I have been wanting to set up a small NAS for quite a while for use as a backup for my data drive. I already have a stand alone external drive that I use but would like to have something a bit more automatic.

I already have the enclosur figured out. A two bay setup. The HDDs I want to do are two 6tb drives in... probably raid 1. I had originally just planned on a couple WD Black drives as I have several of them and wanted to keep the "consistency".

I keep digging trying to work out wether NAS drives are really worth it for my specific use, but I'm still not really sure.
I would be looking at the WD red pro drives if I went that route but most of what I can find tells me the blacks would really be just fine.

So I guess I'm looking for a few more thoughts on things. Anyone have any experience with non NAS in a NAS?

I suggest NAS drives
The feature you want the most is TLER
Time limited error recovery

With a regular drive in a regular system you want the drive to try hard anytime it runs into an unreadable section of the drive.

In a RAID system you want the drive to just say nope couldn't read that and let the RAID deal with it. If the drive takes too long the raid controller might kick the drive out of the array.

You can use any drive you like.
When I set up a NAS or USB Backup I generally use the better drives but it is not required.
The difference is in the rotational speed and the power savings design.
I always like to opt for faster performance drives and don't care about the power savings aspect but you can use any drive you want.
I use a lot of WD drives and like the Red Pro the best.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
I use a lot of WD drives and like the Red Pro the best.

I don't use many drives, anymore, but I agree with the WD Red. For home use, the Red Pro may be over-kill.

The WD Red is far more suitable for a NAS application than the WD Black. The Red is quieter, runs cooler, and nearly half the power consumption. (Didn't look up the Red Pro.)

I'm using a Synology 2-bay NAS at home. It does what it's supposed to do.

Thanks.
I am more performance over power saving as well lol. I was looking at the red pro for the comparable performance to the blacks with 7200 and 256mb. My biggest worrie I guess is some of the questionable reviews I've been seeing on them over the black drives.

Noise and temps I guess would be something to think about as it would be basically at my feet

quote:

Noise and temps I guess would be something to think about

Fans (internal case fans).
I can't remember any hard drive I heard over a fan (unless it went bad).
... and they keep 'em cool ~ and they are even quiet ones.
or
Go SSD.

I use WD Red drives on two different Synology NAS devices. No problems to date (after 6+ years on some drives). The nascompares.com website offers a lot of information about several types of NAS devices.

Also, check the drives you plan to use regarding whether they use CMR (better for RAID) or SMR recording. Website above has articles on the differences and why you might prefer one vs. the other.

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
I use a lot of WD drives and like the Red Pro the best.

I don't use many drives, anymore, but I agree with the WD Red. For home use, the Red Pro may be over-kill.

The WD Red is far more suitable for a NAS application than the WD Black. The Red is quieter, runs cooler, and nearly half the power consumption. (Didn't look up the Red Pro.)

I'm using a Synology 2-bay NAS at home. It does what it's supposed to do.

**Everywhere I typed 'pro', change to 'plus'. The pro is overkill for a home 2-bay NAS. The plus is better than the basic red

The difference between the Red & Red Plus is SMR vs CMR & it will make a difference in speed, debatable difference in reliability.
You don't want SMR in an write-heavy situation, it has to rewrite adjacent/overlapping blocks too often. WD & Seagate got their peepees smacked for sneaking SMR into NAS drives - that's why the Red Plus line exists and they advertise CMR as a 'feature'. It may not make that much of a difference with a decent hardware RAID-1, but for software RAID, just say no.
I got bit by a 4TB Red - absolutely killed my Unraid box when I wrote heavy data. Recently replaced it with a Red PLUS & not only does it not choke writing large files consecutively, the average read/write speed is up (13hrs for parity check vs 17).

If you have them around, Blacks are great. If you're buying new, go Red Pro. Cooler, quieter (maybe) and probably a bit cheaper.
WD blacks have lost a place for me in the age of TB SSDs - anything that needs speed needs SSD. Anything that doesn't, doesn't need what the Black provides.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: snidera,

My two cents is that if you are asking if you need NAS drives, you probably don’t.

