweet spot for storage to drive failure ratio
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Great video. One tip from lil ol me. First nas I ever used I bought 4 identical drives same make, model, style type. Unintended consequence was……. Same mtf. All the drives started failing close to each other. Next nas I made sure had a mix of different brands, different styles, mix of new and used. That should spread out the failures to different times
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???? Key points for quick navigation:
00:17 *???? Enterprise-grade hard drives can sometimes be cheaper than pro series drives despite better performance and durability.*
00:45 *???? Pro series drives often have lower performance, durability, and sustained performance compared to enterprise drives.*
01:14 *???? Examples show enterprise drives often cheaper, e.g., 20TB WD UltraStar at £394 vs. WD Red Pro at £469.*
03:22 *???? Pro series drives are subject to dynamic pricing based on demand and popularity of certain capacities.*
04:44 *???? Enterprise drives’ price per terabyte tends to decrease with higher capacities, unlike pro series.*
05:55 *???? Bulk purchasing by data centers leads to lower prices for enterprise drives due to high volume orders.*
08:41 *???? Enterprise drives are noisier and more power-hungry, designed for sustained industrial use, contributing to their cost efficiency.*
09:51 *⚙️ Pro series drives are quieter and consume less power, making them more appealing for home users despite higher prices.*
Made with HARPA AI
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Reason 5 : they may sell your refurbished prefail drive and pretend they are new ! When you buy an enterprise drive : CHECK your warranty ! Last 2 exos drive i bought as “new” felt like a scam. First one was reading thousand of hours of powered-on time on smart data and an unusually large number of recorded correctible error. When i plugged it in, it was not blank, there was an empty partition table. When you type the warranty number on seagate website, it was showing that the drive was almost 2 years old and warranty was not provided by seagate. Probably not seagate fault but a scammy seller for sure.
A second exos drive i bought as new, appeared as new with clean smart data, but i discovered after that warranty was unsupported from seagate. So i’m pretty sure i got a recertified one instead of a new one.
I’m unconfortable buying more because if the uncertainty. I had a few drive failure before but never bothered checking the warranty before it was too late, now i’m wondering if they were failing refurbished drives. There are many good price on them (france/europe), but I would be willing to pay a bit more to be 100% sure that the seller was not lying about providing new drives.
If you have recent exos seagate drives, go to seagate warranty page NOW and type the serial number (written on the drive label or just display it in your OS without opening your case).
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Thanks for the info!
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More drives is always better. If you have one disk drive, failure of that one drive and you could loose everything. With more drives, you can run a raid array. With options for mirrors drives. Options to strip across drives for incredible speed. Or data protection using a drive for bit checking to ensure data stays intact. Just swap out the bad drive. And then the ultimate, use them all together. Speed, reliability. So many options. More is always better.
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3:18 5:45
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Basically no reason. Just buy a Enterprise drive.
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Also remember: an active raid is not a permanent backup solution, it’s a stop-gap. You should always do regular backups to an offline media as well. I suggest a raid 5/6 for active use and backups then a mirrored external for offline. backups.
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Lol. More and bigger lol.
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The “not all eggs in one basket” is a bad figure for RAID5. Speaking from probability of losing your data, using LESS drives is better. Let’s say the drive failure rate is 3% per year.
– 2×6 TB RAID1: probability of losing ALL data (2 drives fail same year) = 0.03 * 0.03 = 0.09% per year
– 4×2 TB RAID5: probability of losing ALL data (2 drives failure plus 3 drives failure plus 4 drives) = 0.518 % per year
so the RAID1 is A LOT safer BECAUSE it’s using a double safe basket instead of multiple baskets that are connected and ALL fail if 2+ fail
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I’ve been playing with that RAID calculator while I listened to your analysis, and boy, now I do have a headache.
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Great video!
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Wd red are 5900 rpm until 6TB. They are much quieter. The 7200 rpm and above are noisier.
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thanks … well explaining
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You also can see that “only NAS drives” checkbox is uncheckable
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I prefer drives under 4TB as I find them to be more bulletproof. Bigger video and game files as well as AI models have caused me to now need large capacity drives. I been on a computer since DOS. My first PC had a 100MB IDE drive. I used that drive till IDE was fazed out and SATA became the standard. It never died nor slowed down. But it did sound like the Predator from the movie. I stopped using it cause IDE was just too slow. I am 40 years old and I have drives that I had when I was a teenager that still work fine today. The one that runs my pfSense is a 2.5 inch that has been in a laptop for about 6 years till it went in my Desktop for extra storage for about another 5 years and now runs my firewall. Its the only old drive I have that clicks. Been clicking for years now but will not die. But every singe 4TB or larger drive I get will need to be replaced at some point cause they are sensitive like lil girls.
Vibration or noise or impact or temps or looking at it too long will break it. I have spare large drives just in my closet. No small drives cause they just won’t stop. That 2.5 120GB has been in bumpy cars, dropped 100’s of times, bumped into, ran sitting upright, ran upside down, sideways, slanted, its older than some peoples children, and still clicks along. Its seen soo many video drivers, windows updates and PornHub. But 4TB and up…a loud noise might startle the thing and make it slap its forehead with the back of its hand as it faints. You gotta wake it back up in the controller. Shaking a grown man and he will most likely survive. Don’t do that with a baby. But HDD’s is different. You can shake the baby HDD’s but if you shake the big grown HDD’s they are dead dead dead. We are at a age now where files are big now so I am building out a server rack using large HDD’s not because I need a server rack but because the server rack needs a safe place to even be a server or NAS like Hollywood. PC’s are built different. They will save mkv’s and load steam in the streets of Brooklyn even after being dropped violently because a bee flew in your face and swatting at it and missing the bee made you smack the PC on to the ground. Them small capacity drives are built like 50 Cent
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are regular consumers allowed to buy just one enterprise drive? where can I get those???
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IME, few motherboards have more than 8 sata ports, and most around 4. It’s definitely a better idea to use the largest drives available. Also, I don’t trust these NAS. I take something with ECC RAM and put linux on it, currently btrfs raid-1 with triple redundancy. So it can lose up to 3 drives and not lose data. I trust the code and security updates from Debian way over those a NAS gets.
I play with datasets for AI, and have accumulated over 72 TB of data, half of which is probably not essential, but makes reproducibility easier.
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Not really a fair comparison comparing 2 large drives in raid 1 vs 3 smaller drives in raid 5. The smaller drives should be raid 10.
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“I hate seagulls!” While pointing up was too funny
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Gr9 vid man! Appreciate you going thru all of the various different perspectives and angles of all of this info! My plan is 6 drives, raid 6, at least 2 systems, 1 system as backup, 1 system live, large format drives, not going to be cheap, but want the redundancy of raid and mirror, allowing up to 2 drive failures at one time. Most likely just Truenas scale at this point. Subbed and liked! Keep up the great work!
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Things are even more interesting when looking at CEPH instead of a single NAS. Off course you need at least 3 servers and fast and dedicated network
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Wow man! ????
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I feel like I’m watching a Chinese film.
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Im still using the orginal drobo????
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Is it possible to set up my NAS to copy over from a HDD to SSD and paste back on shutdown? Or just work in parallel with the SSD as a main refference and buffer stack any writes that the HDD can’t keep up. I preordered myself a 6bay + 2 m.2 Ugreen NAS. I worry that the biggest size SSDs are 8TB, but I could add two and have 16TB, somehow copy that to a HDD. And any less important data on normal HDDS
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He’s math aint mathing you used 3 6TB’s when you need 4, 2 6TBs for 12TBs and need 2 6TBs for the extra 12TBs for redundancy.
So here’s the math you mess up on 1 6TB=158 1 12TB=258 right so 4 6TB=632 and 2 12TB=516 so you are spending 116$ more and I guess you didn’t see you have 1 lass drive when you’re doing this or YOU are trying to miss lead people on what you are doing here.
People double extra check you’re math when you are calculating.
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This isn’t strictly relevant to this specific video but I’m asking advice I’ve been given the task of assembling a moderately large NAS for a small company.
I’ve decided I am going to include cache but it’s the type to get I’m confused by.
It happens to be a Synology NAS I’ve gone for, and I noticed that specific types of M.2 Sara or nvme are recommended. It basically narrowed it down to WD Red, FireCuda 520 and Synolgy’s own 400 or 800Gb Nvme.
My initial reflex was that it was probably a good idea to go for Synology as it’s the same make as the enclosure but 400Gb of Synology SNV3410 Cache is about twice as expensive as 1Tb of WD Red nvme.
Why is this and is there anything that justifies this price difference?
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Great video but one thing I think you might like to cover in an update video is WARRANTY.
I recently had a pro drive frail (when I say fail I mean the cat knocked it off the shelf) and luckily it was under warranty, just.
Since then I am looking at enterprise drives as they come with a longer warranty.
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This is sort of a strange take imo… it isolates an issue that cannot really be isolated like that in reality. There are too many variables to take every factor in a generalistic way and have it be useful.
So in a way you have to establish a sort of brake point – above X cost the value of data isn’t enough to justify the cost of keeping it. What I mean is that in principle you should have a NAS by a different vendor using different drives in a different location, to your primary. Realistically most peoples data is not “worth” that kind of solution run privately. So the most important thing really is to determine what data is worth enough effort to really make sure it isn’t lost. Back that up across several solutions. Like USB sticks etc. The rest? Yolo 😉
If you want to mess with this stuff as a hobby, all the power to you, but do back the important stuff up some other way too. Preferably “off site” however you prefer to do that.
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Toshiba 16TB drives have been cheap for some time. Now the weet spot seems 18TB, but ymmv
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Bigger drives are better. But if the data is important to you, the cheapest way (if it is not for professional needs), get the biggest drive vs price you need, and have an extra one as backup you dont use except for backup. Keep that backup away from power in some storage shelves or so. Hdd you dont use last very long. Had a drive from 10 years ago that I almost never used and put it in ‘cold’ storage, so unplugged in a shelves, and worked like a Sharm.
