The Best ‘Price per TB’ NAS HDD Deals of Black Friday 2024
This Black Friday brings a range of exceptional deals on NAS hard drives, offering substantial discounts for those looking to upgrade or expand their storage solutions. Whether you’re building a new NAS setup or adding capacity to an existing one, these discounts on top-tier drives from Seagate and Western Digital provide a great opportunity to secure reliable, high-performance storage at a lower cost. Below are the standout deals, featuring both consumer and enterprise-grade drives, designed to cater to a variety of needs and budgets.
IMPORTANT – BIG HDDs vs Lots of SMALLER HDDs in a NAS?
When deciding between larger hard drives or multiple smaller drives for your NAS, it’s important to consider your storage needs, budget, and the capabilities of your NAS device. Larger hard drives, such as the 16TB or 24TB options, allow you to maximize storage capacity while using fewer drive bays. This is especially beneficial if you’re working with a NAS that has a limited number of bays or want to reserve extra slots for future expansion. Additionally, larger drives often provide a better price-per-terabyte value, reducing the overall cost of your storage investment over time. However, keep in mind that larger drives can take longer to rebuild in the event of a failure, so proper backups are essential.
On the other hand, purchasing multiple smaller drives can unlock the performance benefits of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) configurations. RAID setups like RAID 5 or RAID 10 distribute data across multiple drives, allowing for faster read/write speeds and increased fault tolerance. This makes them ideal for users with demanding workloads or those seeking additional data protection. Additionally, spreading your investment across smaller drives may offer more flexibility in terms of replacing or upgrading drives over time. For larger NAS systems with more bays, using multiple smaller drives in a RAID configuration can optimize both performance and redundancy, making it an excellent option for businesses or advanced home users.
BEST DEAL SO FAR – Seagate 24TB Ironwolf PRO HDD 38% OFF – Now $399 HERE
The Seagate Ironwolf Pro 24TB NAS HDD is a high-capacity drive designed for NAS environments that demand reliable performance and durability. With a massive 24TB capacity, it is ideal for users managing large datasets, media libraries, or high-volume backups. Its robust design includes features like CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) for optimal performance and a 300TB/year workload rating, making it suitable for 24/7 operation. The drive is now available at an unbeatable price of $399.99—a 38% discount from its original price of $649.99. This is the best deal of the season for large-capacity NAS storage.
WD Red Plus 4TB NAS Hard Drive – 29% OFF, Now $84.99 (was $119.99)
The WD Red Plus 4TB NAS HDD offers a great entry point for users with smaller storage needs or those building their first NAS. Designed specifically for NAS use, it supports workloads up to 180TB/year and includes NASware 3.0 for enhanced reliability and compatibility with multi-drive systems. Its 4TB capacity is perfect for smaller setups or as part of a RAID array in a larger NAS. Previously priced at $119.99, it is now available for $84.99, offering a 29% discount.
WD Red Plus 6TB NAS HDD – $99 (33% OFF, was $149)
Seagate Ironwolf (non-Pro) 8TB NAS HDD – $149.99 (17% OFF, was $179.99)
The Seagate Ironwolf 8TB NAS HDD is a versatile and reliable option for mid-sized NAS setups. Featuring AgileArray technology for improved RAID performance and vibration resistance, it is ideal for small businesses or home users needing reliable storage for backups, media streaming, or file sharing. The drive is now priced at $149.99, down 17% from its original price of $179.99, making it a solid choice for users seeking dependable mid-range storage.
WD Red Plus 10TB NAS Hard Drive – $55 OFF, Now $169.99
The WD Red Plus 10TB NAS HDD is a powerful solution for users who need higher storage capacity without breaking the bank. With a 10TB capacity and 180TB/year workload rating, it is well-suited for multi-bay NAS systems in homes or small offices. Its NASware 3.0 firmware ensures optimal performance and data integrity in 24/7 environments. Previously priced at $224.99, it is now available for $169.99, providing a $55 savings.
Seagate 12TB NAS Hard Drive – $199.99, was $239.99 (17% OFF)
The Seagate 12TB NAS HDD strikes a balance between capacity and affordability, making it a great option for expanding existing NAS setups or building mid-tier systems. Designed for continuous operation, this drive includes features like vibration resistance and RAID optimization for enhanced performance. Previously priced at $239.99, it is now available for $199.99, representing a 17% discount.
16TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro Hard Drive – 21% OFF, Now $249.99 (was $314.99)
The Seagate Ironwolf Pro 16TB HDD is a high-performance option for professionals and businesses that require reliable storage for demanding workloads. With a workload rating of 300TB/year and CMR technology, it delivers consistent performance in multi-drive setups. Its 16TB capacity provides a substantial amount of space for backups, virtualization, or media storage. Previously priced at $314.99, it is now available for $249.99, a 21% discount.
WD 20TB Red Pro NAS HDD – $319.99, was $429.99 ($110 OFF)
The WD Red Pro NAS HDD is a premium drive for professionals and businesses looking for reliable, scalable storage. With a workload rating of 300TB/year and optimized for multi-bay systems, it provides exceptional durability and performance for demanding environments. Previously priced at $429.99, it is now available for $319.99, a significant $110 discount.
Seagate Ironwolf Pro 24TB – $399.99 ($250 OFF – was $649.99)
The Seagate Ironwolf Pro 24TB NAS HDD is a top-tier storage solution tailored for NAS setups requiring high reliability and performance. Boasting an impressive 24TB capacity, it is perfect for handling large datasets, extensive media collections, or heavy backup tasks. Built for durability, it features CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) technology for enhanced efficiency and supports workloads up to 300TB/year, making it ideal for continuous 24/7 use. Currently priced at $399.99, this represents a 38% discount from its original $649.99, making it one of the best deals available for high-capacity NAS drives this Black Friday.
WD Red Pro 24TB NAS Hard Drive – 12% OFF, $499.99 (was $569.99)
The WD Red Pro 24TB NAS HDD is built for large-scale NAS environments and offers top-tier performance and durability. Designed for workloads of up to 300TB/year, it includes enhanced vibration protection and error recovery controls for dependable operation in RAID systems. Its 24TB capacity makes it perfect for data-heavy applications, including business backups and large media libraries. Previously priced at $569.99, it is now available for $499.99, offering a 12% discount.
Seagate EXOS Enterprise Server 24TB Hard Drive, 20% off – $479.99 (was $599.99)
The Seagate EXOS Enterprise 24TB HDD is an enterprise-grade solution designed for the most demanding storage environments. Featuring a 550TB/year workload rating and advanced caching technology, it excels in delivering consistent, high-speed performance. Its 24TB capacity and durability make it ideal for data centers, virtualization, and high-capacity NAS setups. Previously priced at $599.99, it is now available for $479.99, representing a 20% discount.
Thinking of buying a product mentioned in this article? If it has helped you make that decision, you can head to several stores using these links and we will get a small % profit of whatever you buy, which goes directly back to NASCompares and allows me and Eddie to keep doing what we do here on YouTube, the community support sites and the Blog.
📧 SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER 🔔🔒 Join Inner Circle
Get an alert every time something gets added to this specific article!
This description contains links to Amazon. These links will take you to some of the products mentioned in today's content. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Visit the NASCompares Deal Finder to find the best place to buy this device in your region, based on Service, Support and Reputation - Just Search for your NAS Drive in the Box Below
Need Advice on Data Storage from an Expert?
Finally, for free advice about your setup, just leave a message in the comments below here at NASCompares.com and we will get back to you.
Need Help?
Where possible (and where appropriate) please provide as much information about your requirements, as then I can arrange the best answer and solution to your needs. Do not worry about your e-mail address being required, it will NOT be used in a mailing list and will NOT be used in any way other than to respond to your enquiry.
TRY CHAT
Terms and Conditions
|
 |
(Early Access) My Favourite NAS Releases of 2024
(Inner Circle) Recommended ATX NAS Motherboard Guide - 6 GREAT NAS MOBOs!
(Early Access) Flashstor Gen 2 NAS - SHOULD YOU BUY? (Short Review)
(Early Access) The DREAM Video Editor NAS - Flashstor Gen 2 Review (FS6806X)
(Early Access) A $230 10GbE and i3 6 Bay NAS Mobo - HOW? Any Good? (MW-N305-NAS)
(Early Access) CWWK Q670 8-Bay Gen5 NAS Mobo Review (UPGRADED VERSION)
Access content via Patreon or KO-FI
I just bought a Beelink EQR6 Ryzen 5 24GB RAM, and a Crucial 4Tb SSD, for less than a turnkey NAS. It’ll run rings around a turnkey NAS and provide more than enough storage for my needs, all while being near silent. I may add a second 4Tb SSD as a parity drive. I’m probably going to use unraid so that I have that choice.
