Exos vs IronWolf Pro - Which is the best HDD option for your NAS?
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- čas přidán 27. 04. 2023
- An in depth compare between the various harddisk options for your NAS, and which is best. Also a quick dive into PMR/CMR vs SMR, how this works under the hood, and why you should avoid SMR for anything other than archive. I use Synology as an example, but its just as valid for QNAP or any other NAS vendor, or even do it yourself NAS options.
Follow on watching. comparison of drive manufacturers failure rates : • Comparing Seagate vs W...
AFR Analysis of 230,000 10Tb-16Tb Disks : • Failure Rate Analysis ...
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Thanks to everyone for watching, hope you find the content useful. - Věda a technologie
Thank you for the video I was thinking of upgrading hdd and had the same questions
As I was working in storage-virtualization industry I must say, You nailed this one here :)
Big shout out to You.
Really appreciate that, especially from someone in the field. ☺️
I moved to enterprise drives for my NASes many years ago. I look at MTBF, uncorrectable bit error rate and warranty period, and I no longer remember when I last had to replace a disk... currently my largest RAID set consists of six Seagate 6TB drives, with power on hour counts between 47kh and 64kh (due to moving to a bigger NAS and some disk juggling between my multiple NASes several years ago). This has usually meant paying more per disk, but from past experience replacing failed disks I consider it well worth the difference. If they're now *cheaper* than the "NAS drives" it's a no-brainer in my opinion. I also usually take a look at BackBlaze's disk statistics a couple of times a year as it gives some interesting insights into reliability.
(I also ran WD disks many moons ago. I remember the "secret SMR" debacle, and it was a factor, though not a very important one, in me switching to Seagate)
Awesome Video! Concise and to the point! Well thought through and covered. Thank you!
Thank you Sir, appreciated.
Thank you! This was very informative! I got screwed with a WD SMR drive as well and have since switched to Seagate also. You are absolutely correct on how hard it was to find if a drive is SMR or not. I assumed if it didn't say, then it was. Otherwise, it would celebrate it was a CMR drive. But Seagate has been working fine for me for some time now. Thanks for pointing out the differences between the Ironwolf's and Exo. I never really knew what to get. I'll certainly know next time! :)
By the way Seagate and Toshiba have been sneaking in SMR drives in their desktop lines as well without telling the customer. WD though was the only manufacturer who was brazen enough to sneak SMR drives into their NAS/RAID lines.
I got away from WD back around 2004. Their failure rate was going up, and seagate seemed better at the time. I have been happy with Seagate for many years, using their drives for 24/7 Trunas storage for many years between failures.
Thanks for the video !
A pleasure, and thank you.
I'm a HUGE fan of Exos drives. been using them for years. Just picked up a pair of 8TB Exos, to replace some older drives that are just about out of space. I love these things.
do u use them for photo or video edit? thx
@@manosalexakis Neither. I use them for both general storage, and archive storage. Being that they're enterprise-class drives, they're built more robustly than your average consumer-grade HDDs (hence the longer warranty period, and huge MTBF rating).
Excellent video, I just bought my first 4 bay NAS a couple of months ago for home use, I originally purchased 5 Seagate Ironwolf 14tb drives and upon arrival all were dead so sent them back, I then looked at WD and the reviews were somewhat lacking
I then came across Toshiba N300 NAS discs and have 3 14tb in my NAS and touchwood had no problems at all, I also have 3 16tb in my DAS which I use as a backup medium, I will continue to buy Toshiba NAS drives
Great to hear about your experience with Toshiba, thanks for sharing. Synology sell their own disks, and these are actually Toshiba disks that are white labelled.
Could be a different reason for you, but I had a couple of Exos that were dead on arrival. The drives had not been well packaged and were just wrapped in bubble wrap. Both drives had dents in the same corner of the drive where they had been dropped. So not a manufacturing problem in those cases, just bad shipping and handling.
If you get disks delivered and they come packaged this way. Inspect them closely and if they are physically damaged, definitely return immediately.
@@sometechguy Shipping damage is probably way more frequent with hdds than most people would expect. Even with professionally packaged units, the drives have a g-rating that must not be exceeded. So if a forklift driver drops a crate, looks at it, says it looks fine and doesn't report the incident, you might end up with hundreds of damaged drives that fail in a matter of days.
So when you buy a bunch of drives and they all fail immediately, I'd say shipping damage 99.9%
Thanks 🙏
One thing to consider is that sometimes the reason the exos drives are so cheap is they are being sold as enterprise or business surplus in which case as they are being resold, despite being brand new, there can be warranty issues there. Just something to keep mind
Indeed. It means that you can't register the 5 year warranty direct and have to rely on the seller to honour the warranty, so buy from a reputable supplier!
This is a general problem with oem drives, not just the professional models. But I guess you could run into that problem more often with the professional drives.
Indeed I took this chance buying 15 drives for my new NAS and I was lucky to have full warranty. But that being said this was after weighing many reviews and knowing that it was a bit of a gamble.
One reason they are cheaper is they dont come with data recovery services. Iron Wolf does
@@BrianGarside Data recovery is irrevelant if you are using RAID 5 or 6 and do some backups.
Good info, thank you for putting this together.
Thanks for watching also. Glad you find it useful!
SMR saga was literally my reason to go with Ironwolfs.
This is super good info, thanks!
30 exos drives been used for years. Zero issue so far.
Good to hear and thanks for sharing your experiences. I also had a great experience with both my IronWolf Pros and Exos disks. I had a few failures on my WD Red’s, but usually at 5+ years, which is also pretty good. The disk I have that is near 8 years old is going to be replaced shortly as a precaution.
Knock on wood 😆
@@juschuWD is the brand of the single most reliable HDD in enterprise, based on data center statistics.
@@surewhynot6259did they receive a JD Power award for that? 😂
How many years to be exact? Why not ironwolf? Please let me know if it's okay?
I came to the same conclusion last year and switched from WD Red to Exos. I went with the 12TB, because they are cheaper and use less power than the rest of the series for some reason.
