Newbie: Advice on hard drive purchase for Qnap TS-431

[Dave Parker]

Looking for some advice on which hard drive to purchase for my Qnap TS-431. Western Digital, Seagate, or generic unbranded. Found some of these on Ebay for about half the price of name brand drives. Primary use of NAS is to stream videos to my Roku, as well as storage for digital photos, movies, tv series. and misc. documents. No 24/7 or heave duty usage. Looking at 3TB drives as any larger drives seem to increase in price drastically.

Thanks for any advice
Dave

 

[sfx2000]

QNAP has a compatibility list - these are drives they've tested, and are known to not have issues...

https://www.qnap.com/en/product_x_grade/product_intro.php?g_cat=1&II=156

WD Red's are generally favored by many here, I would run them myself, but I got a great deal (non-public) on a set of Seagate Enterprise NAS drives (which are pretty spendy on the retail shelves).

 

[Dave Parker]

QNAP has a compatibility list - these are drives they've tested, and are known to not have issues...

https://www.qnap.com/en/product_x_grade/product_intro.php?g_cat=1&II=156

WD Red's are generally favored by many here, I would run them myself, but I got a great deal (non-public) on a set of Seagate Enterprise NAS drives (which are pretty spendy on the retail shelves).

Thanks for your response. I looked at Western Digital Red Drives, also Seagate, But this is a learning experience for me so I hesitate to invest to much up front. Most of my computing and networking is hobby. I don't run a commercial business and it's just me and the wife. I do have a 3TH WDMyCloud and I have been playing with it for a few weeks. Found a good buy on the TS-431 so I bought it. I did find a Refurbished 2TB Hatchi at NewEgg for Around $35.00, so I ordered 4 of them. If I outgrow these I will consider something a little better.
Thanks again for reply. Most of what I have learned about routers and networking has been here at SNB

 

[System Error Message]

For a NAS i would suggest to avoid budget/low power drives like WD green and performance drives like WD blacks. WD reds, WD blues, seagate cheetahs or even seagate NAS equivalents are all suitable but you have to use the same type of drives. Dont mix WD red and blue for example.

Dont bother for fast drives. Those standard 3.5 inch 7.2K RPM or 2.5 inch 5K RPM drives are fine as long as you get one with as much cache as you can.

I use WD blacks in RAID in desktops and servers for their performance but i allow them to vibrate. They slow to a crawl if stuff in tight spaces unable to vibrate, though i suspect this to be the same with all drives, only WD blacks can shake the entire case. With the help of some clever partitioning WD blacks can be really fast and a cheap way for some storage for OSes and software so they start fast.

You can mix drives in this sense - blue for OS, red for NAS and raid.

In the past you could modify the firmware of the drives, now you cant so things like drive idle and profiles, spin ups and such are controlled by the firmware and not visible to the OS and WD green will sleep quite quickly uncontrolled or visible to the OS while blue does the same with much longer intervals. If seagate still lets you do it than a bit of firmware changes will let you stuff a bunch of them comfortably in raid.

 

[Dave Parker]

QNAP has a compatibility list - these are drives they've tested, and are known to not have issues...

https://www.qnap.com/en/product_x_grade/product_intro.php?g_cat=1&II=156

WD Red's are generally favored by many here, I would run them myself, but I got a great deal (non-public) on a set of Seagate Enterprise NAS drives (which are pretty spendy on the retail shelves).

Thanks for your response. I looked at Western Digital Red Drives, also Seagate, But this is a learning experience for me so I hesitate to invest to much up front. Most of my computing and networking is hobby. I don't run a commercial business and it's just me and the wife. I do have a 3TH WDMyCloud and I have been playing with it for a few weeks. Found a good buy on the TS-431 so I bought it. I did find a Refurbished 2TB Hatchi at NewEgg for Around $35.00, so I ordered 4 of them. If I outgrow these I will consider something a little better.
Thanks again for reply. Most of whati have learned about routers and networking has been here at SNB

For a NAS i would suggest to avoid budget/low power drives like WD green and performance drives like WD blacks. WD reds, WD blues, seagate cheetahs or even seagate NAS equivalents are all suitable but you have to use the same type of drives. Dont mix WD red and blue for example.

Dont bother for fast drives. Those standard 3.5 inch 7.2K RPM or 2.5 inch 5K RPM drives are fine as long as you get one with as much cache as you can.

I use WD blacks in RAID in desktops and servers for their performance but i allow them to vibrate. They slow to a crawl if stuff in tight spaces unable to vibrate, though i suspect this to be the same with all drives, only WD blacks can shake the entire case. With the help of some clever partitioning WD blacks can be really fast and a cheap way for some storage for OSes and software so they start fast.

You can mix drives in this sense - blue for OS, red for NAS and raid.

In the past you could modify the firmware of the drives, now you cant so things like drive idle and profiles, spin ups and such are controlled by the firmware and not visible to the OS and WD green will sleep quite quickly uncontrolled or visible to the OS while blue does the same with much longer intervals. If seagate still lets you do it than a bit of firmware changes will let you stuff a bunch of them comfortably in raid.

Thanks for you reply. The drives I ordered are HGST Refurbs 7200rpm 2TB with 68mb cache and they were less than$40. So if they don't work out I'll wait for some black friday deals. Would really like to have WD 3TB red drives but don't want to pay full price. Less than $90.00 would be nice.

 

[thiggins]

Most of what I have learned about routers and networking has been here at SNB

Then you know RAID is not backup. So make sure the NAS is not the sole location for files you can't afford to lose.

Hard drives are one thing I would not purchase refurbished....

 

[Dave Parker]

Then you know RAID is not backup. So make sure the NAS is not the sole location for files you can't afford to lose.

Hard drives are one thing I would not purchase refurbished....

I have read a little about raid and I do understand that it is not a backup. I do have a 3TB WDMyCloud and a Silicon Power 1 TB portable hard drive and a Western Digital 1TB green drive in an external enclosure. I have my important stuff in several places. Also I noticed that NewEgg has there 3TB Western Digital Red drives on sale this weekend so I ordered 4 of those. Too late to cancel the order I placed yesterday for the refurbs so I will just return them unopened.

Thanks to all for assistance. Much to be learned