If I had need for more than 16TB storage, I’d probably build a DIY NAS and run TrueNas Scale.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Are all countries doing Tariff’s next year? or just the America?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
So I bought the Terramaster F2 424 for Black Friday. This is gonna be my first NAS. I was wondering since I see you have a few videos on this device. I need it for backing up my MacBook and my iPhone plus be a storage area for all my photography. Client photos, and hopefully powerful enough to edit photos straight from the device. I was wondering, is there a good app for that they offer to back up the MacBook and MacBook Pro kinda like Synology?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
But where are those Jonsbo n5 cases at that price? Yesterday and today I’ve scoured Aliexpress and I haven’t found anything under 220 euros.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
@Robbie
Hey, apparently on the WAN Show tonight, Linus was talking about HexOS being released beta for testing, said he had a video all about it that comes out this Sunday on his channel, and that there will definitely be a one time payment lifetime access plan ($50 today, $100 in December … eventually $300 long term – you might want to get ahead on that) and … that iX Systems is actually an Angel Investor in this company … thats who owns TrueNAS.
Did ya know that?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Putain de voix IA de merde …
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
You are truly a gem in YT community. Frequent uploads with ton of content. Thank you, take care.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Love the time stamps but white writing on white backgrounds make them less than ideal.
I’m going to take a punt and assume “Same as last year – Nothing for Australia”.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I was very confused, when an AI Voice started to dub the video in german, very creepy
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Australians getting fucked again, thanks for checking anyway
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Doing gods work. Thanks for this years upload.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
AI VOICE = INSTANT QUIT VIDEO
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Mmmm tempted with the 1621+ for £800 as keep looking to move away from QNAP TS-873A
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Hey HexOS is doing a pre sale and is doing a beta launch on the 30th iirc. Will you do a revisit to the video you made a few months ago?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
A few days ago I bought a WD EasyStore 20TB USB drive off of BestBuy for ~$250 chuffing USD. Not bad IMO. I might buy another as it’s still at that price. Just started an extended S.M.A.R.T test on it and that will likely take days.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Thanks!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
no good deals on hard drives…sad
i did get a TL-SX105 for $70 off though
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
HexOS also has a deal going on for the lifetime membership. Betas are being sent today for the people who have a membership
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Thanks.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Lets buy things we would’ve never bought yeeeahy.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Im resident in japan atm and there F all on amazon Jp
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Western Digital as the WD Red Pro 20TB for $316 each or the 2 22TB for $700. You can also use Capital One Shopping for 27% Cash Back or Raukten for 12% Cash Back.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
As always, really appreciate the research and reporting – thanks!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
WD Red plus 6TB 99USD, its 185EUR here in Germany at Amazon. something is wrong with pricing here in Germany
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
DS923+ for 539 euro (Amazon matched the Megekko price, both in the Netherlands – YT removes my links)
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Wasn’t Plex Pass $60 last month?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Looking for an ssd for ps5 can’t find reliable baseline readspeeds and reviews… lexar nm790 is one of the cheapest 2T with heatsink. But I’m looking for the best all around not sure if you ever checked the baseline for the lexar
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Bought Terramaster f4-424 at 384 GBP. I have installed truenas scale, I just need it for backup so this is more than enough for me.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
@nascompares
I want to confirm,
If Toshiba N300 4TB NAS 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive – CMR SATA 6 GB/s 7200 RPM 512 MB Cache – HDWG740XZSTC
at 114$.
As This is the only brand which has “7200 RPM 512 MB Cache” for 4TB HDD.
Can you please share you feedback/review on this HDD?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Just picked up a Qnap ts262 for $239 from BH photo. I’m excited to set it up once it arrives! ????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Very good offers from terramaster and ugreen, personally i just find 4 slot too small, if it were 8 slots would be all over.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Just got my first turn key Nas the QNap TS-464-8G and used your affiliate link. Thank you!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
7:00 is a pretty great deal considering storage is included
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Is it possible to swap my hdd’s from a synology nas to a diy nas with unraid installed? Would that work or is it nessesary to wipe the data from the drives before using them in a new system?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I gather it should be internationally available deals, right?