They Exos disks are noisy though, especially starting up. The bulk storage in my NAS isn't used often, so I thought I'd save some power by having them spin down, probably not the intended use for enterprise disks... but it's quite noticeable from across the room.
This is a good point, I also notice this if the disks are parked and are woken up.
Almost bought an exo, but quickly changed my mind I heard that they were pretty loud. I use my nas as a media server and it's in my living room next to the couch.
@@ThesavagesoulsAssuming you went with a WD Red or Ultrastar?
Yeah, spinning down disks frequently isn't great for disk health. I'd hope the Exos are built well enough they can take it, though.
@@Cobalt985They have a shit ton of cycles they are rated for. For my use case I once calculated roughly how many times per day they would spin down and up again and I think I got some number like 10+ years of runtime. I do think that they are more likely to fail for some other reason in that time, so I would not be concerned about the power cycles. Leaving them running for 10 years will probably cost me more in electricity than replacing them will, especially here in europe.
Have you also looked into WD Gold drives? (WD's equivalent to Exos).
There was a time when WD Gold was nearly the same price as WD Red Pro, which is when I bought a couple 16 TB Gold here in the U.S.
Not sure if it's just the drives I received, but the Gold drives turned out to be quieter overall than the IronWolf Pro that I have in another Synology NAS. For some reason, the IronWolf I have are very loud when writing data.
Thanks for this. Was noticing the price difference with Exos being cheaper so was curious about the differences.
As you point out, they have been cheaper for some time now. It may not always be the case, but it certainly makes for an interesting reason to dig into how they differ and if they should be used for home or SMB NAS, because you might naturally assume that IronWolf or IronWolf Pro (or Red Plus / Red Pro) are the correct choice here. Thanks for the comment!
@@sometechguy You are correct Idol, I assumed it was IronWolf/IronWolf Pro was the correct choice, but seeing Exos has a bad rating on Amazon, can you please enlighten me why?
@@KurushimiVrishraka I can't say for sure why it has that rating on Amazon, you could check the reviews. But Amazon reviews are not very trustworthy anyway. One reason could be that a lot of the drives sold on amazon are from non authorized sellers and the drives have an unknown origin. They may not be correctly warrantied and may have been removed from systems and resold. I hear of reports of drives that are reconditioned or just not new, and once the amazon 30 day money back period expires, you really can't be sure if you can get the drive replaced. Often the drive will be 'return to base' and the drive manufacturer will direct you back to the seller. Amazon also don't pack drive appropriately often and they can get damaged in transit, but they are not the only seller that does this.
So its possible that people are reviewing the state of the drives and not based on a brand new drive. But that is just based on opinion and experience and could vary. I would go look at the reviews and see the complaint is that people are making.
Personally, I buy my drives from approved resellers and if there is any sign of damage to the units, they go back.
@@sometechguy I have thoroughly checked some of your video's, did more reddit research and whatnot, as long as Amazon states (Renewed/Refurbished) then I will avoid that. I have my eye on Ironwolf 20TB, they are close enough to Exos price, but I wanted it silent because I can only store it on my room and only use it for back and buying the NAS you suggested, I have to stop for few years collecting figures and focus on this investment because I have gotten so much data since 2011 and it's making me crazy. I made a mistake buying too many SSD's, instead of those, I should have bought NAS. I wish you upload this video few years ago, though, I appreciated everything you did. I rarely subscribe, but you deserve my subscription and will check on your videos! Mahalo so much man!
wouuuuuuuu the best explanation of this topic
Like you, I also started out using WD particularly their MyWD series. But last year, when their OS was upgraded to OS5 and my WD Nas was too "obsolete" (to say the least for that upgrade) I gave up and decided to switched to Synology and learned that Seagate also worked hand-in-hand well together.
I love my Synology NASs. I think the software is great, reliability has also been good. I did have one suffer a known CPU related issue following a power event, but it was replaced super quick under warranty and when I put the disks back in, it just picked up where it left off. So all good.
The EXOS HDs called back in the day Baracuda ES drives, they cost a lot more than the regular Baracuda's back then. I always used the ES variant for obvious reasons. Now I use Ironwolfs Pro for the NAS, and the backup disk is an EXOS 8Tb drive. Bought it cheap from my reseller, because someone gave it back. It runs now for 2 years and they are great and fast.
Weren't they 'Constellation ES' drives? IIRC Barracuda was always the consumer line ... which I've had horrible luck with. I've had a pretty good experience with Constellation & EXOS though.
Holy shit, this was fantastic. Smashed subscribe harder than the core of a neutron star.
🥳
Agree, with everything. I had been a Seagate fan for years, then when they reduced warranty and quality went to WD, then lost trust in WD with the SMR scandal while Seagate had improved. Recently bought 4 14TB Exos for my new homelab Synology. My reasoning was the same as yours and am very satisfied with them. The only Exos downsides are not including data recovery as a part of the warranty but I don't need or want that so not really an issue at all (for me, and I suspect many others) and supposedly noisier but may (or not) be an issue only if you are work physically close to them.
Agreed on the data recovery. I use mine in RAID arrays, so failed disks get swapped out. But its a good point that this isn't offered on the Exos.
If you have backups, you don't need data recovery. And by the way I wouldn't want to count on data recovery. There's things that can be fixed/recovered, but others can't. With a head crash on the platters, some data will just be gone, no recovery will be able to get it back. So yes, data recovery should be avoided by using a solid backup strategy.
are they noiser than wd
I have the same WD EFRX running for 9 years perfectly. At a time I got another one, same model, for mirroring, but it vibrated too much and was noisier, so I got a 5400 RPM Ironwolf instead.
At least for the 20 TB version, with the new refresh, the Iron Wolf Pro seems to have the same MTBF, warranty, and most other important specs as the Exos, while coming with the 3 year data recovery option and being quieter.
Never really understood the 'upsell'/value-added of the 'data recovery' option; what sort of moron only stores important data on a single drive? :)
@@mdd1963 It’s not, but if it’s striped across the drives, it’s still on there, and if you have a failure during an array rebuild, they could at least get something back for you. Data recovery is a 1z likely occurrence, but it’s really expensive in the unlikely event you need it.
