Are NAS HDDs worth the extra?

[Derek Smith]

I replace my HDDs every four years. I've had two catastrophic failures over the years, and I get nervous.

One checking what's available, I see that a NAS drive, which, as I understand it, is designed to be significantly more reliable, is priced at £175 - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-IronWolf-Internal...

The equivalent non-NAS comes in at a lower price. I'm all for saving money, but even more for reliability. Is NAS worth the extra?

Recommendations would be much appreciated as I don't trust Amazone's ratings.

I'm re-orginaising my images and video folders and going from 3TB to 6.

[macdaddy11]

I'm no expert, but a couple of links below might be of interest:

https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/support/kb/hard-disk...

https://www.vueville.com/home-security/cctv/nvr/se...

The first link is from Seagate explaining their HDD reliability and why they no longer use Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) and the other is another site comparing the Seagate drives - funnily enough including the MTBF rate of their IronWolf drives, 1 million hours apparently, that's over 100 years!

The article mentions that one of the main influences on HDD failure is temperature, so that might be worth looking into. But having worked in IT for a few years, with servers and desktops, the best thing you can do is have a regular backup, even if it is just to another local drive. At home I have my important files saved on a pair of RAID 1 disks and then backed up onto a local server each night. If I lose a disk, I can just replace and rebuild. We use a similar idea at work, just on a larger scale with an offsite backup. Any drive can fail, you just need to decide whether it is worth the extra money on a more robust drive, or is it better to design out the point of failure.

[geeks]

The main principle between NAS and Desktop HDD's is around things like temp but also vibrations etc. NAS drives tend to be closer to other drives and thus more likely to experience vibrations from the other drives nearby, they are built to withstand this kid of thing by default.

That said, my NAS has two desktop 3GB Toshiba drives and has and remains fine, the drives have been running for 48,608 hrs without issue and have been through 72 power cycles and the SMART status reports everything as all good. I am yet to experience a drive failure using a desktop disk (I have been using this NAS for around 10 years, started with 2 x 1TB drives now up to 2 x 3TB and I am running out of space so that will be swapped to 2 x something bigger when I can muster the will power). I do also back up the important content on there to a cloud service, this is good practice anyway and you should have a backup routine in place that covers drive failure after drive failure if that's your kind of thing. My drives also run in RAID 1 so I have some flexibility in there for a single drive failure too.

[Derek Smith]

Thanks for the answers.

I have 3 x HDDs in my desktop, all close together, but with three fans blowing on them, the max temp is normally under 40 deg.

I have 3 x external HDDs which are dedicated to backup and I also back up to the cloud on critical folders. After 4 years I relegate my internals to backup so they are not wasted. When backing up, temperatures tend to rise, but never much over 40.

The vibration aspect is something to consider I suppose. I'll go with NAS.

Thanks again.

[paulrockliffe]

Derek Smith said:

Thanks for the answers.

I have 3 x HDDs in my desktop, all close together, but with three fans blowing on them, the max temp is normally under 40 deg.

I have 3 x external HDDs which are dedicated to backup and I also back up to the cloud on critical folders. After 4 years I relegate my internals to backup so they are not wasted. When backing up, temperatures tend to rise, but never much over 40.

The vibration aspect is something to consider I suppose. I'll go with NAS.

Thanks again.

Surely the answer is to run a RAID setup, with proper drive redundancy and then only replace drives if they fail, rather than guessing and hoping for the best? It'll be far cheaper as in a properly setup RAID array that is primarily storing data rather than the data being accessed all the time the drives are barely stressed and will last many many years.

[geeks]

Derek Smith said:

Thanks for the answers.

I have 3 x HDDs in my desktop, all close together, but with three fans blowing on them, the max temp is normally under 40 deg.

I have 3 x external HDDs which are dedicated to backup and I also back up to the cloud on critical folders. After 4 years I relegate my internals to backup so they are not wasted. When backing up, temperatures tend to rise, but never much over 40.

The vibration aspect is something to consider I suppose. I'll go with NAS.

Thanks again.

Hang on... maybe I misread the OP. Are you asking if you should put NAS drives in a desktop? If so, then no. There is 0 benefit. Also if its desktop go SSD.

[mmm-five]

geeks said:

Hang on... maybe I misread the OP. Are you asking if you should put NAS drives in a desktop? If so, then no. There is 0 benefit. Also if its desktop go SSD.

A 6TB SSD

BTW OP, if you're going for one of those drives, you might as well get the 8TB model, as it's currently £5 cheaper than the 6TB...and the bigger Ironwolf (and all the Ironwolf Pro) ones are 7200rpm vs the 5400rpm of some/most of the standard Barracuda drives.

Edited by mmm-five on Wednesday 9th February 15:01

[geeks]

mmm-five said:

A 6TB SSD

Yeah fair point

[Derek Smith]

geeks said:

Hang on... maybe I misread the OP. Are you asking if you should put NAS drives in a desktop? If so, then no. There is 0 benefit. Also if its desktop go SSD.