In my limited experience using NAS drives that are setup and managed by a team of IT people (at work), I am quite happy with an external SSD and cloud storage.

quote:

Originally posted by snidera:
The difference between the Red & Red Pro is SMR vs CMR & it will make a difference in speed, debatable difference in reliability. ...

WD Red Plus are also CMR. I have a pair of 6GB RED plus in my NAS.

If you have a raid 5/6 setup I would get nas drives with actual "Error Recovery Control". Especially if you leave them running 24/7. But, it all depends on what you're using it for and how important the data is.

Ok, I am old, but I have no idea what this thread is about. I guess it's computer stuff. Yikes. I really feel old.

quote:

Originally posted by mark123:

quote:

Originally posted by snidera:
The difference between the Red & Red Pro is SMR vs CMR & it will make a difference in speed, debatable difference in reliability. ...

WD Red Plus are also CMR. I have a pair of 6GB RED plus in my NAS.

Crap, you're right. Everywhere I said 'pro', I should have said 'plus'

I am running four Synologys. Three are for work, one is a personal stuff, mostly Plex. They are:

DS218+
DS1019+
DS1621+
DS920+

I have purchased 17 drives so far, all betwen 4 to 8 TB. They are all either WD Red Plus or Seagate Ironwolf drives. Most are 5400 RPM. I have had only one, an Ironwolf 6TB, fail in the last two years. It was only about sixty days old, so it was a case of infant mortality. All of my NASs are running Synology Hybrid RAID, a type of modified RAID 5.

The advantages of going with NAS drives is that they are more robust, especially if you are going with an enclosure with many drives. After about eight drives, they can interfere with one another. The NAS drives account for this.

It has been mentioned already, but avoid SMR drives at all cost, especially if you are running a parity-style redundant RAID scheme like RAID 5. When you loose a drive, the array will still function, albeit degraded. Adding in a new drive, the volume will begin repairing itself. This is very stressful for all drives involved. It basically runs your drives a full bore until the array is rebuilt. This means that if you have another drive on the edge, and it goes down before the volume is rebuilt, your data is toast. Therefore, you want to rebuild as quickly as possible.

SMR basically increases your rebuild time dramatically. I mean like a week or two instead of a day. If you really must run any SMR drives, at least use a RAID 6 or SHR-2 volume, but then this would negate any savings from using the cheaper drives. This doesn't really apply to RAID 1 so much, but you never know what the future holds.

BTW, I don't know what you're planning to use it for, but you should consider at least a four bay unit, like a Synology DS420+. It is way cheaper to add a drive in the future than it is to replace the entire unit, and the four bay unit isn't that much more expensive than a 2 bay. For example, a DS220+ is $294.49 on Amazon, while a DS920+ is $549.99. For the extra $150, you get two extra bays, 4GB instead of 2GB memory, and two M.2 Nvme SSD slots for cache -a big help if you wish to run a virtual machine.

ETA: A four bay unit also reduces the cost of the redundancy. For example, if you added 4x4TB drives, you'd have 12TB of available storage, for 25% waste due to redundancy. In a two bay unit with 2x8TB drives, you'd have 8TB of available storage for 50% waste. Since 8TB drives are $219 and 4TB drives are $104, it is actually cheaper to buy 4x4TB than 2x8TB, and you get the extra 4TB of storage, so your cost per TB would be way cheaper. You could also get to 12TB by adding 3x6TB for about $150 each, and still have an empty slot for the future.

Thanks all

The SMR/CMR thing I have seen mentioned a bunch in reviews I have been reading on the red pros. Most saying they apparently got SMR drives... but I don't know if the reviews are bundled with other similar drives or not.

My only real plan for the NAS is straight data backup. I will probably end up removing a few things from my main drive as well just to free up some space tho.
I don't have any plans for a media server or anything else really. Most likely once a week for partial?? backup, and maybe once a month for a full backup. My current data drive is 4tb and my stand alone backup drive is 6tb, which is kinda why I was thinking 6tb for the NAS as well. But I am not opposed to going bigger... other than the drive cost lol

Only the WD Red is SMR. All Seagate Ironwolf and WD Red Plus/Pro are all CMR. You certainly don't need the performance of Black or Gold drives for backup.