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I’ll put this out there for anyone to answer – I contacted MSI to ask them and the reply was basically “No Idea – let us know how you get on”. I have an MSI Tomahawk Max II Mobo, running a 5600X and 32GB DDR4 3200mhz. Because I have a 4x Nvme 2TB boot, I only have 4 SATA drives available (I don’t bother with a DVD). I have added a 7 port USB 3.2 card. So I’m running about 72-76TB of drives. I want to expand that a lot. The internals are only 500GB – I want to take them to 18TB. Will my chipset support that? Even MSI said “Meh – Dunno”. Has anyone here done it? Its a very expensive experiment if it fails….
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I can’t hear you even with the volume at 100 it sounds like whispering.
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Can i use exos drive like normal drive in pc for storage?
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This calculator is USELESS. The “Best” it shows me is actually more expensive than the items I already have in my Amazon cart. 14TB drives for $180, NAS-only or not. I have some $100 Non-NAS drives 14TB & some NAS ones for $120. There’s no reason for that
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too long, waste of time and doesn’t answer the question
what is it better? 2 units of ssd 2T or 1 unit of SSD 4T?
of course when it comes to performance
and of course same brand and type, like sandisk ultra 3D
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I realize that bigger ‘pro’ drive would be more reliable, NAS class/designed to be better, that’s why their also more expensive to the identical desktop version… BUT to make these lager capacity cheaper, one way *would* be to make them in desktop class and loose that extra reliability you only pay on ‘pro’
Plus, to limit higher capacity to RED drives etc, manufactures get more money, and users don;t have a choice if its not there.
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Per gig is cheap now-a-days. However, i don’t think i should admit i still use Barracuda desktop drives in my NAS…
Their cheap, compared to RED drives and IronWolf.. Besides,from past experiences, they ‘whine’ allot in idle mode… Could of just been bad drive, but i doubt. These were 4TB drives
Also, power-saving can make up the difference between buying big drives… The presumption your making is NAS’s are designed to be on all the time and active all the time, which is not always true. There is always going sections of ‘idle’, time, (particularly after midnight),. If you have Scheduled backups going on a QNAP, your gonna allow a few hour either way before the next starts to prevent possible increased failure. In that time space, the dives will spin down after 30 mins (usually) thus saving power. If you work that over a given year, that’s still a bit of energy saved right there.
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When I first got a NAS for mass storage I got a 4 bay NAS and filled it with 4TB drives, it was nearly full after 4 years and I upgraded the drives inside it with 4 10TB drives.
I back up the most important data off on the NAS over the movies.
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Honestly I just have a bunch of 4tb red drives (every seagate I have ever bought failed within a year.. all of them..) My reasoning is its easier to replace a 4tb drive than an 18tb drive. Both in cost and in time. If I fail on a rebuild then I only loose 4tb of data. (I use unraid) I only backup what I can’t get back (pictures, home movies, etc. I can always re rip my dvds and such. 3-2-1 can get expensive otherwise. Especially with larger drives.
The little nas boxes seem pretty neat but frankly an old pc with an hba card is all you need. Buy unraid once (or use truenas, openmediavault, linux, whatever you prefer) works. I prefer unraid because of the way it works. Even if you fail on a rebuild you only loose whats on the failed drive. With raid you loose the whole pool. With nas boxes your upgrade path is kinda expensive. With other options you can just use your old pc when you upgrade.
My 2 cents worth. A lot of options. Depends on risk, time, and finances. Everyone’s mileage will vary.
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I enjoyed this video very much! Very informative!!! What I would have like to see is a graph that shows where the flipping point is to decide on more or larger drives, including the NAS itself.
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Well, if you follow technology you would know that ceramic glass memory has been proven to be a much smaller, cooler and vastly larger in size capability that the current SSD and HDDs. The Ceramic Memory Drives will be integrating over the next 5-10 years and the HDD will be as useless as the VHS and 8track tapes. So… no need to currently buy anything bigger than 200% of your needs, as you will be replacing them before you fill them.
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i went with 24 14tb refurbished drives for my nas
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It depends. If your nas it is just for fileserver and a few clients go foe bigger disk. If youf nas contains db’s and lot of clients, better more disk..
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8 20 Terabyte drives run in Raid in my new computer in a Themaltake case is where I am headed..
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you start with saying smaller drives are cheaper, and while they are cheaper as singles, if I were to buy a skyhawk 4tb its 21.5 per tb, a 20tb is 17.2 per tb.
an exos is bigger disparity, in favor of larger drives.
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The answer is simple: the best is to have lots of big drives!
Crib the storage perspective, of course, not the noise/power consumption.
Of course, with larger drives one should be very sure of the backups. And preferably use 2-disk redundancy to boot. It may be also result in higher ram usage.
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What if we go with a mixed approach? i.e. we get a large NAS, but start with as little large drives as we can and expand from there if necessary
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Select drives based on workload and never mix workloads.
If you’re recording surveillance 24/7 don’t mix that with other data. The surveillance activity is going to wear out drives faster. Putting other data into that mix is putting that data a risk.
So you might need bigger drives for surveillance and maybe smaller drives for your other stuff. Create separate arrays to separate the workloads and buy drives that make sense for each workload.
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I like it hard and big.
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You talk about the possible more possible points of failure.. but you miss the big point with Raid 5 vs Raid 1… raid 1, if one drive dies.. you take it out.. order a new one.. re-raid it when you get it.. with raid 5.. when one fails.. you have to get another drive and rebuild it.. b ut while that is going on.. the entire raid is OFFLINE.. so I normally recommend.. if you RAID 5.. order a spare to minimize the downtime…
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would be nice to compare RADIx vs throughput comparison to see in which case yo can utilize 1/2.5/5/10 Gbps….
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Here is how I do it: get the price divided by total capacity to get $/TB. That is the true cost of your storage. Then you can compare apple to apple on all of your drive options and pick the cheapest one.
Just note that there is a trade off. The more drives you have, the more power it is going to draw and the more points of failures there are in your system.
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I wait for special CPU with lots of PCIe lanes and very little CPU power consumption. They would need a verys special design, so i guess i will have to wait forever before i can get a Raspberry Pie like system with 128 PCIe lanes (remember, they don’t need to be active all at once, but you can’t reconnect them dynamically as they are point to point, not a bus).
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I choose both!
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Get as big as possible because they get full faster than you think and with small disks you run out of SATA-ports.
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I feel like power consumption… isn’t a factor. You’re going to consume more power. You should expect that.
Also noise… isn’t a factor. HDDs make noise. If you don’t want noise, don’t get HDDs.
Here are my take-aways:
1. Don’t just get 2 drives. Because you’ll end up using one for parity only and waste the space you could use.
2. Get 4-5 smaller drives at once so you can benefit from the performance boost. This also ensures you can have more useable space over all.
Unless you have the cash to fill out 4-5 18TB drives in your NAS, just get smaller drives. Then you can have better performance and more redundancy.
If you didn’t want high power consumption and lots of noise, you shouldn’t be buying a NAS and filling it full of HDDs.
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More small HDD is better, when you have many HDD bays. When you have HP Microserver with 4 HDD bays, you have to buy large HDD or additional microservers.
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I’d always lean towards getting a bigger NAS and smaller drives rather than bigger drives and smaller NAS. There’s more options in terms of backup and space options.
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More hard drives or bigger hard drives?
**MORE BIGGER HARD DRIVES!**
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More. That was easy. 😉
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You know what, I have been researching to having a solution for iCloud and Google One Drive because I am really struggling saving my image RAW files and videos. Then all on a sudden a photographer Tony Northrup brought the light of a NAS! I did not know what NAS is until couple of weeks ago! Then I started to do my own research and found you. I know you dont have smooth voice and attraction catching vocal gestures, but I find myself in you, I would want to express my research so that people can decide what’s best for them. I have found the same agony in you. You are like a tech big brother who wants to advice whats best for us instead biased brand marketing. I like your videos. Just wanted to pay my gratitude because I know, a small wish can boost up the moral energy a lot cause you have done so much research, night and day sleepless time. I know for the video but I know it’s for the people whom you want to help so desperately. Thank you so so much.
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More bays: allows expansion, means you can postphone an upgrade. Clarifying your data increase is also important. Duplicate finder is alao a good way to save money here.
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since when does England use dollars? WTF?
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More bigger HDs????
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muchas gracias hermano!
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I didn’t notice anything weird with microphone.
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hdd hum is something that drives me mad, I can stand the ticking etc but the hum goes right through me and i can hear it from one end of the house to the other.
So for now I’m just doing manual backups and using local storage, no networking.( I really dont trust networking much when it comes to viruses etc ).
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Cheaper more drives but what about power consumption? More watts consumed or is the same? Let’s say will last 6 years and had to pay more electricity ⚡️ during those 6 years that also impact
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HORRIBLE HEAD BEATING FOR 20 minutes?? No thanks.
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Would it be a good idea to have the redundancy drive twice as big as the primary drive so that when the primary drive fills up, the redundancy drive can become the primary drive and then get another redundancy drive twice as big as the new primarry drive and the original primary drive can be put in another location for storage?
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What about both, more big harddisc X3
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Having not watched the video… both have their benefits and drawbacks.
Benefits:
More means higher throughput can be achieved and higher levels of redundancy can be gained making the setup more resilient when it comes to disk failure.
Bigger means less power draw, less vibrations and less potential heat, less physical space used and more capacity.
Drawbacks:
More disks is more power draw, more vibrations more heat production and more physical space used. With the added redundancy comes less capacity as the redundancy means disks are there just to cover the situation where one or potentially more disks fail protecting you from data loss in those cases.
Bigger disks means less options for redundancy as you have less individual disks, less theoretical throughput and often higher cost because even though the cost per GB drops the amount of GB’s per disk is significantly higher.
In the end it does not matter much which one you pick as long as you first take some time and think about what your goal is with the setup maximum redundancy and not to concerned about max capacity well more disks is better. Maximum capacity and not to concerned about the data’s longevity less big disks is the best option. If your chosen NAS enclosure allows for more disks than you are currently using then less but bigger might also be a good option as it will allow you to grow the storage capacity over time.
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“I hate seagulls” <— ????
