Best 2TB Drive for home NAS

[eishundo]

If it was answered here before - I can not find it using search function.

What is the best 2TB drive available on the market today for the home NAS?

Thank you
~e

 

[handruin]

That's not simply answered without some more details on your NAS and your expected usage.

What is your home NAS (make/model/home built)? What do you plan to use it for? What's your budget? Do you require drives that will be RAID capable? Do you have noise requirements? Heat requirements? Are you looking for 5400RPM or 7200RPM drives?

 

[eishundo]

More info

Planning to order Synology DS410 (comes out on Monday, 19-Apr-2010).
Primarily use:
- Music storage (possibly streaming to SqueezeBox)
- Photo storage
- Movies storage (small -700-1,400Mb avi file as well as 10-12Gb mkv files)
Main requirement - performance for the applications above.
Noise, heat - secondary. Though Synology is pretty small enclosure - so het might be an issue - not sure.

Thank you
~e

 

[eishundo]

And RAID

And yes, I'm planning to use RAID 5.

 

[handruin]

I'm a fan of Samsung drives for many reasons. For what you plan to use your NAS for, even the 5400RPM drives will perform well with 4 drives in RAID 5. The Samsung 2TB F3EG is at a reasonable price ($149) compared to the other brands. The drive is listed on the compatibility matrix which is a plus. The downside is that since most of the consumer grade drives aren't built specifically with RAID in mind, there are some complications with things like (TLER/CCTL) that you should keep in mind if you haven't already researched it.

How many concurrent users do you expect to have on this NAS? If you plan to have many concurrent users, a faster 7200RPM drive would be more beneficial for performance. That would help with the random nature of reading/writing data when more than one user are accessing the NAS. I'm not yet comfortable with the maturity of the 7200RPM 2TB drives that are available. Some of them are just too ridiculously expensive for what they offer. If you want to read some reviews, xbit has a shoot out of 2TB 7200 RPM drives. Also, the Samsung 2TB drive uses 4 platters where as the Hitachi 2TB (7200RPM) uses 5 platters. You'll end up with more heat and noise from the Hitachi.

I don't personally own the Samsung 2TB drives because at the time I didn't find them worth the extra money/gigabyte so I opted for the 1.5TB F2EG drives. I'm using those in RAID 5 and they work very well in my DIY NAS.

 

[randfee]

That's not simply answered without some more details on your NAS and your expected usage.

What is your home NAS (make/model/home built)? What do you plan to use it for? What's your budget? Do you require drives that will be RAID capable? Do you have noise requirements? Heat requirements? Are you looking for 5400RPM or 7200RPM drives?

Unless I'm totally mistaken there is no such thing as a RAID incapable hard drive! Of course there are RAID edition drives but the major difference usually is an extended warranty and mean time before failure duration.

Just find a balance between price and warranty. Performance wise I wouldn't bother, all 2000GB drives in Raid5 should deliver plenty!

 

[eishundo]

Western Digital Caviar Green

Can anybody share their experience with WD Caviar Green drives in RAID 5 in NAS?

 

[handruin]

Unless I'm totally mistaken there is no such thing as a RAID incapable hard drive! Of course there are RAID edition drives but the major difference usually is an extended warranty and mean time before failure duration.

Just find a balance between price and warranty. Performance wise I wouldn't bother, all 2000GB drives in Raid5 should deliver plenty!

Take a look at the link I posted regarding TLER and CCTL. Some drives will wait indefinitly when it encounters a read/write and because of this it will cause a drive to drop out of a raid array, cause performance problems and be a pain in the butt to deal with on some drives. There have been reports in different forums where people have had bad experiences with certain drives. Because of this, there are tools that people recommend so that you can adjust only certain drives TLER or CCTL to limit the drive to a typical 7 seconds. Many RAID controllers know how to respond within this time if the drive handles it correctly.

Technically you can use any drive but it's in your best interest to research any drive you might be interested to see how it is configured and if it is possible to change the TLER or CCTL values.

Those drives which are sold as RAID drives have the right settings so that RAID controllers handle errors corretly.

 

[eishundo]

One more article

Quite interesting test results and some concerns about older CSS head parking technology on Barracuda LP drives.