As I just scored a TS-h1277XU-RP, a TS-H1886XU-RP and a few TS-h1677AXU-RP-R7’s for really ridiculous very low prices but only available locally. But I would also guess the average user wouldn’t be into such models either. But the prices, I couldn’t let them collect dust any longer!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Hello!
I have a question, it is that I have a nas where I have set my hard drives to copy each other. Now it starts to get full, you can change some settings where you remove one of the hard drives so that both become just one. if you know what i mean????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Wish I had about &$3200 to spare for 8 of those 24 TB IronWolf Pro drives. That’s a killer deal. I have it, but I can’t spare it for that purpose now.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Ugreen seems like they are about to blow out these first-run units and introduce what we got teased with AI earlier this year.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
If you haven’t finished that Flashstor video, could you talk about how you’d recommend filling out the bays? Which NVMe drives would you recommend? I’d worry about spending extra wasted money on drives that are too fast for the lanes. Is that a legitimate worry or no? (BTW I love you videos. Thank you for being passionate about NAS!)
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Just ordered the Terramaster D8. Within hours terramaster sent an email regarding a niche issue. If using UnRaid on Linux and trying to create a RAID pool on the NVME, the device might assign both NVME with the same serial number. Firmware link provided. So.. decent customer service.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
What would be the best place to look for deals in the EU? Located in the Netherlands myself but i order over the entire EU myself.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Just a heads up, your chapters are royally off. By several seconds.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Best Buy has external 20tb hard drives for 249$.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
*HUGE* Apologies for the crackled audio on this video. As mentioned in the introduction, I am testing 3 different NAS devices for upcoming reviews and clearly the capture box I was using for the MOBO on the desk has interfered with the microphone I was speaking into – ROOKIE ERROR! I didn’t pick this up in the testing, as it did not start till the CPU fan on the desk mobo started! Really sorry for dropping the ball on this, but hope that the deals I spotted are of use! Have a fantastic week.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
For some reason there is only audio in Hindi, Japanese and Bahasa. o_O
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I use a separate encryption technique locally before backing things up to the cloud.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Will be sure to do most of my purchases by January 20. Post Christmas, before inauguration.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
What about here in Australia where can we find really good websites that have all the deals for NAS
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I sent you an email. Thanks for these info-videos
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Do you have a recommendation for case that can hold ATX mobo and hot swap HDDs? I want to upgrade my machine and use the older parts to upgrade my current NAS.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Excellent video , a good source of information. Thanks for putting this content out there. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Can someone provide a link to that list of Cloud Storage Providers? I assume that’s a list of current “sales”.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
A raid is not a backup but you said “at your peril” for raid zero in the Ugreen user guide vid
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Why do you say TB every time? Why don’t you just say terabyte like a normal person?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Wd has 2 14tb gold drives for 450 dollars
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Outstanding information! Thanks for this PSA. You’re a gem.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Synology emailed yesterday to say “We have amazing discounts starting 25th November on selected Synology NAS models and our WRX560 WiFi-6 router.”, they list partners to buy from; Amazon, Broadband buyer, Scan, Ebuyer, laptops direct & box
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Love these, thanks for sharing.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Hm. If there are tariffs to the US, there is a good chance that the prices in Europe will go down. Because the produced goods have to go somewhere. So prices will probably get under pressure.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Looking at DS420+ vs. DS920+ vs DS923+ vs DS423+ for iPhone Photos (12,000), 1440p video and General 4 PC backups.
Which unit would be best bang for buck anyone able to shed some light?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I switched to japanese – and it’s hilarious 😀
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
If Seagate Ironwolf Pro and Exos have the same price, which one should I buy for my home DIY Nas?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
WD has two 22TB for $699.98. I just picked up two 24TB there last week for $687, so this is an even better $/TB deal
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
UK Amazon must be missing some of the early deals, here the TS-464 is down to $470
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Once upon a time, black friday was THE time to buy electronics and computer parts…especially motherboards. I’d say for about ten years now that hasn’t been the case. Monitors, TVs, pc parts, NAS’s have been having their all time lowest prices from around mid Spring time thru Summer. I’ve still seen some super low prices on some gaming consoles and of course the budget tier TVs usually like you say Rob, about 1-3 weeks prior to black friday. I’m guessing I have around 1,000 or so camelcamelcamel price alerts set up and I’ve only been getting 3-6 daily price alert emails, same for prime day which means the prices are higher than their recent lows. There is some exceptions to the triple camel and that is the bonus % on a prime card and some sales don’t hit camelcamelcamel quick enough to alert the email but it’s rare.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Robert, again great video
Thanks you for sharing!