Make sure the NAS you buy supports the btrfs (butter-fuss) filesystem. For backing up, it's the cat's pajamas. You can do up to 1024 snapshots per volume without adding to the backup size, except for changes to your data. It also supports data scrubbing and is self-healing, something you want in your backup volumes.

A larger backup volume will allow you to have deeper revisions in your backup scheme. Just having a single copy of your data is insufficient. What if your system has been crypto-locking for the last two weeks, and you just noticed? If you are only holding 7 daily backups, then you'd essentially have no backups. On my most important volumes at work, I backup every 15 min from 08:00-18:00. I save 96 hourly backups, 92 daily backups, 26 weekly backups, 12 monthly backups, and 10 yearly backups. This gives my backup scheme depth, so that when dealing with a crypto attack, I can restore from the closest possible change to a file and minimize data loss.

I also use a dedicated backup program, volume snapshots, and volume replication onto a spare server. In the event that our main NAS goes down, the backup NAS could be in production in short order. It is not a "hot" spare, but bringing it up would only take the amount of time to change some IP address assignments.

I know this is more than you need, but it gives you an idea of how you perhaps could use more than you realize now. I say you should have your backup volume be at lease 2x your production data. That would allow you to have a rather deep backup scheme. Also, for your most important data, spend $59 a year on a cloud plan and have the NAS backup itself to a cloud provider. 3-2-1 backup. It'll help you sleep at night.

Good timing. I was using an Apple Time Capsule 3TB as a Router/WiFi/TimeMachine backup for 3 Macs. The internal drive died a week and a half ago so I bought a new Netgear Nighthawk WiFi 6 3-band Router that is a lot faster and can handle a lot more devices. I was going to use a USB drive with the new router for Time Machine backups, but of course, that function is not supported.

So I decided to make the Time Capsule a network drive and disabled WiFi and routing and made it just an ethernet client on the new router. I replaced the dead Seagate 3TB drive with a WD Red Plus 4TB CMR drive. I would have preferred 6 or 8 TB, but the 4 TB was available locally for $105 and is 5400 RPM which should mean lower noise and heat. So far it is working pretty well, not too noisy and not too hot. I really wanted to put a 4TB SSD in the Time Capsule but that would cost more than $500 at current prices. The Time Machine also is functioning as a print server with a USB to Parallel cable and a ca. 1998 HP LaserJet 6MP. Knock on wood but the HP is 23 years old and bulletproof and you just have to like something that lasts that long.

My mid-2017 iMac 27" and the Time Capsule which I bought at Christmas 2016 both had hard drive failures within a few months. I'm not sure what Apple used in the Fusion drive in the iMac, but it's probably a 2TB Seagate base drive (plus the 128 GB Apple PCIE SSD). So I am pretty much done with Seagate. My previous 2010 iMac had a bad Seagate hard drive that was replaced under a warranty exception.

Sad to say but hard drives have gone to shit in the last decade. My iMac has two 2TB external SSD's now, one running the entire system, and the other as a clone backup that is updated every day. I might replace the internal drive at some point but no rush.

quote:

Originally posted by djinco:
Ok, I am old, but I have no idea what this thread is about. I guess it's computer stuff. Yikes. I really feel old.

I got the 'Naval Air Station' part, then they lost me.

Synology owners, this came out yesterday. https://www.bleepingcomputer.c...ces-with-ransomware/

quote:

Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
Make sure the NAS you buy supports the btrfs (butter-fuss) filesystem. For backing up, it's the cat's pajamas. You can do up to 1024 snapshots per volume without adding to the backup size, except for changes to your data. It also supports data scrubbing and is self-healing, something you want in your backup volumes. ...

You could also look into zfs. I’m running a freeNAS server now. It’s been trouble free for two years on retail, non-server hardware but I’m still not happy. I’m going to set up another, off-site server because one backup is no backup at all. Your data needs to be in 3 places.

I don’t know if the garage is considered off-site but I’ll start there.