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OK Typed up a long post and then lost it all… So here is a short version.
Check the manufacturers HCL (hardware compatibility list) before buying drives. And if you don’t find a drive of the capacity you want then consider if it’s worth the risk. RAID controllers can be real finicky about drives.
You may feel SATA and SAS is mature tech and there should be no compatibility problems, but there are and there will be more. I’ve worked with (from memory) Adaptec, Areca, Raidcore, 3Ware and LSI. Sometimes the compatibility problems are blatantly obvious, but sometimes they are a creeping problem that takes time to develop, and they don’t get better with time. Sometimes a firmware upgrade of the drives or the controller can help, but there’s no guarantee that either is coming if you start out with incompatible hardware.
Also stress test the arrays before your start using them. Run every storage test you can think of on them, and then try some more. Check the RAID logs and take note of any warnings. You don’t want warnings! Not even the non critical kind. Make sure there’s as little vibrations as possible. Vibrations can play havoc with RAID arrays even if they are not strong enough to cause a head crash.
Also don’t use Shingled magnetic hard drives. They are a pain when used for RAID.
Temperature! A interesting paper published by a storage company probably a decade ago showed that the ideal running temp for HDD’s seems to be between 35 and 45 °C. Higher or lower temperatures showed increased failure rate. But don’t take this as gospel. However we do know that high temperatures are bad in general, and 40°C is a quite easy target for HDD’s.
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I don’t have that much data, so I end up just refreshing 2.5″ hdd every few years, and use the surviving older one as redundancy backup. as time goes on, newer drive will be cheaper with more tb, so if I don’t need those 16tb at once right now, I can just buy 4, 5, 5, 6 over the years whenever I need one. Currently have 500gb, 750gb, 1tb (dead), 2tb, 4tb, 4tb, 5tb, 1tb sata ssd, 2tb nvme
Sure multiple points of failure, but at the same time it’s not all eggs in one basket. I did once have 1tb hdd when it was huge in 2009, backup all my files, then trip on the power cable, making the drive dead, with all the 1tb data I just sorted. So nowI list down list of file I have in an excel sheet in gdrive. so if one broke down, I know exactly what data it stored. Especially if I have 1 hdd for 1 tipe of stuff. that one is for x, this one for y, this one for z. so I won’t need to find z in x.
Personal use 20tb should be more than suffice. which is probably 4x5tb or 5×4 tb. 450-500 usd probably. All my photos from 2010 is only around 400gb jpg. and since current hdds are 4-5tb or so, yea I can manage to save more copies in more drives.
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today we are going to answer an easy question…
10 minutes later…
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This is one of the most stupid videos I have seen .. you can’t compare a mirrored pair at one point and then say a stripped set is cheaper .. pointless
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If you have seriously important data don’t use a NAS use a SAN, lots of drives only generally gives a performance increase only for reading not writing, RAID on NAS devices usually has some restrictions based on implementation of the standards of the supplier vs on board raid provided by server manufacturers. NAS providers are great at vendor lock-in. Also make sure you buy drives compatible with the NAS as they don’t cover warranty issues otherwise. Generally pro series drives offer 5year warranty non pro are 2-3 years
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huge enterprise drives can go 300mb/s sequential while a 4 or 6tb drive usually cant even hit 200mb/s especially if they’re 5400rpm so fewer disks can be as fast depending on the size difference. Also, the power use is substantial when using more disks. disk power usage can be more than the rest of the entire system combined when talking about 10+ disks
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More mechanical parts are wearing down using smaller drives vs few less drives same as a car with three small gas engines vs one larger most likely one of three water pumps will fail before warranty
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This is absolutely through and incredible information. You just saved me HOURS of research
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clip starts after 1 minute intro. In 1 minute I explain the easy facts 😉
More drives: good for raid level 5 or higher. Where raid5 needs at least 3 disks. In case you need a specific raid level, you need the least amount of disks.
More drives: eventually more cache if you use drive cache. Depends on drives.
More drives: more performance if your controller is still not on its limit.
More drives: can increase performance, if the blocks you need are on different drives.
More TB: less power consumption compared to the same storage with more drives.
More TB: higher density = faster access (compared 1 disk with 1 disk, not the raid in summary)
More TB: overall costs could decrease (smaller NAS, maybe more TB per $$)
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I use 8 x 8tb as standard in my 8 bay nas’s, JBOD. Reason is, I use a 2nd and 3rd nas as backups, and if a drive fails I just copy the data onto its replacement, that way I just keep 1 nas running, otherwise 2 would be on all the time, I do a backup using goodsync once or twice a month, I tried synolgys drive sync, too automatic. I like the control of goodsync.
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Very short version… go for more drives. More smaller drives usually work faster AND they make less noise. My advise would be never to buy drive bigger than 8TB, larger drives come with a big drawback of noise. Also using more smaller drives and a drive failes its cheaper to replace and faster to rebuild.
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As of this month(August 2022) it’s actually cheaper per gigabyte to buy high capacity drives.
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Sooo,,, would you say that for my first NAS (Syn 220+) with one bay already filled (Seagate Ironwolf) 4TB drive, it would be absolutely fine _if not superior_ to instead of adding a 16 TB IronWolf Pro I get the Exos one of the same size? (Noise won’t make thát much difference for me, but it is in my room.) My two goals of the NAS are: storage (of currently about 6 TB video + 1 TB backup history), and connecting my LG C2 (OLED 4K 48″ 120 Hz) TV to it to watch videos (often 4K) from it?
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To what extent can you mix and match drives in something like a Synology, QNAP or Asustor system? I have only WD Reds because my original NAS was a WD. I was wondering whether I can use Seagates if one fails. I was also wondering a switch to a bigger drive would work. Say I have four 8TB drives and I replace one with a 12 or a 14. Does that work? What impact is it likely to have on performance?
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I had a slightly different experience from what is expressed here, though I’m not casting any doubt on the validity of the information. I have a Nimbustor 4, populated with 4x8TB, for 24TB of storage.
I went for 8TB because, at the time, it represented the best bang-for-buck and gave me a total capacity (24TB in RAID 5) that I was unlikely to exceed for quite a while.
The NAS itself represented the best box I could justify. Being four bay, it also gave me the opportunity to spread my expenses over a longer period.
When I originally set it up, it had two drives in it. It was kind of noisy but no more than I expected. When I added a third drive, the noise and amount of disc access was much greater than it had been.
Recently I upgraded to 8GB of RAM and added a fourth drive. The first thing I noticed was that the overall noise is far less than it was with three drives and almost certainly lower than it was with two drives. In fact, it’s got to the point where I rarely hear it.
This probably won’t be most people’s experience but it seems to me that either by luck or design, I ended up in a sweet spot. I can’t explain it but I can hazard a guess that this is the kind of setup the designers envisioned…?
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I only find the seagates enterprise drives are cheaper than the NAS drives, WDs seem to have it other way around, at least where Im at.
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I think a lot of the enterprise drives that trickle into the consumer market can also tend to be in batches, i.e. leftovers, overruns, supplier cleanouts from warranty stock, etc. There are deals to be found on them often, especially the size down and the two size down slots. When they go out of vogue they get dumped like hot potatoes from the bigger distributors (whatever they don’t clear from their main channels). Newegg, Amazon and any of the other physical storage connected resellers have clear advantages here as well as they get liquidated and surplus items as part of their business model.
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Can somebody please help me.
I have a QNAP NAS with 4 x 10TB SG IronWolf + a 500GB M.2 (cache) in a raid 6.
Sometimes drive performance seems to be quite slow (< 30MBytes per sec) If I add 1 or 2 HDDs (nas max is 6 HDDs + 2 M.2s) will it improve, reduce or not effect performance? Thanks <3
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At around 8tb enterprise hdds overtake consumer pro drives for price per TB. Under 8TB consumer drives are cheaper which I find an interesting phenomenon. No questions that enterprise drives significantly cheaper for 10TB+
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Buy Exos. I just picked up (2x) 8TB Exos for $281.10 total – tax.
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Very good video and explanation.
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I think its worth including hot and cold spares into the discussion too
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i love them i use them for my digital dvds.
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More bigger hard drives
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can we mix different sizes of HD, like 12tb and add a few 4tbs? thank you
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I dont think we should only look at size vs number but also failure rate. I would rather go with a disk that doesn’t fail on me that often then the one i need to buy a new disk every few years and rebuild the RAID.
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Instead of buying a simple 3 TB it’s much more fun to buy a bunch of 100 x 30 GB.
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If you have two large capacity drives and one of them fails…that’s a HUGE SLOG to replace in one hit. If you have lots of small drives and one fails it’s not going to hit you as hard when you suddenly have to get the replacement.
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currently my Media collection is currently under 3TB so I do not need a very big set up yet. Currently using 3 2TB reds in a raid 5. About to upgrade to 3 3TB drives in a raid 5 Then have a single 10TB HDD as a Back up.
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Would not want one with Helium because it would eventually leak out then it will fail.
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If you really wanted the best price of course you would buy used. But I get that there is no affiliate income in that suggestion. So I’ll just say it here.
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I started buying Enterprise drives a decade ago and couldn’t be happier. They have been very, very reliable.
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I say buy bigger drives, but don’t fill up your NAS day one, then you can more easily grow by adding drives as they become more affordable
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Both.
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I just built my own NAS after going through a 2-bay NAS and then added a 4-bay NAS. I built one with 18 HDs and it is much more expandable. I am using UNRAID and it has been great so far. It is much faster and I have so much more capacity. When I need more, I will replace some of my 6 TB drives for 12 TB drives.
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one point , is when one of your drives will die , is easer and faster to recover one 4tb drive than a 12tb drive , and you don t lose all your data just lose a part of your data , and you can come up much easer with 70 euro than 300 when you get a surpize dive falure ,
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What about the best of both worlds: lots of big drives?
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If you don’t need the speed consider using 5400 rpm drives. They are cheaper and tend to be more robust.
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Hard drive prices haven’t been making sense since many years now
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At this point, I’ve settled on the EXOS drives going forward for the capacity, cache, price, and warranty.
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Or, Dell T630 LFF server £350.