Helpful vid matey, thank you!
Appreciated, thank you. 👍
I got a new 8TB Exos for my AM5 build. Was best price per gigabyte within my budget and rocked a 5 yr warranty.
As a home user I've never had a compelling reason to have a NAS, since online storage has so far taken care of my situation. But as most people would if they thought about it, I'd like to remove myself completely from online storage, and have all of my data together instead of spread out over three major providers and almost two hands worth of separate accounts. I have enjoyed watching this and some of your other videos on NAS drive stats, and it's made me decide to go with the Exos drives.
I used to be a HUGE WD fanboi, but the shingles outbreak (in many ways just as painful as the real thing) dampened my desire for future purchases, even though it didn't erase the many great years of service I've had from my WD consumer drives. I've got a couple from 2012 that are still 100% error free, after all. But I think I'll proceed a lot more eyes-open from now on. Again, thank you. Subbed.
Thank you, and good luck!
Running a NAS can give you more control, and for larger volume data it provides other benefits. I have many terabytes of data and it’s not the best use case for cloud storage. But make sure you don’t neglect backups of your important data. Using things like RAID can help protect from some failures, but it won’t protect from all and backups are easy to forget when using online storage because it’s easy to think the backup provider is taking care of this. But of course, this isn’t always true. Any disk from any manufacturer can fail, and this is true or spinning disks as well as SSD. So just treat it with the mind set that are not indestructible. Thanks for the sub, and hope you get good use of what I make. 😀
in Germany Toshiba is really aggressive in pricing with their enterprise, helium filled drives. the 18Tb one are also elaly nicely priced at around 14€/TB. and they come with 5 years manufacturer warranty.
The Toshiba drives used to run really hot. Do they still run warm?
Got myself 3x Exos X12 12 TB some years ago. They were cheaper than anything else back then and they work great. Now I want to replace the 4 leftover WD Red 4 TB with larger drives and the price situation in Germany is just crazy. Right now Exos X16 and even the current X18 16 TB are cheaper - not just per TB - but in total than any 14 or 12 TB NAS drives including the smaller Exos. ^^
And Exos x22 out now, so it will only keep moving in that direction!
My EXOS disks are working great in my Synology 4 disk NAS. Very quiet - more quiet than the 4 tb WD Red's they replaced. I went with the 12 TB x 2 and I have 2 x 6tb Iron Wolf drives in my 418play
This is what I was looking to know was the noise relative to other offerings, since they're enterprise drives. Thanks!
Good to know. My DS423+ arrives today and I have planned to put in a brand new 18tb exos along with (from my PC) a 18th IWP and later a 16tb IWP in it. Was a bit worried about mix and matching as opposed to noise. NAS noob here. 🙂
I chose the cheaper of the Seagate drives fir my NAS build. Checking out some other brands except WD. Ended up with IronWolf as they were slightly cheaper at the 10TB mark. And Seagate had a quick and easy RMA process when my NAS suggested 1 was running hot and having some errors.
I used to have a single WD red as a simple network drive, but a couple years ago I built myself a proper server machine with 8x 6TB exos drives. I purposefully went a bit overkill with a RAIDz2 configuration, and it had so far worked really well as a little torrent machine primarily.
In hadn’t come across RAIDz, thanks for sharing that. I use SHR2 on one of my NAS devices. I will dig deeper into RAIDz!
WHen you have 8x drives, I consider RAIDZ2 the perfect choice...
Thx for the information)
A good article, thanks.
I've been using 14Tb IronWolf Pro's in a 10 slot NAS since 2019. I've got two cold spare drives. Within the 4 years, I've had 4 sudden drive failures for no apparent reason - all at different times. Each was covered under warranty. Some replace with new, others replaced with remanufactured drives that come with generic white labels. These also seem to be OK in terms of reliability.
Like you, I've done research to actively avoid SMR drives, including replacing Barracuda drives with IronWolf's as my standard desktop drives for capacity. I just wish manufacturers would recognise that people want to know what they are buying and make good decisions. If they have to resort to hiding something, then generally that must be a bad thing, since if it was a positive thing for the customer, marketing would have it up in big red flashing letters all over the place.
Exos's seem to have a longer warranty period too, which has to be a good thing. I have heard that performance is a little lower than IronWolf's, but I've not seen anything concrete here. They are also the only drive to come with SAS as well as SATA interfaces.
Very helpful, thank you!
👍
I bought around 150 nas hdd in twelve years. The slowest are the most reliable (despite not designed for NAS use): WD Green. The RE (raid edition) 2 Tb had a lot of trouble, also the 4 Tb RED were not so good. All the 6 Tb RED are dead after 5-6 years. I moved two years ago to EXOS 18 Tb and I'm very happy.
I also had a lot of trouble 10 years ago with Seagate 3 Tb disks, due to a stupid seller which provide HDD without vibration sensor together with a 12 bays NAS. It took one year to find out what was the problem after exchanging many drives showing random errors.
I live in BRazil. I bought 4 3TB Seagate in 2010 in a travel to USA, direct from Amazon. All disks were dead 2 years after, using only in a synology NAS.
I've been using 4x 16TB Seagate Exos drives in my NAS since 2019, awesome performance. Used mainly for media storage movies etc.
I find it funny how we all hint at what we do with our NAS... but never actually say it. I have 8TB of ... stuff.
I had already moved to seagate at the time of the SMR bait and switch, but that act sealed the deal on me not buying WD for hdd for a long time. I do buy WD SSD's though.
4 x 18tb exos in synology 420+. Seems to be working fine. The drives are a bit noisy but i also dont have any other hdds to compare them to
I've used WD Blues, Blacks, Reds, RedPlus, and Red Pros, even had a good number of old scorpio drives for a while. I've also used Seagate Barracudas, FireCudas, EXOS, and IronWolf and Pro. all in various capacities from 1-6TBs mostly with a few 12TB+ drives here or there.