I was secretly looking for a new NAS, and I can’t say goodbye to the brand QNAP my current model TS-653D. But was so disappointed because after my firmware update ‘QTS firmware 5.2. 2. 2950’ I had so much trouble and I could no longer log in with my password and not even after a reset with the Cloud Key. The problem was ultimately in the QNAP QM2-2S10G1TA 2-Slot PCIe Network Expansion Card. After this I could log in with the Cloud Key (with 1 spare hard disk) Firmware downgraded and everything is now functional again. Only from now on I can no longer use my Twonkey Server because I performed a reset and it now indicates that this OS version no longer supports it. While on my identical other NAS that I had updated, but had not reset it just works fully. Very unfortunate, I was very frustrated about this, but QNAP has been in my heart since 2007! So this love can’t just end….
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Thanks, but I suspect that, as per usual, Black Friday will be a “non event” here in Australia.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
How can I disable the German voice? It sounds like Donald Duck. ????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Would you recommend buying Aoostar Gem 10 with the occulink 4 bay m.2 extension as a NVME NAS?? They don’t have any deals on black friday but their pricing is really good especially in comparison to the CPU performance, and want to pull the plug on it.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
all still overpriced and under-resourced
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Grabbed the F4-424 Pro a week or so ago since Amazon Canada already moved some on a Limited Time Deal. Ironwolf 4TBs are holding at $124.99 CAD, so I’ll probably grab 2 to go with my existing 1 and populate my NAS after I get it setup with the OS on my (yet to arrive) SSD. I’m irritated that certain things I’d _like_ are gated behind Amazon Prime for this Black Friday though; _huge_ turnoff for any impulse purchasing when I see that already.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
“Only buy stuff you need.” ????Get a 4 bay so you can add on drives later. indeed!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
In central Europe Amazon dictated that Black Friday has already started. Deals for Hardware are worse than ever.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Is there something similar to the TS-1655 but with a cpu that has an igpu? That form factor is essentially what I’d love. Brand doesn’t very much matter to me
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I’m confused, why are prices being quoted in Dollars on a UK channel?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Excellent advice!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
“If you don’t need it, don’t buy it”.
Best advice EVER.
Too bad that we’re constantly under brainwashing about the complete opposite.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Thanks for doing this vid. Almost bought an SSD for read only cache for my Synology on impulse but your 3 years old video helped me avoided the unnecessary purchase as it’s not relevant for my use case. But I bought a 20TB WD external HDD for hyperbackup ????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
What a disgusting AI french voice. Nothing and good subtitles are better
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Holy, that auto translated voice is creepy stuff.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
F2-424 was a good deal. Put DSM on it qnd enjoy!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Very disappointed with Asustor ‘Black Friday’ prices – specifically the FlashStor 12 Pro – Gen 1 & Gen 2. Have gone with a TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus model instead.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
This was a FANTASTIC video for a LOT of reasons. But the “2 vs. 4 bay” bit was Unexpectedly Helpful. Thanks! ????????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Thanks for publishing this this is precisely the video that I didn’t know I needed before the upcoming holiday!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I have 2 wd gold 16TB drives mirrored and love them. Quiet and responsive. Wicked warranty too.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
+ point for smaller drives, if 1 fails out of warranty. its cheaper to replace and getting that raid going again.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Amazingly comprehensive research. Thank you!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Easy answer…more big hdd is good
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
so my solution after this video was: big and many. ????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
what if i get refurbished bigger drives
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
No 1 NAS rule, use different suppliers, NEVER take 2 or 4 from the same brand
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Who ever had to copy a 8TB that made strange sounds, understands Einsteins relativity theory
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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 =(
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
great video, thanks.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I have HDD’s of various sizes. 2TB 4TB, 6TB, and 16TB.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I would say more drives, more chances at redundancy and rpms somewhat combine with raid so the speed increases.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Thank you for this video sir! Good as always
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Based on a 6 or 8 bay Synology system, whats the best size drive for reliability in Seagate drives..?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I have 20tb of games to clone and not sure which way to go lol
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
16tb drives is my sweet spot for storage to drive failure ratio
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Lol. More and bigger lol.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I’ve been playing with that RAID calculator while I listened to your analysis, and boy, now I do have a headache.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Great video!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Wd red are 5900 rpm until 6TB. They are much quieter. The 7200 rpm and above are noisier.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
“I hate seagulls!” While pointing up was too funny
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Wow man! ????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Im still using the orginal drobo????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Toshiba 16TB drives have been cheap for some time. Now the weet spot seems 18TB, but ymmv
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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….