Used 2GB cache RAID controller £110
6x used 8TB HC520 drives, £70 each.
Needed a server as well as a lot of storage, so leaving out CPU & SSD upgrades.
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As an Arch Linux user, I was torn between buying an expensive (new) tiny RAID machine with 4 x new HDD’s or using an old (but free) monstrous 12 bay Supermicro server with 12 (free) smaller HDD’s.
Decided to go the Supermicro route. Have to admit, I’m way in above my head on this and have been dragging my feet for nearly two years now. In the end, I’ve decided that any form of RAID like setup is not for me. Don’t want to pay electricity (UK prices) on a server running 24/7. The beast can sit in the corner and be booted up once a week, whereupon I’ll do identical rsync (ext4) backups to two of the four nodes. Then following month do the same to the other two nodes. If I have a week when something of critical importance is created, I’ll rsync immediately. Also like the idea of each backup being completely isolated from the others.
I know my PC HDD will one day fail. However, given a choice between losing a few days of data or paying 24/7 electricity for RAID… I’m prepared to accept the former.
Thing is, I’ve never heard of anyone doing this with a four node machine, so maybe there’s a good reason not to. I like the idea of the sever being extremely heavy, as it’s less likely a drug addled thief would be able to move it, or even realize the drive bays are removable. Always thought those tiny RAID machines were too easy to tuck under your arm and walk away with. In fact, I might even bolt the thing down, as right now it sits on a table.
Could’ve gone with 4 x HDD’s and backing up via USB. However, that’s back to the hassle of pulling them out from a hiding place and connecting all those wires up. Plus, I’d need to buy large expensive HDD’s. Yep, I just like having four sets of backups.
Yes, fire/flood is a possibility, but still have a cloud backup for all essential documents. Like I said, I ain’t no expert or computer geek. Maybe it’s a daft thing to even consider doing…
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In 2004 I had 9 Seagate hard drives fail in a 2 week period and they were sequential serial numbers. When I contacted them about a possible issue with that batch they spewed out the corporate boiler plate response saying that wasn’t the case and that their hard drives were of very high quality blah blah blah. I asked for new replacements rather than refurbished ones but they wouldn’t do that either. I’ve never sold another Seagate drive since. I doubt the few thousand drives I’ve sold over the years that weren’t Seagate are missed by them but I also never recommend Seagate because of their piss poor customer service.
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The time to rebuild an array with 1 of several smaller failed drives verses the time it takes to rebuild an array with 1 of two large drives is important to me as a home user.
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I’ve had 7X 4TB Hitachi Ultrastar drives for my NAS since 2015, and still haven’t had one go bad on me. I’ve run it in both a RAID 6 and RAID 10 with a hot spare, and in both hardware and software (WSS) RAID modes, and recently bought another drive to make it 8 and did away with the hot spare, making it the storage for my backups. Still pretty reliable, but I wanted to replace it with SSDs. I’m a believer in minimum 6 drive arrays for NAS, for both performance and redundancy.
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I built two TrueNAS (was FreeNAS) using six 4TB drives each (4+2 ZFS2), back in the days.
I’ve been considering upgrading to six 8TB drives (4+2), but have also been thinking about four 16TB drives (2+2) instead.
Both get me about the same usable space (~32TB). Note less than 2 parity drives is NOT an option.
I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, but haven’t reached a conclusion. It’s a tough choice.
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I picked up 4x WD UltraStar DC HC550 16TB for my raid at just under $14/TB. I think I did pretty good.
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Nice video. Thanks. R.
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IF I “HAVE TO” BUY A BRANDED NAS BOX, I’d spend my money on the biggest NAS with the max # of BAYS possible. Cuz you can always buy cheap smaller drives at first, but if you get a small NAS and used up all your bays from the begining it won’t grow more bays in the future and expanding more capacity means you have to discard your smaller drives, and that is a drive doing nothing loosing it’s value as redundancy.
The question of more hdd or Bigger hdd its a wrong question. Why? because the purpose of a hdd is to hold data. So data security always comes first.
Product like 2 bays NAS are pointless, you can achieve that with any old computer or laptop laying around your house, hook it up to you network and you have a raid 1 (minimum) NAS, the rest is just SOFTWARE, heck if you like Synology that much you can use XPenology which is a hacked version DSM 6.2 and the new DSM 7.0 that can be installed in any computer. And if you think well my old computer consume a lot of WATT to be an Always on NAS, then find out the socket of your motherboard and buy the most efficient CPU on ebay. Like, I have an old i7 90W cpu, then get an i5 35W chip for $20 and it will be almost as fast as the fastest Synology box.
Then what is the appropiate rule to build a NAS. It’s pretty simple actually… you build it with the capacity you’ll need. A good rule of thumb is aggregate all your current storage cap in your house and multiply by 2 (chances are it took you years to fill them up). Most people without NAS, they won’t reach 14TB.
And this is how data centers are built, they buy by capacity and not expandability.
Second thing you’ll need to do is calculate how many disk you are willing to distribuite those “14TB”, always remember the more the better, cuz you will have more redundancy.
In my case I would go for used SAS drives on ebay, for one they are all 100% enterprise drives, and are 1/2 the price of SATA drives with the same Capacity, but that also means you need to build your NAS with a SAS backplane and a SAS HBA in mind. ie I bought 3 Dells R730 XD with 24 2.5″ bays, 24 cores, 256Gb ram ECC and it includes 24x 2.5″ inch 600GB 10k rpm sas drives. For only $900 ea. I bet you can get waaaay lower price if you go for r620
Now you can also get a r730 same specs but with 12x 3.5″ bays, there is one that comes with 12x 3TBs SAS drives a total of 36TB for $1400. Synology 12 bays costs $3000 and it doesn’t come with disks. Booooo
If you go to ebay, you can see SAS 3TB goes for as low as $15 ea and buy in bulk I found a 5x 3TB for $30 total LOL. Oh! and it’s free return, couple years more 6TB will be at the same price point.
And almost forgot, you can switch to SATA drive when you like. Cuz SAS hba with SAS backplane can take SAS drives AND Sata drives. Unlike most Synology NAS only accept SATA drives.
Of course power consumption is a problem but it’s like $25/mo I would gladly pay (cancelled Netflix and Disney Plus LoL), cuz you are dealing with a real server not only you learn new skills, and all the parts are super cheap. And you can always expand your server capabilities. Synology is moving to 2.5Gb and 10Gb as PREMIUM stuff… heck I’ve been running 10Gb like a decade ago. I moved to 100Gbps, not long ago, that’s 10GB/s!!! The cards costs like $150 ea and the switch costs around $600 for 32x ports of 100Gps, yes 32 ports. I moved all my nvme to boost the server storage, and all my terminals are all diskless because booting from network is almost as fast as having a local Gen3 nvme, and not to mention all the VMs and Dockers you can run.
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What’s the best HardDrive for HomeUsers (for Data, Video, and Surveilance)? …maby a Seagate Exos x16 (with 14TB) in a QNAP Turbo Station TS-464 8GB …….what do you think?
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I buy bunches of drives from broken computers. Dirt cheap, better for the environment and a failure doesn’t matter when you’re using RAID.
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TLRD; Because economy of scale. They make more enterprise drives over consumer NAS drives.
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Noise is really a bummer for me now. I went from 4x3TB red to 3x8TB iron wolf, and the noise is more than double, and far more annoying in character. Heat and power also way higher. For next upgrade I want 14TB plus disks, and they are all horribly loud. I want high capacity, but low noise, low speed, low energy, since I can have multi TB of NVMe cache.
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Very informative videos. You give info that is very relevant without beating around the bush. You make a good point about balancing out between the cost of NAS system and the actual storage. One option for anyone starting out could be to go for a smaller storage and then buy more/bigger HDD as the data grows and HDDs become more affordable in future, while investing in a NAS with more bays for future-proofing if really necessary. That also means hopefully sticking with the NAS with more bays for a longer time, given the initial cost.
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Thanks mate for the great info. I have a 5 yr. old TS-653A with 5 WD60EFRX and I’m stuck with 1gbps connectivity. I’d like to get at least 2.5gbps upgrade so I’m going to get another NAS with faster networking and use it as a staging NAS. I’ll add a 6th drive to my 653A and move it to my in-laws house and work out syncing between the 2 NAS.
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Nice Dreamcast sticker.
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I think the mistake people make with NAS and especially raid5/6 is they think its a backup and its not. Any important data still needs a backup, RAID5/6 yes can increase read/write speeds but its really about redundancy (meaning uptime), businesses need to maintain uptime but not home PC users unless Home users are hosting web, file, plex servers for others offsite to access.
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I have adopted this rule now; Any HDD capacity less than 1.5x what you can get for $200 on the SSD side, is to be considered obsolete.
Currently you can get 4TB SSDs for just north of $200, that means 6TB (1.5 x 4) drives are now the smallest HDD that is worth getting. 6TB HDDs are now $90, while 4TB HDDs are $60. Up to each and everyone to put their cutoffs though!
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Still not clear which is best ????????, so I bought a QNAP TS-1232PXU-RP-4G 12bay ($1475) and put in 12 x 20TB drives (Ironwolf Pro $329 each). After RAID 6 have 185TB available ????????2 x 10gbe, 2 x 2.5gbe network connection. Bought 13 drives to have a spare. Total cost before tax: $5752.
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I don’t buy Seagate – ever – crooks they are, different drives sold with the same SKU – some are from a modern Thailand factory, others are pieces of shit from an ancient Chinese plant…
Hitachi, Kioxia are decent companies, making excellent products
WD, well, Seagate bought them out – your mileage may vary, depending whatever they actually bother to ship you…
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16, 18, 20, 22TB>>>>Talk about putting your eggs in 1 basket!!!
Sad this guy doesn’t even talk about the difference from smaller drives vs larger drives platter technology and the difference in drive life expectancy and likelihood of drive crash.
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Smaller. Failed 2TB drive can take days to get the data back. Imagine the damage if you have to deal with big 12TB drive that failed. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. But if you can – get more and bigger drives. Spread the information around.