Currently been trending towards the 14TB EXOS for the last year or so as i've been updating my TrueNAS Boxes and cycling out the old 2 and 4 TB drives. The EXOS 14s have been the best value per TB outside refurbs, in my instance. I've been waiting for a good deal on a disk shelf or two so I can migrate my NAS boxes to my network rack from the old Full tower cases.
I've been running a load of the 2TB 2.5" FireCuda drives for a long time too. those were meant for laptops but I grabbed a heaping pile of them while they were $49 each probably 5-6 years ago to save physical space and they were surprisingly speedy and low power. I've just now started getting bad sectors or failure in that 16 drive array all clustered in 4, 5 1/4" hot swap bay adapters.
That's a good variety of drives, what are the anecdotal observations on reliability between the vendors and drives?
@@sometechguy from what i've seen it's been almost a dead heat between brands/vendors, over the last 20 years it's been a bit of a pendulum for which was more reliable.
the Blues and greens seem to have the shortest lifespan from WD. I have yet to own any of the SMR drives, all the REDs i have are CMR. I've yet to have a WD Black, Red, or Purple fail. the scorpio drives also have yet to fail but they've been moved from my old laptops into some of my older consoles now and don't get many hours logged anymore.
Barracudas have had the highest failure rate for me, the Firecuda "hybrid" drives have been vary reliable only have had 3 fail in the last 7-8 years of the 20+ i've purchased. roughly in order by age.
none of my Ironwolf or EXOS drives have failed yet either. the oldest of those I have is around 6 years, and most my EXOS purchases have been in the last 2-3 years.
I'm in process of Migrating towards all EXOS 14TB in my main NAS. got 4 in it currently and have 12 more to finish replacing the 4-6TB reds and 2TB blacks.
I don't have any Blues or Greens left. and the Purples are in my Security System PC with the PoE camera footage.
@@sometechguy I'll also say I've had bad luck with those Arsenal DAS drives, seems like 1 in 4 have been DOA, and about 1/4-1/3 of the non DOA have started losing sectors in the first 6-8 months.
but i've only bought 8 or so of them. very cheap for the capacity, (around $8 per TB on the 12TB) but I'd prefer more reliable generally.
what about exos x16 sound comparing to others you tried having 7200rpm. are exos x16 noisy ?
My X16 14TB EXOs drive were much cheaper in the end and perform remarkably well. It seems counter intuitive for these to be cheaper than consumer drives, but in the end I felt like I was paying less for a better product.
I've been using EXOS x16 14TB drives, very nice !
Currently (4 May, 2023) $209.99 at amazon, that's $15.00 per TB which just happens to be my threshold for purchasing HDD's.
Hopefully this will come down as I need many more !
For those of you who can remember Seagate, back in the day (some 20 year ago) had a 5 year warranty on all it's drives,
where WD did not.
Have had both, only a WD has failed on me. A 120GB drive with a 1 year warranty failed after 18 months.
Decided to lookup the CEO of WD and write him a letter regarding his product, and did get a response (not directly from him, but some subordinate. And this was before social media.), wow !
I returned the failed drive and they replaced it with a reconditioned drive, albeit a 160GB version, both good and bad.
Regardless, I was happy to get a response at all. WD redeemed themselves a little bit !
And then comes the SMR fiasco ... well you know the rest !
@@HendriuGaming Sorry I missed it !
I have seen those drives at over 600 dollars!
There was a lot of bad reviews in forums about WD Red, so we still using or WD Purple, or Seagate Exos.
Thanks. I recently decided to go with 12TB Exos disks for my unraid server.
Good Video ...
In the past i build some NAS beginning with WD (2*4TB, 2*6TB) and as the amount of Data since 2018 the Resolution (4K) rised
with the IronWolfPro-Series (4*10TB, 8*16TB and actual 12*20TB with 2*4TB NVME Cachedrives) for the final Archive 3
otherwise i used a Pair of "normal" IronWolf-Disks (18 TB) for my Streaming- and Video-Recording PC for the temporary Archive 2
and on each of the Gaming- and Recording-PCs a Pair of EXOS-Disks (20 TB) for the temporary Archive 1
The Streaming- and Video-Editing PC is a Threadripper 3. Generation with 256GB RAM, 4*2TB NVME and a Raidcard with 4*4TB NVME.
The Gaming- and Recording-PCs are one I913900K and one AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D with each 128GB RAM and 4*4TB NVME.
That is a nice kit list! Thank you for the comment and for watching also. 😊
I use several EXOS 16 TB and IronWolf Pro 12 TB disks in my NAS box. Never had a single failure for the EXOS disks, but 3-4 of my IW Pros started developing bad blocks and had to be replaced under RMA. I am now transitioning fully to EXOS disks. Absolutely amazing quality and they're cheaper to boot. I don't care about the IronWolf data recovery feature since these are used in RAID-6 volumes which are backed up overnight anyway.
With a small sample size like this, I always suspect shipping damage first. Your IW Pros were shipped in a different crate than the EXOS and some forklift driver dropped the IW crate and didn't report it. And just like that, 80% of the drives in this crate are damaged. I had this happen with WD Reds a couple years ago when I bought four and three of them were basically doa and the fourth made funny noises. Brought them back to the store and the owner later told me that he got most of the drives from this shipping crate back after just a few days. The crate looked fine, the drives looked fine, they were still damaged in shipping.
@@heikosale1027 Depends on what you mean by a small sample size. I use three dozen IW Pro and EXOS disks. They were all bought from the same three IT suppliers, all perfectly packed, at different times over several years. Over time, only IW Pro disks developed bad blocks and had to be replaced. EXOS disks are trucking away with zero issues. If there was shipping damage, disks would either arrive dead or fail very soon after being put to use, that's not been my experience.
@@little_fluffy_clouds If you bought them at different times over several years, then it's probably not shipping damage. I thought you bought them all at the same time.
Perfectly packed doesn't mean they can't be damaged. They have a g-rating that must not be exceeded. If a crate falls from a fork lift, everything might look totally fine, but you could still have a couple dozen damaged drives.
