Most Reliable Hard Drives for a NAS

From Cheapest to Best and Most Reliable Hard Drives for a NAS

There is two kind of requests when choosing hard drives for the NAS. Some people need the cheapest possible hard drives whereas others prefer the most reliable hard drives. With cheapest ones, everyone understands that when that one year warranty runs out- drive can fail any time. Sometimes it doesn’t but quite often it does. In the RAID it can be replaced and no data is lost. But for those who want to invest in a long-lasting solution need to do a few extra steps to find the most reliable drives out there. But how do you know which drives are made for high reliability?

Each HDD is designed for specific applications, workloads, MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), and POH (Power-On-Hours). Basically, all hard drive classes can be used with Synology NAS, but we recommend choosing the right drive class to fit your needs:

  • Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): MTBF is a statistic used by manufacturers to state the reliability of hard drives. Often the higher the MTBF, the lower the chance of failure. Note that there is no manufacturer of any hard drive that can absolutely guarantee zero failures.
  • Power-On-Hours (POH): POH is the length of time, in hours, that electrical power is applied to a device. For hard drives, two categories are usually used:
    • 8/5: eight hours a day, 5 days per week.
    • 24/7: 24 hours a day, for every single day in the year.
  • Workload: user’s data transfer rate (terabytes per annum) with the drives.

Most reliable drive comparison

When choosing most reliable drives you will very often hear a model name like WD Red Pro, WD Gold, and Seagate Ironwolf Pro as well as Seagate Exos drives.

Fastest drives

speed WD Red Pro WD Gold Ironwolf Pro Exos Ultrastar® 7K4000
1TB 184MB/s
2TB 164MB/s 200MB/s 195MB/s 226MB/s 164MB/s
4TB 202MB/s 201MB/s 214MB/s 226MB/s 202MB/s
6TB 227MB/s 226MB/s 214MB/s 226MB/s 227MB/s
8TB 205MB/s 205MB/s 214MB/s 249MB/s 205MB/s
10TB 240MB/s 249MB/s 214MB/s 249MB/s 240MB/s

Best Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)

WD Red Pro WD Gold Ironwolf Pro Exos Ultrastar® 7K4000
1TB 2mil 2mil
2TB 1mil 2mil 1.2mil 2mil 2mil
4TB 1mil 2mil 1.2mil 2mil 2mil
6TB 1mil 2mil 1.2mil 2mil 2mil
8TB 1mil 2.5mil 1.2mil 2.5mil 2mil
10TB 1mil 2.5mil 1.2mil 2.5mil 2mil

Best at Workload TB/year

WD Red Pro WD Gold Ironwolf Pro Exos Ultrastar® 7K4000
2TB 300 550 300 550 550
4TB 300 550 300 550 550
6TB 300 550 300 550 550
8TB 300 550 300 550 550
10TB 300 550 300 550 550

Best warranty

WD Red Pro WD Gold Ironwolf Pro Exos Ultrastar® 7K4000
2TB 5 years 5 years 5 years 5 years 5 years
4TB 5 years 5 years 5 years 5 years 5 years
6TB 5 years 5 years 5 years 5 years 5 years
8TB 5 years 5 years 5 years 5 years 5 years
10TB 5 years 5 years 5 years 5 years 5 years

Load/Unload cycles

WD Red Pro WD Gold Ironwolf Pro Exos Ultrastar® 7K4000
1TB 600k
2TB 600k 600k 600k 600k 600k
4TB 600k 600k 600k 600k 600k
6TB 600k 600k 600k 600k 600k
8TB 600k 600k 600k 600k 600k
10TB 600k 600k 600k 600k 600k

Reliability Rating

WD Red Pro WD Gold Ironwolf Pro Exos Ultrastar® 7K4000
1TB 0.44% 0.44% 0.44%
2TB 0.44% 0.73% 0.44% 0.44%
4TB 0.44% 0.73% 0.44% 0.44%
6TB 0.44% 0.73% 0.44% 0.44%
8TB 0.35% 0.73% 0.35% 0.35%
10TB 0.35% 0.73% 0.35% 0.35%
12TB 0.35% 0.35%

 

 

 

 

Hard drive price comparison list

WD Red Pro WD Gold Ironwolf Pro Exos Ultrastar® 7K4000
1TB
2TB Check
4TB Check
6TB Check
8TB Check
10TB Check
12TB Check
14TB

 

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