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Thanks for another great video. I was looking to get 5 x 16TB of disks for a new DAS/NAS system and the EXOS and UltaStar where both about $20 USD cheaper than the Ironwolf Pro and RED Pro per disk which for backup day were being offered at $249 each. Not sure if I made the right choice but I went with the EXOS. Hope it’s not too noisy. Plan to put these in a Synology 1522+. We will see. Enjoying your channel.
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RAID 10 with 4 hard drives seems like a good idea.
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Answer is simple, more bigger hard drives
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voltage is not equal to power consumption. watts is. you messed up the whole power comparison there. but i guess we get the point.
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26 minutes? Is there a short video where the question in the title is answered within 3 minutes?
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More spindles, faster, faster rebuilds, etc.
My 12 spinning disk array does 5gb a second. Monster.
With enterprise hardware
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I wonder how much more noise enterprise drives make.
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Make the comparisons on graphs and show the differences in value. The waving hand is a bit boring.
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he speed difference between more drives or not is one I have debater. I have an 1819+ and a newer 920+. The 920 CPU is about 50% faster, but the 1819+ had 6x HDDs, and i used the other 2 bays to run normal SATA SSDs as a RAID 0 cache, since the add on card for the 1819+ is really pricey for what it is. I ran PLEX on both and initially it felt like the 920+ was slower and stuttered more with larger files, however now there doesnt seem to be much of a difference. Hardly a scientific test but this is an interesting question. Not sure how to test it scientifically.
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my 4tb seagate barracuda went out, so im intrest in Xeos 8tb, im not using this for interprice but the cost of this one think is good,
do you recomend this one, just for storage and game…..
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I like this video but it never answered the question posted in the title. It laid out a lot of considerations, which is helpful, but never came to a conclusion. I still do not know if it is better to get a 2, 3 or 5-bay NAS. Near as I can tell it is a wash.
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You missed one point. Kinda. It falls in line with the performance aspect. the larger the drive the longer the rebuild takes on a failed drive. So a 4 or 6TB drive, depending on how full the prior drive was may take 3-8 hours depending on the speed of your system / controller. But a 20TB drive could very well take 24+ hours which in turn leaves your array in a vulnerable state for a second failure. BTW this is why NO ONE should be using RAID5 anymore. The happy medium for me is somewhere between 10TB-16TB drives. They offer larger storage, but with a reasonable rebuild time.
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You REALLY don’t want to run raid 5 with just 3 drives. You risk data loss when rebuilding the array.
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Another option is 8TB SSD drives. They are much faster, silent, don’t vibrate, use little power and are very reliable.
I’m not up on linux file systems or RAID wrt redundancy, but maybe 2 x 8TB and a 4 for error correcting, giving you 16? Just accept the risk given the greater reliability?
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Binging your content!
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Great information and I love the presentation. You are definitely not boring, even if some would say the subject isn’t the height of glamour. I bet you could be a stand up comedian too.
A lot of the useful stuff I have learned about NAS technology is from your videos. Nice one, thanks!
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It takes less time to rebuild the Raid with a smaller HDD. This would be an Argument for more smaller than fewer larger drives.
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I just bought WD Gold 20TB. Crazy fast Built-in NAND and transfer speed up to 500MB/s !!! and much less noise !! I always love larger drive than small one. Because you will save money to throw away small HDD.
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I’ve deceided to get a NAS for home use as a media server. I’m checking out a lot of your videos to make up my mind what I actualy want and need, your videos are great, very detailed and very good explanations of the usage and for whom that particular NAS would be of interest. Kepp it up….
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You don’t touch on the fact more drives you are using less data per drive at any write or read.
If you have 2 large mirrored drives, 100% of the data is processed through each of the drives. If you were to have the same capacity over 8 drives, the actual throughput is divided by 1/8th per drive. If you look at data loads of 300tb per year with an MTBF of 1,000,000 hours, the raid with 8 drives will last 8x longer.
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some of the bigger nas have addtional features as well that should come into determining the value proposition
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You should do a video on having multiple drives, vs bigger drives, and the energy costs overall, in difference.
Energy costs factor alot into this too, especially today with electricity prices for people.
Your right to do such a vid to point this stuff out, but you could of shown the energy differences also.
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I’ve calculated how many GB you get per dollar and looks like the larger sizes give you a much better bang for your buck (14-18TB drives):
SG IW:
1TB – $35 – 29 GB/$
2TB – $65 – 31 GB/$
4TB – $105 – 38 GB/$
6TB – $158 – 38 GB/$
8TB – $177 – 45 GB/$
10TB – $224 – 45 GB/$
12TB – $258 – 47 GB/$
14TB – $271 – 52 GB/$
16TB – $309 – 52 GB/$
18TB – $389 – 46 GB/$
WD RED PRO:
4TB – $140 – 29 GB/$
6TB – $173 – 35 GB/$
8TB – $215 – 37 GB/$
10TB – $245 – 41 GB/$
12TB – $253 – 47 GB/$
14TB – $270 – 52 GB/$
16TB – $298 – 54 GB/$
18TB – $349 – 52 GB/$
20TB – $419 – 48 GB/$
22TB – $551 – 40 GB/$
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I’ve been toying with getting an expansion unit for my 1019+ to get more drives or upgrading the current ones I have. 2 – 8 TB, 3 – 4 TB, 2 – 500 GB cache.
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Actually, I think in most case It depends on how many IO is on your motherboard
such as, if you have 4 SATA ports and you used 2, then you will soon realize if you buy too many low-volume hard disks, you will soon be out of IO to let you upgrade in the future
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i would have assumed that the enterprise drives would use less energy since energy consumption is very important to data centers
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I’ve got this idea recently.. In theory, what about using classic non-NAS type 2,5″ SATA SSD’s? For example four 2TB SSD’s in RAID 5? I know, it’s more expensive. But it’s silent, less power consumption and if I would have money for it? Just for home using, not really too much transfering data and important data will be backed up to external drive too. Is it there some statistics or something? What’s yours opinions guys? I have few data SSD’s in pc for long long time using by daily basis and they are immortal.
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Wow, you really went into this one eh. I actually like the seagulls!
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Maybe I’m on drugs or something because no one else is commenting on this, but in regards to the first segement “More HDDs Can Be Cheaper…”, your math seems all wrong. If a 18TB costs $389 and 3 6TB cost $158 each the total is $474. The 1 18TB drive is substantially cheaper. It seems to always be cheaper to buy 1 large drive than it is to buy 2 or more smaller drives to reach the same capacity. The one exception seems to be the 22TB RED drive. While its true that the TB per dollar increases the smaller the drive is, it doesn’t do so nearly fast enough to make buying multiple smaller drives worth it.
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For most home users, bottom-line .. use RAID 1. What you’re not telling the people is the difficulties in rebuilding a failed multi-disk RAID e.g. 5,6,10.
Multi-disk RAID 5,6,10,etc is when you need large storage capacities exceeding a single disk capacity. For example, large storage banks of video, photography, workgroups, etc.
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More drives is more performance is quicker to spin down is less power used. More competent nas can run server tasks or wake on lan or….using less power in total than a smaller nas can in your total setup.
Large drives take to long to rebuild to be used in anything less then raid 6
I rather have more points of failure then 2 drives that are the same type and age and then pray for 24 hours that the remaining drive works to rebuild the raid 1 set.
And ofcourse raid isn’t backup, always make back ups because if it goes terrible wrong you can lose all your data no matter what setup you have. A fire or flood doesn’t care about your drive size.
If you don’t put the nas in a place where noise isn’t a problem, use SSD if you use your nas constantly or time it so the drives sleep during the day.
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Thanks
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I too am a novice here, and found this incredibly helpful. Thanks so much for this from sunny Sheffield in the UK 🙂 I know you like QNAP, my Hi-Fi specialist suggest QNAP, but judging by security concerns from another of your videos QNAP v Synology, I had cancelled a 2 drive QNAP on Amazon, to rethink, and possibly have a 4 drive Synology. My Hi-fi specialist will only support if I bought a QNAP….. now that is very a difficult decision..!! Oh, and stop using big words.. lol.. ie, nebulous..!!
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I just received two new WD Red drives from Amazon. Each had ENTIRELY different packaging and different stock numbers. Same size drives.
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What happens if one buys enterprise class hard drives because of the lower price for external storage backup? You plug them once a month in on a SATA docking, update the backup and the let them sit for a month. By logic, being them more rugged they should last fine, is that so? I never understood if being engineered for 24/7 becomes a problem when the drive is used only occasionally
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the wd red pro and iron wolf are not enterprise drives. they are consumer nas rated drives. Ultrastars are Wd enterprise drives used to be Gold and Exos Drives are Seagates Enterprise hdd
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It would clearly help to get a better grip of this topic and your conclusions, if you would visualize e.g. the performance, power consumption etc. of the different SSDs., This way everyone could easyly see the sweetspot of the price and the number of drives. We humans are visually predisposed ????
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good videos, but i like it short and simple
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I’m back to simpler is better. Always did Synology Hybrid raid with 4 (Usually 4TB) drives. With my new 4 bay I decided on two Toshiba MG08 Series 16TB. I like it better.
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Why is it you have been making NAS news for so long and your microphone is still so terible…
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Great video dude.
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I’ve talked about this on my channel more and more and I feel like its a fact that its still now as much known as it should be, I hate seaguls.
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It depends on what you need… More I/O – IOPS vs. need for more space. You can’t really get both… Great video! I have done a lot of videos on this very topic…
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more disks = high power bill…
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It is important to also consider rebuild and restore performance. With a larger number of drives running RAID 5 or 6 there is a significant difference in rebuild time compared to rebuilding a mirrored array. Also there is a difference yet again when you compare something like a RAID 10 to a pool of mirrors instead. In the case of RAID 5, 50, 6, 60 and 10 your backup will be of the entire array. In the event that data loss actually occurs and you must restore from backup you are talking about restoring the entire size of the array that was lost. However, when using pools instead you can elect to restore only the data from the underline RAID 1, 5 or 6 that you lost. These are all important factors to consider when selecting how you want to build out your storage array.