The Ironwolf Pro line does have one "alleged" edge on the datasheets over the Exos line: its operating temperature range is wider, e.g. 5-60 degree C for Exos vs 0-65 degree C for Ironwolf Pro.
I'd say if your drive temperatures are in excess of 60°C, you're doing something wrong anyways. No matter what the drives specified max temperature is, you shouldn't let your drives get hotter than 50°C on a regular basis.
We discovered working on USAF recce aircraft on the cold Nebraska flightline that assorted Netapp appliances will absolutely refuse to even spin the drives up if temps are below 0C! :)
In 7 years running 5 Seagate 4 TB Iron drives in a Synology NAS, one of the five cashed after 3 years and 4 months with bad sectors - shorts outsite the 3 years warrenty. One time after 7 years a drive power off (hang up), but can be reinstalled to the RAID again without an error. But for the future I switch to Toshiba, because all Toshiba drives have 5 years warranty.
If it’s good enough for enterprise, it’s good enough for me.
NAS drives may be perfectly fine for home use but if it’s not good enough for the “Enterprise” moniker, and if its more expensive than real enterprise drives, I see no reason to buy them
Recently bought 2 12TB Exos X12 drives to add my my NAS, I'm fine with mixing drives so I run them in a brtfs Raid 1 together with the 4tb IronWolf drive I have unlike other ways of doing raid, btrfs Can actually do Raid 1 with 3 diffrent drives of diffrent sizes (I think in this case half of the 4TB is mirrored to one 12TB drive, half to the other and the remaining 10TB are mirrored across the 12tb drives). I use a Rasberry Pi hooked up to a 4 bay USB enclosure instead of a dedticated NAS.
Exos X18 drives were insanely loud in my synology nas to the point it was unbearable being in the same room and I considered doing a new SSD or 5400 RPM nas and keeping the Exos drive nas as a backup. But I was able to do a firmware update & disable the power saving features (and later added and SSD volume for the most used packages & initial downloading) and along with all the noise tricks (velcro in the bays, putting the unit on top of anti-vibration pads and a heavy book on top) there's no crunching head parking and much less constant activity.
Under normal running they seem fine, but you are right that if the array has gone to power save and you wake it up, they are noisy for a few seconds. I will look into the firmware changes, thanks!
I have eight 10TB Exos 10 drives that I purchased 4 years ago for about $250 each running RAID-Z3 and FreeNAS for my home media server. I am aware that RAID-Z3 is not ideal on 8 drives but that is the max number of drives my controller can handle and I needed it as bulletproof as possible because it took me several months to rip over 1,400 DVDs & BDs worth of TV series, anime and movies as well as my music CD collection. It has been running 24x7 for 4 years now without issue. I only shut it down for cleaning every 6 months or so. I am at about 86% of capacity and will eventually get a pair of 20 TB drives to backup everything and then reconfigure it to RAID-Z2 to clear up more usable space while keeping things backed up on those 20 TB drives for the extra protection.
are 10tb exos noisy ?
@@serdar-ors Not any noisier than any other drives I've owned. I've been using mostly enterprise drives for the past twelve years now. My previous drives were 8x HGST 6TB SAS and before that I had 8x HGST 3TB SAS drives. These are a little quieter than those previous drives. Because these are in my media server, it is in an out of the way place in my living room and, from where I sit in relationship to it, I don't hear anything unless there is absolute silence in the room at which point I hear the light whir of the fans and might hear an occasional blip of head noise from the drives but it is pretty faint.
I woke up this morning to a clicking WD Red Plus in my NAS. A little over a year old. Switching to Seagate
That’s no fun at all. 😢
i just bought WD Drives for my Server/NAS - went for the RED Plus, which are CMR drives. i went for WD because they seem to be more reliable according to the latest statistics from backblaze. Seagate was the worst in terms of failure rate. And we are talking enterprise level drives. And the WD RED were only 18 bucks more expensive than Seagate Ironwolf drives...
Have been planing on going from WD to Seagate disk on my Synology myself, just because of the price to storage ratio. I only use it for media storage, nothing else.
First i was using WD RED non Pro, meanwhile i use the Seagate Exos X18, they are a bit louder but also very fast, and more bang for the buck.
What separate between one drive with another within the same maker is the firmware and features. Western Digital used to divide their drives in Black for performance and Blue for cheaper drives with less cache and less features (also the number of platters)... hence cheaper while both maintained 7200rpm. It all changed when they realized they can trained their customers with color branding instead of reading the goddamn specsheets. So they started with this GREEN 5400rpm, which are the same drive as the PURPLE Surveilaince drive, and Red for NAS and so forth. Meanwhile Seagate Exo was always their top of the line drives with all the features. The problem is by now the public are all trained to buy the specific color for their specific task... Kudos WD for the savy business decision. Whomever came out with the brading is a genius.
I saw Red NAS costing 50% more than the EXOs drive with same capacity... It's madness!!! and now there going after NAS maker QNAP Synology to validate those drives, I truly think their next move is to firmware lock with NAS maker so none validated drive won't initialize.
And for this reason I haven't purchase a single WD drive after they started the color branding BS. I only buy EXO drives for Unraid, for couple of reasons, Unraid utilize a kind of JOBD with parity so it only spins up the drive that contains the data, second, you can mismatch capacity and third you can stress the drive before you add it to your array. But for VMs and other application which requires replication, use SAS drives instead of SATA drives, ie TrueNAS, vSAN etc. for better IOPS... or better yet, go for nvme (Asus Hyper m2 with 4 nvme) and you can also buy used enterprise SAS drives which is no no if they were SATA drives. I have 48 SAS 2.5 10k rpm 600GB drives, bought them used, it's been years and none of them failed yet.
Well, going SAS will require server hardware. It's not like you can stick a SAS drive into your Synology NAS. I don't think this is a feasible route for most people.
There was a time around 2014 where it felt like I had Seagate drives failing constantly. May have just been a few but because dell's servers were mostly rebranded Seagate drives (at the time) the impact felt dramatic
The exos drives also do not include the data recovery service.