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
i went with 24 14tb refurbished drives for my nas
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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..
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
8 20 Terabyte drives run in Raid in my new computer in a Themaltake case is where I am headed..
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I like it hard and big.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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…
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
would be nice to compare RADIx vs throughput comparison to see in which case yo can utilize 1/2.5/5/10 Gbps….
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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).
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I choose both!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Get as big as possible because they get full faster than you think and with small disks you run out of SATA-ports.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
More hard drives or bigger hard drives?
**MORE BIGGER HARD DRIVES!**
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
More. That was easy. 😉
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
since when does England use dollars? WTF?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
More bigger HDs????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
muchas gracias hermano!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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 ).
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
HORRIBLE HEAD BEATING FOR 20 minutes?? No thanks.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
What about both, more big harddisc X3
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
“I hate seagulls” <— ????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
This is absolutely through and incredible information. You just saved me HOURS of research
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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 $$)
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
As of this month(August 2022) it’s actually cheaper per gigabyte to buy high capacity drives.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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…?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I think its worth including hot and cold spares into the discussion too
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
More bigger hard drives
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
can we mix different sizes of HD, like 12tb and add a few 4tbs? thank you
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Instead of buying a simple 3 TB it’s much more fun to buy a bunch of 100 x 30 GB.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Would not want one with Helium because it would eventually leak out then it will fail.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Both.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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 ,
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
What about the best of both worlds: lots of big drives?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
If you don’t need the speed consider using 5400 rpm drives. They are cheaper and tend to be more robust.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
At this point, I’ve settled on the EXOS drives going forward for the capacity, cache, price, and warranty.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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…
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Nice video. Thanks. R.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Nice Dreamcast sticker.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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…
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
RAID 10 with 4 hard drives seems like a good idea.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Answer is simple, more bigger hard drives
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
voltage is not equal to power consumption. watts is. you messed up the whole power comparison there. but i guess we get the point.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
26 minutes? Is there a short video where the question in the title is answered within 3 minutes?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
More spindles, faster, faster rebuilds, etc.
My 12 spinning disk array does 5gb a second. Monster.
With enterprise hardware
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
You REALLY don’t want to run raid 5 with just 3 drives. You risk data loss when rebuilding the array.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Binging your content!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
It takes less time to rebuild the Raid with a smaller HDD. This would be an Argument for more smaller than fewer larger drives.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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….
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
some of the bigger nas have addtional features as well that should come into determining the value proposition
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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 – $551 – 40 GB/$
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Wow, you really went into this one eh. I actually like the seagulls!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Thanks
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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..!!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I just received two new WD Red drives from Amazon. Each had ENTIRELY different packaging and different stock numbers. Same size drives.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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 ????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Great video dude.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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…
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
more disks = high power bill…
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
The correct answer is more big hdds
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
More drives+ZFS=> Safer !
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Q – More Hard Drives or BIGGER Hard Drives?
A – YES!
Always more and bigger, what can go wrong?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
In the video you stated 5th of Jan 2022.. did you mean 2023 or is this a republish from last year?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
great content but your videos are just way to long on most subjects, could give the same info in a 10min video
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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. ????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Thks Mr HD 😉
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Get more drives, put it in your utility room, connected to your core switch, on a UPS.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Question is, why use HDDs anymore when NVMes are far better?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Unless I missed it, Price per TB is the biggest determiner for most people!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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).
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
I’m just in the processes of putting together a NAS…SOOOOOO many questions and this was one of them ????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
5th of January 2022? ????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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).
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Ambient noise irrelevant
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Excellent question
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
you showed us the pro iron wolf series why when the pricing does not match what you said
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
We all know you hate seagulls????
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Is Synology sponsoring your articles? Or pay you in any way?
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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..
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
Fantastic comparison!
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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 ????)
REPLY ON YOUTUBE
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.
REPLY ON YOUTUBE