Also I should mention that if you are going with a lot of drives it is also possible to hybrid nest the arrays in such a way as to maximize performance while also minimizing your restore from backup time and risk of inaccessible data. For example you could take two drives and place them in a RAID 0 then take two more drives and place them in a different RAID 0. Then you take those two RAID 0 arrays and Mirror them together. You create sets of 4 drives in this method that you then pool together. The obvious con to this is that you would ideally add sets of 4 drives at a time to your pool.
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This tool really highlights how the UK is paying more per TB than the US.
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The correct answer is more big hdds
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The biggest point you’ve missed is that the best way to shop us to first identify your risk tolerance, and then identify the workload needs, and buy either the largest drives you can afford that give you more redundancy than you think you, need or the fastest drives you can afford that give you more iops than you think you need. Your video also completely neglected iops, focusing on sequential io and capacity. Even just adding a small nvme mirrored cache device can turn a large disk pool into a virtualization and game storage powerhouse. Imagine what you could do with all-flash
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I think your videos and reviews are excellent, and the hard drive pricing comparison tool looks very useful (thank you), BUT, I was staggered when I visited the nascompares website and opened the Vendor Preferences section of the cookies permissions…more than 1500 (yes, one thousand five hundred !!!) “Legitimate Interest” and other cookie permissions which seemingly can only be turned off (or activated, if that’s what the website visitor wants to do) MANUALLY. Yes, it took a looong time. Please, just provide a simple and all-encompassing “Reject All” option in cookie preferences. Cookies should be (IMO) opt-in. not ‘gotcha’.
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Wow that’s super useful! I wish it also did Europe but I get that’s probably pretty tricky to do.
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Having those hard drives standing upright and waving your hands around is making me so nervous lol
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If you are into data and/or storage then you can never have enough space.
Cheaper long term to buy the biggest NAS with biggest hdd’s, Otherwise you will run out of space and cost you more to replace all those smaller hdd’s or smaller NAS.
Not really worth it to buy the expansion unit only to fill it with more smaller drives.
Made that mistake with my first NAS, 5 bay and only filled it with 3x8TB (1 for redundancy) drives adding another 2 later on.
Thought I was being smart and saving money, Filled it after 3 years, I regret not going for 16TB drives at the start and would have lasted twice the time 6 or more years.
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After an almost critical incident, hot spare makes more sense to me. If not go for dual drive fail safety in synology to stay safe. Avoid buying drives from the same batch, I went as far as buying drives from different stores and different months.
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I always tend towards the higher end of drive sizes but normally stay a step or 2 below largest capacity so I can have a better price per TB and just know that I can get bigger for cheaper in the future I prefer having expansion bays in my system open as my storage needs grow as that always have and will continue to
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One idea to consider is the difference in power for say 4 big drives (say 14TB each with 1 parity) versus 12 small drives (say 4TB each with 2 parity).
The comparison of a small size storage ( smaller than 20 TB ) I think was the focus of the video and not larger size storage (35+ TB storage sizes.
Overall the video hit the points I think are important.
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More drives+ZFS=> Safer !
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Do you have a video on different ways to migrate to a new NAS with same/different bays. Maybe you could add to the tool a migration option that can calculate the least number of drives / steps required e.g. go from raid 5 to raid 1 larger drives and then reuse the raid 5 drives once migrated. Hopefully this makes sense. What do people do with old working drives?
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Backing up 10 drives with several computers much faster. You also probably should not use 1 partition unless you want to wait 2 days to complete a back up.
I have heard many never make backups, so imagine the panicked person thinking his hard drive is failing, then waiting two days to see if the new drive got it all?
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Cool
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@NASCompares
I hope you will be able and willing to answer my question. I have a DS218+ with 2 8TB seagate iron wolf harddrives. I want to have an upgrade so I’m buying a DS420+ nas and 2 18TB seagate iron wolf harddrives. My plan is to replace my 2bay synology to the new 4bay synology and I want to know if I can just put the 2 8TB drives into the new synology and then also add the 2 new 18TB drive in bay 3 and 4..
I want all of them to be configured with SHR and the 2 8TB drives are already in SHR. According to the synology website (the nas RAID calculater) it tells me that with my setup (2x 8Tb and 2x 18TB) I should get 32TB available space and 16TB Protection.
So.. can I just take the 2 older 8TB drives (in SHR) out of my 2bay synology and put them together with the 2 18Tb drives into the new 4 bay synology without losing my data or without having to figure out a way to transfer the data off the drives first.. I do not have the external drive space to temporary store 8Tb worth of data. I don’t really care all that much about any settings from my old nas, all I want is to keep all my own data safe when transferring to the new nas.
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Price per TB crossed tabbed with with Mtbf [actual], size and noise, are the items I try to balance.
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What’s better for the NAS HDD’s health: keep the NAS running all the time, or turn it on only when needed?
I use it maybe 3 times per week, for about 4 hours each time.
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Can I shuck 12tb wd my book external drives for a nas that i plan to build, they are 40% cheaper than the cheapest 12tb nas drive.
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Looks a bit messy on iPad. Be nice to have a mobile version of the tool so it’s easier to use. Maybe you could follow in Money Saving Expert footsteps and creat a dedicated app for your site
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Didn’t quite think things through enough when I ordered drives for my first NAS. Had to decide between Synology IronWolf, and WD Red (not Pro or Plus). Ended up going with the standard Red based on some reviews that weren’t quite… complete. So now I have a drive that isn’t officially supported and for a reason I still don’t quite understand is just worse in the long run than the IronWolf. All of this because I wanted to save 15€
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I dont know seagate exos 2 tb costs 117€ seagate ironwolf 2tb costs 70€
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I went with Raid5 – 4 x 18tb drives for my 4 bay for best price, reliability, space balance for me. Seagate x18 drives at $15 per TB.
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No offense to the work you’ve put in on this tool, but none of your calculators have ever worked for me. Disabling ad blocker and different browsers, just doesn’t work. Not sure what I’m doing wrong. ????????♂
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Even better! ????????????
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Funny you posted this. I’ve actually been comparing prices all morning. Idc about noise I just want reliability/capacity.
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Kewllll
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Thank you guys!!! Anestis from Greece here, just got my first NAS, a Qnap 464, thanks to your recommendations for 4bay Nas and now trying to decide what kind of hard drives to buy. I need a lot of space (50tb to 60tb) usable space in RAID5 and the cost is very high. Do you think that Ultrastar series is suitable for my case? I’m going to use my NAS for multimedia library and PC backup mainly. THANKS AGAIN for your great articles and useful videos!!!
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It would be great if you did the same for shucked drives. Many Synology users use them. Frankly, I have one server with (7) 14TB drives and another with (6) and not a peep about them for over two years so far. Still healthy. ????
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One thing I would add, is an actual $/TB column, as it helps to work out Amazon’s sales versus other retailers during various promotional periods.
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I think reliability and loudness would be the big secondary factors. My nas is my office where I work from home, those exos drives probably too loud?
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This video + That tool Eddie Created = You guys are awesome!
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Your timeline/chapter markers in comments are messed up sir.
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Nice tool!
Thanks Eddie! (and Robbie, of course)
And that in the weekend! Wow.
Even Though it is not (yet?) including my region, still quite useful.
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Thank you very much. This is exactly what I can use. Have a great weekend
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Ty for this. I have a ext4 shr2 raid in synology, and am considering getting a newer model and using that to switch from ext4 to btrfs… I wish there was an easy way to switch between ext4 and btrfs without new drives… but I may just expand my drive sizes at the same time as transitioning from ext4.
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Q – More Hard Drives or BIGGER Hard Drives?
A – YES!
Always more and bigger, what can go wrong?
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Thank you these great video’s, I highly appreciate them!
If I may ask a request on a video. using QNAP NAS and running Qumagie. How do you backup meta data from Qumagie as they are stored in an Qumagie database and not in the photo or on a separate file.
Ronny
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The required amount of redundancy depends on how you plan to use the storage. If the NAS is the primary storage, then redundancy is very important. If the NAS is backing up primary storage on other computers, then RAID might be less critical for some people. The other consideration is point in time, or off-line, copies. If you have a fire or a ransomware attack, it might take out the whole NAS. Therefore, you need protected offline copies. That means maybe double or even more storage. How should we provide that? Does that remove the need for redundancy in the NAS?
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Really interesting video, thanks. Here are a couple of ideas on presentation of the numbers: 1. Produce a line graph of price against drive size. That would make it clear that the price per terabyte drops a lot from 1TB to 20TB drives – $35 from to $21 per TB on pros. 2. Compare prices for some sample configurations with the same amount of usable storage.
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Recently got an 8 bay QNAP, but getting disk combo nail is more challenging.
Current stack of drives don’t give me what I’m ideal after
3 x 3TB
4 x 4TB
2 x 12TB
Will prob get rid of the 3 and 12TB drives for more 4TB
The 12TB are HGST ultra star drives, as you say noisy too, but that’s not an issue.
Got 2 X 32Gb for cache
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In the video you stated 5th of Jan 2022.. did you mean 2023 or is this a republish from last year?
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great content but your videos are just way to long on most subjects, could give the same info in a 10min video
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This channel is so bad. Here in America I’m getting 12 TB Exos drives for $110 each, 6TB Hitachis are $45, and you can buy a motherboard, cpu, sas card, and a few drive cages for a lot less than the price of those pre-assembled and not expandable NAS cases
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You were two weeks too late with this video, I just brought 5 16tb drives. I refuse to do the maths to see whether I made the right choice!
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Appreciate your content but I do think you can benefit from shorter videos that get to the point a lot quicker. I find myself scanning and skipping through your videos a lot because I just don’t have half hour plus to dedicate to something, especially when I can Google and find an answer within 1 minute. Your content is mostly informational so getting to the point quicker is going to be much appreciated by everyone. Maybe start with the conclusion and then continue with the details as to how you reached your conclusion. ????
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Thks Mr HD 😉
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Get more drives, put it in your utility room, connected to your core switch, on a UPS.