MY WD RED 3tb raid 5 server never spins down. 15,0000+ hours 11 years... I've lost 2 disks in that time. Thanks for this video!
Your welcome, and thanks for watching. 11 years of service is nice!
I use Exos drives. I've actually been buying refurbished rebranded drives from company called WP Arsenal, as they are always CMR disks, not crappy SMR disks! They usually send refurbished Exos drives, and you can get a 12TB drive for only like $100! I have received one DOA drive from them but they quickly sent out another. Just do a preclear test on the drives right away, and if they pass then your good, as I've yet to have one fail that didn't already arrive DOA.
I bought some Exos drives a few years back because they were the cheapest 8TB 24/7 rated ones available. I looked around for hours in absolute disbelief as to why the enterprise ones were (and still are) cheaper than even the more basic NAS ones. Works for me I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks for the comment. And its why I created the video, because you are left wondering 'why' and 'what is the catch here'. 😃
Did this whole event of "quietly integrating SMR" happen long after the QLC bait-and-switch? Because I'm looking at an article titled "Western Digital promises to do better after QLC controverse"
The SMR shambles was a year before the NAND incident. Article from blocks&files here.
blocksandfiles.com/2021/08/29/western-digital-does-the-wrong-write-thing-again/
Not great for their reputation to have the two incidents, which is a shame.
Using EXOS for large storage. Did well so far - zero failures. Moving to SSD NAS. There is a cost - but there is also a lot more peace of mind. YMMV.
Long term reliability and endurance can still be better, or considerably better on HDD. So depending on the NAS case, they may still be the best pick. But when it comes to performance, SSD wins hands down, as long as the bottle neck is the drive and not the network or interface. SSD is quieter of course. 😊
@@sometechguy nobody can convince me moving parts beat chips for reliability in an active NAS.
Thanks for your video.. very informative!! Saw some great deals on these drives on ebay.. some of them sold as new with 5y warranty but “Seagate recertified product”. Would you be concerned about this?
I would personally be cautious and I wouldn’t buy here. The warranty is only supported by Seagate if sold via an authorised reseller, it’s likely they are not. So you could need to rely on the seller providing a return to base warranty. You could ask the seller to confirm if it’s direct or RTB and check they are a real business seller with good feedback. But it would come down to trusting them to provide that 5 year. If they say it’s direct, you can check the SN on the Seagate warranty page and if you can’t register, return it. In itself it’s no assurance though, there are reports of people shucking and successfully registering 5 year warranty’s, only for them to later be not covered because external drives come with 1-2 years.
In short, the worst case is that the drive comes with only the eBay 30 day cover.
I've been in information technology for years. I've used both in systems. I still believe Western Digital Red NAS drives are way more trustworthy and dependable. Yes I agree that WD screwed up and was definitely wrong for the SMR issue. But I've never had a WD fail on me. I've always had to just replace them because of age and size upgrades. I've had several Seagate drives fail on me. I bought used Dell server that had six drives in it. Three WD and three Seagate. All manufactured around the same time. Two of the Seagate drives have failed. The three WD are still running strong several years later. I replaced all the Seagate drives after that with more WD Red CMR drives. I just don't trust Seagate....even though they have gotten better lately. Great video as well
Thank you for the comment, appreciated. I have had good experience generally with my Red's. I had some failures, but they were well past 5 years old, and the non-pro's only have a 3 year warranty, so I don't hold that against them. With WD, it was more the trust issue around how they stealth changed the technology and then proactively hid it. Ordering some disks that should have been CMR drive, and then getting a SMR drives delivered didn't help.
I recently put out a couple of videos comparing failure data on a large data source across Seagate, WD, Toshiba and WD. The WD reds didn't look to do that well, but this was a fairly small sample, and way back on the smaller capacity models. However, in the video I just released, I compared the 10Tb+ enterprise class drives from those 4, and WD were really impressive, at least on the 2-3 years of data available in that dataset. So I would look at the Ultrastars, if they can be found and at a good price. Right now, it still looks like there usually a considerable premium for the Ultrastar vs the Exos however, and even if the Ultrastars have a better AFR percentage, Exos may still be a better buy. And so far, I have been happy with the Exos drives I have running.
Just upgraded my Plex Server. Was running 2TB Seagates prior that didn't have any premature failures per say. Ran them for about 48K hours.Once they were shut off, the seized up. Not unexpected due to being in the desert.
Switched over to 2x 4TB Red RX and 2x 8TB AX. They both ran well. But now I am using the 16TB EXOS Drives. They were a lot cheaper than expected IMO. WD has always been a bit too much. The product range is also a bit BS; Gold, Purple, Red, Green, Blue, Black, etc etc.
I had a WD Red fail, and during the disk rebuild, I had 1 other go a bit sideways and a couple of months later after a power outage, another one died. So it seems that running them smooth and steady is one thing, but if you interrupt their routine, this is when they die if they feel inclined to it. A good reason to keep an eye on SMART.
The complexity of the range is also irritating, but that seems to be the norm from computer vendors these days with more SKUs than sense.
Toshiba enterprise drives have served me perfectly for many years. And it helps that they’re cheapest in my region
Is saw that currently their enterprise 18Tb drives seems to be at a good price. I may give some a 'spin'. 😂
I had to replace a couple of older WD Red drives with WD Red Plus and as far as I can tell, they are absolutely fine. Even in an older Drobo I didn't run into any firmware problems, they were pretty much indistinguishable from the old WD Red (pre-SMR).
Personally I did switch to Seagate though and I will probably not buy WD Red plus anymore because they are just too expensive in comparison.
It is possibly my Plus drive was just DOA. It happens.
Just upgraded from 2TB to 8TB for my mirrored ZFS VDEV pool - not a NAS, just my PC, as I don't need to share other than to VMs (nfs and smb), and have offsite backups, so went with the cheaper Barracudas.
I have four X16s in my Linux MD RAID10 and they have worked well for a year or so, that is, two of them, the other two were added later, but nevertheless, they aren't that noisy and they are fast!
