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personal NAS use - WD RED vs Seagate NAS
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personal NAS use - WD RED vs Seagate NAS

myhkenmyhken Member

Maybe you guys have allot of experience using NAS/RAID setups and hard drives.
I'm going you buy a NAS box at home, and my current hardware provider has only two manufactures in stock, WD and Seagate.
They charge the same price for WD RED and Seagate NAS 3 TB drives, and I'm going to buy 4 x 3 TB drives.

Some say that Western Digital RED is the best drive for a NAS, and some say that Seagate NAS is the best.

what would you buy if you only could choose between WD or Seagate?

Comments

  • linuxthefishlinuxthefish Member
    edited May 2014

    I use 1TB WD Green's in RAID 5, cheaper than red's and work just as well. You can't get much higher than 130MB/s over gigabit anyway, and I have my disks set to power down after 2 hours of none use.

    Thanked by 1myhken
  • namhuynamhuy Member

    I had bad luck w/ wd red, didn't try Seagate though

    Thanked by 1myhken
  • msg7086msg7086 Member

    I personally use Seagate 3TB regular drives. I don't see any difference between regular drive and NAS one, except for name and price.

    Thanked by 1myhken
  • myhkenmyhken Member

    Anymore fail rate on Seagate disks then WD disks you know about?

  • You won't see that much variation in the big name consumer hard disk drives. Some people understandably have had bad experiences with companies in the past and are sour towards them but generally a consumer HDD from Segate/Samsung/WD is probably going to be fine. Just buy from different batches (and so maybe one five of each brand), that's more important. If one drive in a batch fails pre-emptively it's a lot more likely the other drives from the same batch are bad than two drives from different batches/brands failing within a similar time frame.

  • earlearl Member

    I'd stay away from Seagate.. not sure about the NAS models but I generally prefer WD.

  • Just pointing out two of my Seagate 1tb drives are dying right now :(

    Thanked by 2earl netomx
  • TarZZ92TarZZ92 Member

    Seagate = Fastest
    WD= Most reliable & Slower

  • TarZZ92 said: Seagate = Fastest WD= Most reliable & Slower

    BackBlaze would disagree in some cases, they aren't really that far apart depending on what size you buy. Good article if you're looking to buy a hard drive, didn't think of it earlier. It was published in January of this year too so pretty relevant.

    Thanked by 1raindog308
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    I realize data is not the plural of anecdote but...all of my drive pain in the last 5 years has been Seagate-related.

    I like WDs with the 5-year warranty...I think those are the Blacks.

    Thanked by 1linuxthefish
  • Monsta_AUMonsta_AU Member
    edited May 2014

    Depends on exactly which NAS you are talking about, disk speed required and desired disk warranty.

    Generally I go for Toshiba 3TB ACA drives first. These are Hitachi Deskstars with a Toshiba sticker on them, and cheaper than the normal desktop WD's or Seagate units. Here in AU we get an extra 2 year warranty from the distributor for a total of 3 years. 7200RPM and reliable as hell, I am yet to have one fail in service out of around 100 in NAS'es and hanging off RAID cards. I use them in my two HP Microservers with a P410 card - never skipped a beat.

    If you need an extra TB on them, go the Hitachi Deskstar 4TB. Either drive I am comfortable with buying in one batch. @servarian likes the Ultrastars but for a NAS they are a bit overkill and will increase your build cost substantially. Otherwise they are amazingly good drives.

    After that, you are looking at the WD Reds. I have had a couple fail out of 50-odd disks in various client NAS devices. I always buy an extra disk as a spare on the shelf so no major issue there - just RMA it.

    Seagate NAS drives are not proven yet, I would be buying them only at a last resort and generally not the 4TB versions as Seagate has had plenty of issues with 4TB drives. I would get 2 spares in a 4-6 disk array, and split into two separate batches.

    Thanked by 1karjaj
  • leapswitchleapswitch Patron Provider, Veteran

    We use WD RED in RAID for all our backup servers. Haven't had a single failure yet.

  • smile93smile93 Member

    if for backup purposes, I think it is better to buy from different vendor. Same vendor, same model, will give you higher possibilities fail almost at the same time. Using different vendor, the chances for them to fail at the same specific time slot is minimized.

    If seldom use, then, look for the one with minimum power use. There will save you not only the energy to power them, but the cooling power to cool down them as well.

    I have been using Synology DS1010+ for almost 4 years now. Only need to replaced one out of 5 hard disks through out that 4 years. No data lost. RAID 5.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran
    edited May 2014

    I would not buy a dedicated home nas of any kind. I think that a cheap low power board with atom/brazos has much more options in terms of OS and exporting the FS, also a lot of optimization can be done, including multiple NICs and VLANs, etc.

    Thanked by 2myhken Infinity
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    Maounique said: I would not buy a dedicated home nas of any kind. I think that a cheap low power board with atom/brazos has much more options in terms of OS and exporting the FS, also a lot of optimization can be done, including multiple NICs and VLANs, etc.

    I agree. I had one of the early ReadyNAS devices (SPARC-based no less!) and while it performed like a champ for 7 years, after 7 years he mobo died and I was left with 4 drives in some sort of proprietary RAID format. My only option was to buy another ReadyNAS, and in this case it had to be the same model as they'd changed.

    I didn't lose any data (I was just using it for backups) but I agree with Maounique's point that a generic OS gives you complete freedom to reconfigure, move data in/out, change drives, etc. No vendor lock-in. FreeNAS or plain Linux/*BSD.

    Thanked by 1Maounique
  • WilliamWilliam Member

    We use a lot of Seagates, failure rate is a few % higher than WD in my exp (only relevant on larger scale for both) but RMA is painless and large scale they are fairly cheaper.

  • crdnlcrdnl Member

    At home, we have an small array (4) of the Samsung 840 EVO 1TBs in RAID10. We have AC wifi and 1GBps Ethernet, topped with a custom built router. Needless to say, we're all a media junkie group...

  • ExpertVMExpertVM Member, Host Rep

    We had 4 WD Red failing on one of our internal backup server over the past months. We have replaced it with Hitachi disk for now.

    Will stay away from WD Red for backup storage disk

    Thanked by 1myhken
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