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I think the bit you didn’t really focus on when comparing two 18TB drives vs 5 smaller drives was you dropped from a RAID Mirror to a RAID Array. That is often a big performance drop. Also replacing & rebuilding a RAID 1 mirror is faster. And if you lose both, and want to pay someone to do disk plater recovery, the probability of retrieving usage data, drops significantly when they need to reconstruct the data off multiple drives.
When might you lose both RAID 1 drives simultaneously? Domestic: Voltage spike/lightning. Commercial: Some idiot unscrews the wrong thing & drops all disks on the floor.
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Question is, why use HDDs anymore when NVMes are far better?
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Unless I missed it, Price per TB is the biggest determiner for most people!
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Why not “more bigger hard drives?” When I bought my NAS I got four of the biggest HDD I could at the time. Now they make drives that are almost twice as large, so I’m jonesing for an unneeded upgrade.
The noise is a legitimate concern, but I think for most people the best solution is to try and have a wiring closet / server room type setup and put it in there where you won’t really hear it. Of course, the problem with that is that the house basically needs wired for ethernet with a patch panel. I wish I had that.
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Another excellent, and informative video! I actually looked to see if “Graham Malcolm…or whatever his name is”, entered a comment yet. He probably loves seagulls.
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There´s a interesting point to consider the multiple disk use. The SATA saturation (or other conector). If you are using the 10 Gb connector and/or VMs and docker applications.You can saturate the data bus with to much IO, exceding the SATA read/write capacity, and depending of biggest caches in SSD. And surprise, more probability of failure via hard/soft or energy. With multiple smaller disks more data can be read and write. The trick is what is the size of storage that you need and what size of NAS (slots) you have (including the extenders).
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I’m just in the processes of putting together a NAS…SOOOOOO many questions and this was one of them ????
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5th of January 2022? ????
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Quality content ,love it
Currently got 8 PCS mg05 8TB which is super noisy when using in regular plastic Nas
Moved into a node 804 they are way less noisy on ticking .
Red 4TB non SMR is just fine, they are way silent compare to the mg05
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Agree head spinning. (5400?) My current problem is ripped blu rays will not stream via Plex over my network to fire TV. Having to convert down hard. Is it my network speed? (How do I test) is it my internet speed? (Max 33mbs).
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Ambient noise irrelevant
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Excellent question
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As a novice, this makes my head spin. I’m thinking about a NAS to put all my video, music, and photos in one place, with backup, and if I can afford it, allow it to be cloud storage for my kids. I have 25TB of external drives, and while it’s good for storage (I’m afraid of disk failure and data loss). I’m totally lost as what to do.
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Having just replaced or added HDD’s to both my 4 bay Synology and my 4 bay QNAP, my next NAS purchase to replace one of these will be an 8 bay. And I’ll install 3 larger HDD’s in RAID 5 or Synology Hybrid RAID and add new and larger drives as the need arises and prices fall. The worst thing about smaller NAS is the cost of pulling out perfect good, decent sized HDD’s because you need to replace them with larger drives. This is especially problematic with QNAP as you need to have all drives be the same size. With Synology’s SHR, drive sizes can be mixed ( although even that is not perfect). The extra cost of an 8 bay vs a 4 bay is easily saved by the ability to continue to use my older, smaller HDD’s. Don’t be deterred by up front costs; look at longer term use and future purchases and redundancies.
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If a drive in a RAID configuration fails, it takes longer to restore a large driver than a smallere. Thus it takes longer time before the redundancy is restored.
We are talking time in the order of days. During that period another disk failure leads to full data loss
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If your Data is very very very important than use a 4 bay or larger, with larger Harddrives in Raid 1. in a 4 bay for example you have 3 Discs of failure.
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I would have divided the presentation between Consumer needs/suggestions and business needs/suggestions:
in case of business you need IOPs and you do not care about noise because you have a datacenter (for small that it can be), so smaller disks in higher number give you better performance anche noise means Enterprse disks which have higher number of TB/year. at the same time as enterprise, for small that you can be, you should implement the 3-2-1 backup rules or at least having a backup site. the additional point is having a redundant power supply on your NAS.
for the remaining part, what you said is perfect for a consumer site.
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Thank you for the thorough video! Perhaps one other aspect to consider is the best way to increase space with a 4-bay NAS that has expansion capability. I have a 918+ with 4x4TB. Shall I replace the drives with 4x8TB drives, or shall I daisy-chain a second 4-bay NAS with another array of 4x4TB?
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you showed us the pro iron wolf series why when the pricing does not match what you said
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I’ve mentioned this before, but if you are shopping for Pro drives, the only way to go is enterprise (Exos, Ultrastar). Depending on region they are much cheaper and also better.
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I have an 8 bay DS1821 with 4x 8TB. The rationalisation was that as my data needs grew I could either add more 8TB or on the basis that over time costs would come down start adding say 12TBs and through SHR move to an all 12TB RAID.
So far so good.
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Thanks Man! I know you since the days of my first NAS, a trusty old QNAP TS-269 Pro which is really a long time ago. And you are still passionate like day one about all things NAS and beyond, how is this even possible? Always great info, always on Top. Just Wow, yeah, just WOW and thanks for all the Seaguls. I would consider a video from you without “i hate seaguls” as beeing not authentic. yeah, i love this. ????All the best for 2023 and beyond! — Bernd
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We all know you hate seagulls????
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Is Synology sponsoring your articles? Or pay you in any way?
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Can I use RAID at a software level (TrueNAS) with sata pcie expansion cards that are not RAID capable at a hardware level?
I’m building my very first NAS with a PC I’m retiring in a couple of months, and my motherboard does not have enough sata for the number of HDDs I want, there are a lot of sata pcie expansion cards on amazon but many of them say they are non RAID cards, so I’m not sure if I should buy them, if TrueNAS will be able to set the HDDs connected through that card in a RAID configuration.
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Appreciate the mention that if you buy a number of the same drive from the same vendor you are likely to get drives from the same lot which if that lot has a problem means your risk for trouble is increased.
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In general, would it be better to go with a 2 Bay NAS with two 14TB WD Red Plus drives (larger capacity but still on the quieter side), or a 4 Bay with smaller drives? This is just for home use for storage and streaming videos.
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It would be really interesting to me if you could make videos at regular intervals for things like When will the price of hard drive come down and when will we see bigger capacities in the small classes.
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Nice video!
I always calculate the price per TB. 😉
As that way there is often a HD-size (and above) that the price per TB is higher than the smaller/previous-size one. (price per TB)
We often opt for a wee bit smaller but more drives. As we always have 2x cold standby HD’s (thus unused!) near the NAS.
But more drives also means more power-use as you already indicated and also more heat. (more cooling might be needed)
Business-wide you should replace your HD’s every 3 years (5 years, max) but for the average user at home, you replace when really needed. (or after 10 years?)
To reduce risks, we also opt for multiple NAS. As a NAS may fail (power-supply, firmware-upgrade, bricking)
With larger drives the rebuilding of the RAID also may take longer., when something does go wrong.
BTW, also worth noting, the weight of the NAS might become significantly higher when you are using more drives (noticeable after 8x drives IMHO)
Generally speaking, the 6TB and lower are robusts as rocks (longevity), 8TB to 10TB are often the sweet-spot for pricing in my experiences.
Word of advice: buy as many drives as can fit in your NAS as down the line by the time you want to buy additional drives, the manufacturer may have moved-on to newer models..
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Fantastic comparison!
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Factoring in that I had a stack of unused drives already, my first Synology was a 12 bay. I filled it with 1tb-6tb drives and was golden since that meant I didn’t need to buy drives until I needed more space(which happened, again and again ????)
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I think it really depends where you are and what you can get. In some countries, it’s cheaper to get bigger drives and a two bay NAS, where other places, smaller hard drives and a four bay NAS ended up being the better option. I’ve always tackled it as a your-mileage-may-vary scenario.
Although if you want maximum capacity, a bigger NAS is the way to go.
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Right now EXOS 18TB is at 300 euros. Ordered two of them…
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Nice “Jazz hands” at the 10:00 mark 🙂 Great video
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It is a little painful to see SMR being given an OK for NAS up to 5 bays…. Your 16 April 2020 article seems to contradict this. SMR should not be used in a raid array unless you have a very specific use case. And I thought 8TB and larger Red drives were CMR.
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*”The successful warrior is the average man, with laser—like focus.”* —Bruce Lee
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Why do you insist on calling them a naZ? There is no Z in it, it is a naS.
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As stated numerous times before – If you are shopping in the “Red Pro” segment, don’t. Get enterprise instead for better price and superior performance. Especially higher capacity variants. WD Gold (btw just the the “civilian” branding of Ultrastar) is too expensive though, so don’t go there.
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Cool
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Robbie, I have a Synology DS-920+ that has 4 x 6 Tb WD Red Plus configured with Synology Hybrid RAID. It’s for home home. I will need to start replacing the drives with something a bit larger – probably around 12 – 16 Tb. The issue is that the old drives run at 5400 RPM and have 64 Mb cache. The new drives are 7200 RPM with 256 to 512 Mb cache. Are these differences likely to create much in the way of problems for me ? Not optimizing / maximizing throughput and access times are not a huge issue ; I’m more concerned about reliability and longevity.
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It’s like Skittles. Store the Rainbow!
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Well I like to exos drive simply because it’s just faster on all accounts and once the drives that hit above 500 GB traditional I just too freaking slow. Just doing a scan takes all the two days only 500 GB on a traditional one head drive. I do realize with the exos that with the additional head was going to be extra power usage. Although with the additional heads and lower RPMs they might moderate it
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Good timing on this video. I’ve been doing research for months bouncing back and forth between the WD Gold (enterprise) versus the WD Red Pro (Pro level), the pros and cons, speed, etc and the one thing I notice that the Gold is always about 10% less in cost and I couldn’t understand why. Thank you!
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There’s a little more to it, for example the Seagate – IronWolf Pro includes **Rescue Data Recovery Services.**
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That’s not what RAID stands for.
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Exos is cheaper than the iron wolf at the moment.
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At the moment i can buy a Exos 16tb for 299,- whilst the ironwolf pro’s are 399,-. Ouch.