When deciding on my NAS last time round, capacity was number one, though ultimately what sold me on Iron Wolf Pro was the warranty. Not only is it 5 years, but it also comes with a guarantee of data recovery in the even of failure under normal use. Not sure if the Exos did. It may be the reason why IWP are more expensive. If Segate are willing to front the costs of data recovery in the event of failure, then I judged they must be pretty confident the disks won't fail.
In any case, my policy is only to run the drives for as long as the warranty lasts. This is expensive, but then I think about how long I have been creating the data, and yeah, it is worth it. Coming up again next year. It'll probably be IWP again, because I have zero complaints.
Used the (WD) shingled drives for a while, they were fine for archive, but yeah, slow for continuous data transfer.
Thanks for sharing, and replacing drives before they fail is smart. It can feel painful paying out to replace a drive that is running just fine, but if the data is important then its a good investment. I also think that many people don't keep current backups for home storage in the same way, an organised business might because backing up 10's of TB of data is in itself, costly. So a RAID failure can be a rude awakening.
@@sometechguy Yeah my first server job had a faulty raid controller (a RAID 5 array - remember them?) which kept corrupting the exchange database. No my happiest time.
These days, at home it is all mirrored, and at work RAID 10. Again, expensive, but data is king.
I've been using "shucked" WD 8TB drive in my unRAID server for the last few years. Granted, my use is generally "write once" via programs running in the background, so the delay with SMR would largely go unnoticed. However, I don't like WD's shady approach to SMR.
When I decided to build a second server (for offsite at a friend's house), I went with refurb 16TB Exos drives, purely for the cost per TB. So far, they're working just fine.
Shucking is a great way to get good capacity for cost, if you can find external
bays with good disks. I am cautious about using them in active arrays, there could be different reasons they got put in those caddies. Maybe just excess stock, or maybe testing revealed they may not last as long as they should.
As for refurbs, I am betting most of those are new but returned disks. Not sure there is much real refurbing you can do to a disk, so likely they are just a bit unknown. But if they test ok, then they could be a good bargain!
@@sometechguy Shucking was good when the external units were cheaper than the bare drive. That's not the case anymore.
As for the refurbs, you are likely right. I checked the label, and they are marked Recertified Drive. The SMART system reported single digit hours (typically around 5), and the unRAID preclear analysis showed no errors. So far, so good. Not bad for $100 off per drive.
@JamieStuff, that make sense. When I tested a Red Plus drive and it wasn't recognised, I sent it back. Probably the drive works, and its a firmware issue so I guess it was tested and then resold as a refurb. If you are seeing single digit hours, that sounds like the scenario. So could be a good way to pick up a discount, as the cost of the sellers margin. But of course, I would test it thoroughly and check the SMART details to make sure it wasn't returned for some obvious reason.
Remember that on a Refurb drive they can set the hours in-use clock back to 0 !
@@EJSmith-dk3yg I am pretty sure they *always* set back the counter to zero in refurbs!
i still use cmr hdds huge capacity for gaming, long as you have large enough ram, it ram catches and is as fast after a slow load as an ssd, speed doesent matter as much and i can deal with less speed for downloads its plenty fast! going to store dvds next. HDDs for the win
I have six 16TB Exos in my Synology DS1621xs+ using raid 0 (non critical data) that has been running for 2+ years non-stop without any issues. I also have them totally filled up. I'm still getting the max 10Gb/sec speed when accessing the NAS. No issues yet. I also have one encrypted 18TB Exos on another PC and it also runs great. They are kind of loud though but can't beat the price & features it has at the time I got them.
Losing 100TB of data with ONE defective drive. Just madness.
@@_TbT_ lol I'm actually expecting it fail soon too being raid 0 and I was prepared for it but nope.. it just kept chugging along. Maybe having ECC RAMs helped? My Sabrent DAS with 24TB of my Steam games in raid 0 hasn't given me any errors too for years.
@@xellaz ECC helping against drive failures? Nope. Again. You will lose everything. The question is not if but when.
Still the dumbest setup I have ever heard from.
@@_TbT_ Nope... I mean ECC helping against data corruption. And I guess you weren't reading enough that I mentioned I was prepared for the eventuality of drive failure. I have several back copies local as well as off-site . I guess you never have run raid 0 before for long times. What I did is more of an experiment for myself how raid 0 performs as well as how long it can last without drive failure or data getting corrupted.
😘
@@xellaz Those very very very occasional bit flips that ECC can help against have really nothing to do with data security on disk.
Fur sure I have never run Raid0 for a long time, because it is useless. If you want more speed, get SSDs - and put those in redundant raids.
Backups are fine, but still, redundancy is still helping more than backups, as there are always files which are not yet in a backup.
I heard that the HDD Exos is HW-wise (internals) exactly the same as the IronWolf Pro HDD, just with modified firmware. Horever, what's strange is that in my QNAP NASes, IronWolf Pro discs run without problems, but Exos discs don't, they continuously report sector reallocation increase and then NAS it keeps reporting a warning that the drive is not in good shape 😕
I don't know the details on the internals, but it seems to make sense that they have a lot (if not all) shared components. I guess the reallocation issue could just be software? Hence caused by whats in the firmware of the drive. Not sure if that could be fixed with an update to the QNAP software at some point.
You'd have to test this behavior with more Exos drives from another batch to rule out shipping damage. I'm always very suspicious when two, three or four drives that were bought together all fail quickly. Could be a bad production batch or - and I think that's more frequent - shipping damage. This happened to me with WD Red a couple of years ago when four drives failed in a matter of days. The shop later told me that they got back like 80% of the drives from that specific box/crate and they suspected shipping damage.
@@heikosale1027 Well, I don't think that's my case. I've acquired each Exos disc a long time apart. The 3pieces I have, I bought continuously over the course of 1.5 years.
So from what I took from this is, basically just go for the Exos version. Correct?