Yes. The one I will replace has an HDD either side in the case. Would that make a difference?

mmm-five said:

BTW OP, if you're going for one of those drives, you might as well get the 8TB model, as it's currently £5 cheaper than the 6TB...and the bigger Ironwolf (and all the Ironwolf Pro) ones are 7200rpm vs the 5400rpm of some/most of the standard Barracuda drives.

Edited by mmm-five on Wednesday 9th February 15:01

It's unavailable at the moment on Amazon. Have you seen it elsewhere?

By way of explanation, in the desktop I have 2 x 6TB HDDs and 1 x 3TB HDD, this one due for replacement. I have an M2 1TB SSD for the OS. I do a lot of photography and video. Also, during Covid, I've learned Blender, and now I'm attempting Unreal Engine 4, although my GPU, an 8GB RX570, struggles to cope. Storage gets eaten away on a daily basis. Over Xmas, I deleted over 1TB of files. It seemed to make not difference.

[mmm-five]

Derek Smith said:

It's unavailable at the moment on Amazon. Have you seen it elsewhere?

Scan have it for £192
eBuyer has it for £186
Box have it for £179
There's a French listing on Amazon for £177

[anonymous-user]

mmm-five said:

Derek Smith said:

It's unavailable at the moment on Amazon. Have you seen it elsewhere?

Scan have it for £192
eBuyer has it for £186
Box have it for £179
There's a French listing on Amazon for £177

Just be aware if buying from the EU, anything over £135 gets whacked with duty and VAT. That £177 may in reality be a significant chunk more expensive. That kind of stunt on Amazon cost me another £70 buying from a marketplace seller rather than Amazon themselves.

[Derek Smith]

gottans said:

Just be aware if buying from the EU, anything over £135 gets whacked with duty and VAT. That £177 may in reality be a significant chunk more expensive. That kind of stunt on Amazon cost me another £70 buying from a marketplace seller rather than Amazon themselves.

Thanks for reminding me of the brexit bounce. Isn't there a regulation that compells sellers to include the full price?

I tend to buy bigger IT stuff through e-buyer. I appreciate the warning.

[anonymous-user]

Derek Smith said:

gottans said:

Just be aware if buying from the EU, anything over £135 gets whacked with duty and VAT. That £177 may in reality be a significant chunk more expensive. That kind of stunt on Amazon cost me another £70 buying from a marketplace seller rather than Amazon themselves.

Thanks for reminding me of the brexit bounce. Isn't there a regulation that compells sellers to include the full price?

I tend to buy bigger IT stuff through e-buyer. I appreciate the warning.

When were in the EU Vat was taken at point of sale with nothing further to pay by the recipient, Brexit changed that so VAT and Duty are paid at the point of import.

The shipment either gets Vat and Duty paid by the courier initially and you get an invoice or they hold it until you pay the Vat and Duty. For my purchase the seller put the wrong Tariff code on it costing me £20 it didn't need to but I can claim back if I feel the need to flagellate myself.

[eeLee]

I expect a constantly-running NAS to not suffer drive failure as long as it's kept cool, dust-free and ventilated. Oh and runs and does not get turned off.

It's no surprise to me that Synology has a WDIdle3 command in some DSM versions to manage the WD spindown function....

[mmm-five]

gottans said:

Just be aware if buying from the EU, anything over £135 gets whacked with duty and VAT. That £177 may in reality be a significant chunk more expensive. That kind of stunt on Amazon cost me another £70 buying from a marketplace seller rather than Amazon themselves.

The French-language listing was not from a French seller, it was from TechDealz in the US when I clicked through.

However, that link (in French) is now linking to a page with Amazon as the seller for £180.

Edited by mmm-five on Thursday 10th February 10:20

[Funk]

I sell enterprise storage solutions to businesses (including NAS devices). Geeks' advice is spot on imo - yes there's a benefit to running NAS drives in a NAS (specifically in a rackmount where you might have 12 of them next to each other and all spinning in a row which can cause vibration-related issues etc). Running three in a PC? No benefit really imo.

Edited by Funk on Monday 14th February 20:30

[Derek Smith]

I opted for an 8TB NAS from E-buyer, my choice for more expensive items. The decision was aided by the fact that my credit card debt came back as lower than zero for Jan. It seems that, on the 11th, I paid off not only the previous month's amount but the debt up until the 11th - month ending on the 14th. We bought little since, and we also got the annual rebate on what we bought, so I was £13.78 in credit.

Apart from a confusing few minutes, it was great. I blew the nearly £14 on a £185.98 8TB NAS.

If only there was no shortage of GPUs.

[mikef]

Just saw this thread

NAS drives (I have a dozen in Synology NAS’s) have two major differences from desktop disks

1. The spindles are usually connected at both ends unlike desktop drives which gives better resilience to vibration

2. Because the primary use case is RAID arrays with hot spares, they fail with minimal retries. This characteristic makes them less suitable for desktop use

[anonymous-user]

As an aside, what sort of internet connections can you get to your house? I got a symmetrical 500mbps connection (will go to 1gbps) and did away with all local backups. Pointless when you can backup to the cloud as quickly as a local network.

[anonymous-user]

In America, they are starting to roll out symmetrical 5gbps fibre, which I’m sure will come to Blighty in due course.

If you ethernet in or are on a fast wifi 6e network, there will be even less need for local backups.