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bloody jesus dude, i just watched this whole video and i just came to the realization that i’m fugging stupid !!! ????????
Dell PC desk top = music, videos and pictures… what do I need, something BIG I hope 14tb 16tb ???
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music, videos and pictures… what do I need, something BIG I hope 14tb 16tb ???
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looks like the regular barracuda has the specs that the “pro” used to.
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Are the consumer drives expected to last longer since the enterprise drives are expected to be replaced every few years?
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Ok that makes sense. thank you for the informative video. Have been binding on your videos for the last few days. time to get a new storage solution.
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Hello, i cna use a Seagate Exos enterprise as a regular external drive i have a usb c 3-5 reader and i use barracudas.
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What about storage purposes? Everyone talking about SkyHawk as surveillance but doesn’t it also mean it’s best for storage purposes? However, we have to use storage disks time to time make a read from for video, music or pictures etc. Also when it comes to price, Barracuda (ST4000DM004)[price_1889] is 50% more expensive than Skyhawk (ST4000VX007)[price_1271] at the moment. Exos (ST4000NM005A)[price_2084] is also close to Barracuda’s price range, only 9-10% more expensive.
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The real question I have is… WHICH ONE IS BETTER????
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I contacted Toshiba for support questions for their Enterprise Line of HDD. They said they don’t provide support for Enterprise products and asked me to contact my Dealer or enterprise contact.
Avoid enterprise lineup if you are looking for warranty support.
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I was waiting for delivery of WD GOLD 18TB but I cancelled immediately after checking power consumption in idle mode and noise level. In long term some extra Watts convert into some extra money to spend on electricity. Additionally dB level is significantly higher in Gold models in operation mode. 16TB RED PRO has best price per TB for whole lineup. Thank you for this video.
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My Desktop computer only uses WD Gold drives. Love the damn things.
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Informative video but in a few places you are not comparing apples to apples. The WD Ultrastar drives are comparable to the WD Gold drives but you were showing them compared to the WD Red drives. The Golds are based on the technology of the Ultrastars and are similar if not identical and both are optimized for both reads and writes although the Ultrastars come in more configurations for Enterprise like SAS instead of SATA, etc than the Gold drives. The Red drives are NAS drives, optimized for reads more than writes. The Purple drives are optimized for Video surveillance so they are better for writing than reading. Also be careful when buying drives to consider not only the interface and optimizations but whether they are OEM vs Retail and the warranties involved. I have bought multiple Ultrastars at significantly cheaper prices than their Gold counterparts so I agree with the point of your video but make sure the features are the same like Helium vs Air, EAMR and other technologies that might differentiate them when determining price and what matters to you.
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Thanks for the video! Now I am really understand why Enterprise HDD a little bit cheaper than ‘normal NAS’ HDD.
Is possible to make similar nose comparison of the NAS & NAS Pro HDDs? ????
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Its all about speed if your running a buisness who gives a shit if you need to spend a further 5k to get 10gbe with ssd or nvme with 10gbe nas.. Mech drives are 10 year old tech which are ok if you raid them but you need a nas with 5gbe or 10gbe to be serious. Oh look Nas makes 2.5be a standard, like 10 years too late. Ive run mech NAs drives for over 10 years they alway corrupt.. soon as i went sdd or NVme with 500-1000mps zero errors in 3 years.
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Bulk purchases make little sense. For that to be the case, there would be a minimum buy or lower pricing at minimum order quantity.
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Interesting video and some great points of consideration.
BTW … Tutorial Suggestion … Using Tailscale to set up local to remote Synology NAS’s for scheduled offsite HyperBackups. ????????????
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I’d suppose that the consumer drives are a little costlier to support, since they add on consumer friendly warranties like data rescue and also need to field phone calls for smaller volume purchases (ex. 5 drives vs 50).
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????
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Presumably the Skyhawk would also be a good option as a backup drive?
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Man, the biggest takeaway from this video for me is that you can buy NAS hard drives at Walmart…
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I find 10TB drives often cheaper than 8TB and 14TB less than 12TB.
18TB too occasionally can be found cheaper than 16TB.
These sizes from I’ve heard are the drives that often use odd number of heads, ie atleast one platter uses only 1 head (often to use up platters that are defective on 1 side).
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I just want to chime in on the prices I saw when I was buying 16 TB exos Seagate drives. I spent anywhere from $250 to 230 on five of them. I saw the equivalent Ironwolf drives for $50-80 more. Of course these are all on eBay some of them were either new or open boxed. They’re all still working right now.
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Nice video, I got a question. I have a 4bay nas synology, can I mix my 16tb enterprise with my 10tb iron wolf?
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This vid is not lip-synced correctly. Is this just for me or do others see the same?
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Seagate recovery on iron-wolf pro is not available on their data centre version I think.
That is another reason (for seagate only)
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Great video, I’ve often wondered what was going on beyond supply and demand
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They should do away with pro series and just make the DC drives cheaper like they are.
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Hallo,
im looking vor TS-464. You have it without using it. ?? Can i buy this from you?
Regards
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very helpful… i’m still going to go with the exos 12tb for my desktop…. i run all my fans at a min of 50% anyway so i don’t see any extra noise being an issue. will be nice to finally have the data space and the physical space in my case using this to replace 3 x 2tb drives.
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Don’t forget, the EXOS is a helium drive too, most Ironwolf Pros floating out there for sale are air drives. You should’ve included Firecuda drives for sure or, at least, dedicate a video to them so you can explain the caching.
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I’m glad I’ve never had crazy good computer parts. I feel like the original ps4 load time is great so I don’t mind using hdd instead of ssd
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Thank you!
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I’m a little annoyed the firecuda wasn’t talked about at all. I was also hoping for a little more on the exo series. I’m looking for a large volume hard drive for multiple uses. Movies, gaming, development.m, etc. I want to get the best performance for my dollar. From what I can tell the Exo is the most powerful and best bang for your buck. Right now 8tb Firecuda is $203 and a 16gb x16 is $223. I get double the space for $20 bucks and possibly even better performance so why would anyone go for the firecuda other than the power consumption?
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can we use any of the drive as a normal compact external hard drive
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Great explanation. If I want a raid set up just in my PC ( not in a NAS ) which drive do I use if the Barracuda isnt meant for raid? Do I use the iron wolf??
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hey there , thanks for ur great video. im in need of a 10 tb around hdd that i could keep videos and movies in it i offten also watch those movies , which hdd u suggest
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Wish I saw this before taking the plunge but I bought two 12TB EXO’s, the price at the time was the cheapest at that size and came with the nice 5 year warranty !
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Can I use the Exos has normal 4 bay drive? Just for light personal use. Its cheaper for me to get a Exos than the Ironwolf
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Good video. Informative. Thank You!
Respect from Siberia! ????
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The Exos is clearly the best.
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Thanks a lot for this, it helps!
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Hey! Just subbed.
I have 21 tb worth of data… On my 6 Seagate 4.5 tb drives. Can I use EXOS to just store data on it? Not in nas. Just archival purpose. Just copy and store data and then only read from it now and then. Replace it after 10 years.
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at 8:45 did he just say “Once You Really Start Pounding That Ass!”
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thank you for this!!
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Great video man
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excellent video, learned a lot!
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I recently saw a Seagate Firecuda. Any idea what those are?
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can i use Exos drive in a file server? The server is IBM System x3250 M4
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How valuable is “free data recovery” for a drive that lives in a fault tolerant array?
If fewer drives fail than your fault tolerance can handle, there’s nothing to recover. Just replace the drive and rebuild.
If more drives failed than your fault tolerance can handle, the data recovery people will need all of the drives in the array and a copy of the device they were running in for a “maybe”.
If I have data that is important enough to protect with a fault tolerant array of disks, I back it up.
On another note, if an enterprise is going to be banging away at a NAS, wants better speed and is concerned about life expectancy, they’re probably in the SAS drive range. A 15k rpm SAS compared to a 7.2k SATA with the 15k drive being rated for 50% more hours….
That being said, the expansion of storage has been amazing. I remember managing a 1.5TB SAN with a Brocade switch that around 5k employees shared at a cost of over $500k in the early 2000’s The “cold storage” was retrieved by a robotic tape drive array and optical storage. Now a $100 drive can hold that. Storage engineers used to earn $150k to come up with ways to share 1.5TB of data.
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Can I mix ironwolf pro and ironwolf in the same 6 bay nas?
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I was asking myself, “Why shouldn’t I buy Barracuda drives for my NAS?” You didn’t say it absolutely won’t work, but point taken. (My old LaCie external drive came with 2 3TB barracuda drives, so they aren’t listening to you.)
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Kretino bambino
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Very helpful <3
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Sorry for being critical but i just wasted 10 mins of my life on some rudimentary specs that one can get on Seagate’s website. I was looking for more tech stuff. Neither did u do your own tests. But how could you ? Your HDDs are still in their sealed packs 🙂
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What’s a NAS?
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which drive is best suited for p2p file sharing?
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Are there downsides for using an EXOS or IrownWolf Pro for a desktop PC? (besides the noise) This would be for storage and some gaming, not a main drive. I want the capacity..
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Currently: NAS 4-bay RAID 5, WD RED @6TB each.
Want: 8-bay, expandable, 14-16TB each same RAID.
I write every day and ready every day. My RAID capacity is maxed (about 1TB space left).
I’m torn EXOS and IronWolf Pro.
When you say, “recovery service”, are you saying a service provided, or a software package included inside of the HDD? If it’s a service, mail in, or something like that, it’s not a factor for me.
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Thank you. Second time I seen this.
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Whats best for movies that sit on the hdd for watching later. For personal use, no NAS. I wanted to get the EXOs 18TB
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64MB or 256MB cache HDD is better in a NVR?
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Can you mix Ironwolf Pro drives with EXOs in the same NAS? I have 3 Ironwolf Pros and like the price to performance of the EXOs but wasn’t sure if I could mix them. Thanks..
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Which series is best suitable for gaming?
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Thank you for the great video,
Today I just bought one Ironwolf 8T . After watching the video, I was thinking of buying another Exos 12T.
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