I like the summary of CMR vs SMR, but I think there is another thing to consider in the discussion. Any HDD over 6 or 8TB is likely going to be HELIUM filled. And while Helium hard drives can be an option for companies that need high-density storage because of the lower head friction (leading to smaller heads and higher densities) and lower temps (longer life) that HELIUM-filled drives offer - users need to consider monitoring the SMART 22 attribute (if offered by the HDD) and be constantly checking the status of the helium % remaining inside of a hard drive - because no HDD seal is ever perfect, and below about 92-95% helium remaining- you're now courting a head crash, and it's time to move that data. Large companies can move data quickly. Consumers, well, that's a time consuming, costly drive replacement order possibly taking days to obtain. While annual failure rates for helium-filled drives still appear similar to air-filled drives, not all consumers can accept the potential data loss - unlike a bigger company running raid or with parity correction - and standby hot swap spares. And it could really depend on if you need lots of storage (>30TB) or can afford to have a parity drive and a spare drive or two laying around to use as a hot spare.
So what do you recommend us doing?
@@Eleriam Here's the TL;DR version: "Learn about Helium Filled High Density HDDs failures, monitoring your HDD life expectancy using smartdrive, and also be an informed buyer." I mean, if you think it will never fail, you're taking a risk with the data on the drives. For me, I'm fine using older air-filled 6TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives - but I also run my NAS with 2 disk parity (unRAID) and backup regularly. But "YMMV."
@@petera.morrison2095 why the TL;DR version? I did ask for advice. :)
What does your backup structure look like? I don't have any backup set for my NAS.
I've been running a bunch of 8 TB WD Red helium-filled drives for about five to six years now (the 8 TB used to be helium-filled at first, the current 8 TB ones aren't anymore) and I did not ever have a problem with the helium levels. The smart value is still 100 and they run just fine. Half of them are on 24/7 in a Drobo Raid and the other half is only switched on twice a week for backups.
The advice to monitor smart values is still good, but it applies to all drives, helium or air. None of them will last forever and they don't need a specific reason to fail. So have good backups (RAID is not a backup!) and monitor smart values.
@@Eleriam - Well, let's start with the fact that my backup structure is none of your overly inquisitive business. But in truth, I have both onsite and offsite backup copies, that I'm satisfied with. If you're fine taking a risk that the helium doesn't fail earlier than non-helium drives, then you've made a calculated decision based on your own use case. Mine, I couldn't justify it, based on statistical references and historical practices.
I got a doa exos 18tb sas drive, but they rma'd it within something like 5 days from my email, and the new one is kicking ass, love to see those speeds too with the zraid 0
I stopped using seagate when their reliability tanked. Then became a Hitachi fan because of their reliability but went with Toshiba after Hitachi git bought by WD. Seagate seems to have fixed their reliability issues so i might give them a spin next.
Maybe this was part of the comments below but I would have also contributed to the strong push to go to Seagate over WD is the issue of how WD drives flag themselves after 3 years of usage, even if it was used only lightly.
This is something that surfaced after I made the video. But yes, I agree, this isn't a good look for WD again. I get the value in knowing your disk is passing warranty because that matters to some, but it doesn't have to be any more than a 1 time informational notice.
Been using in my server a few 14TB exos drives and 10TB Ironwolf, just jbod with my plex library.
People ask about how loud those drives are. Did you notice them being any louder than the normal desktop disks?
@@sometechguy They are, not by much but you do not want them closer than 5 meters, in a silent case. They also start working when they are not in use, checking clusters that have not been used for a while , so not reccomended in your bedroom.
@@manofwar556 which one is nosier, exos x16 or ironwolf
@@serdar-ors the exox is louder, a bit louder than ironwolf pro.
@@manofwar556 ok thanks, i want to use only one hdd in my pc for bacup purpose but noise is an important factor.
Just starting the video, but wanted to say that I have 3 Synology NAS units and started out way back with WD Green drives and they were slow and unreliable. I then bought some Red and found they also failed. They have all been running WD Gold for several years and out of 18 drives, haven't had a single failure and they are very fast.
That’s interesting to hear. From all the comments, it seems like there are a real mix of experiences. Some love WD drives and dislike Seagate, some find the opposite; and there is a mix of people with better experience of certain drive types to others. Seems generally positive experience of HGST, but maybe the user base is smaller for those that watched.
There is limited real public data on failure rates between brands and drive types, but maybe a deeper dig is worth doing. Backblaze post good data, but the drive type sample is fairly limited.
But thank you for sharing you experience.
The infuriating thing about the WD SMR fiasco is that SMR is actually usable if you use host-aware or host-managed SMR, and it could have even been tolerable for e.g. archival if they had at least implemented TRIM on their device-managed SMR drives. But because they tried to hide what they were doing, they did none of this, so the performance of their SMR drives degrade as you write more to the disk, and there's nothing you can to do recover from that short of doing a secure erase of the entire drive.
Might be a noob question, but can you put EXOS disks in sleep mode and back on again without any problems? I've seen a lot of contradicting information about it on various forums.
I want to build my own NAS project and want it to be as energy efficient as possible because energy prices are really high here in Europe.
I haven't decided yet wether to use TrueNas, Unraid, or some other OS.
Speaking from experience, I can give you some numbers from one of my NAS devices running Ironwolf Pro and Exos X18 18Tb disks. The stated limits are 600,000 load/unload cycles for both, which is when the heads are parked. My NAS has a disk hibernation time of 20 mins, and after 2.3 years the unload cycle count is ~6600. So around 1% of the budget. I don't see any evidence of any problems here.
I have another NAS with the same idle settings, which has Exos in it also, but it runs Synology surveillance station with around 10 cameras so it has a very low unload count as its writing 24x7.
So it will depend on the workload and your idle settings, but I don't see any problems with load/unloads personally. Would be interested in the points of contention.
I suspect the biggest concern is physical wear to the head ramps, or to the head assembly itself during load/unloads, but given the spec is 600k cycles it doesn't seem like a major concern if the disk idle isn't set to a really aggressive number.
In short, when trying to get efficiency, which is a great idea, balance the disk idle time so they are not parking constantly. What your NAS is doing will influence how you set this probably.
@@sometechguy It's going to be built in a Z440 workstation with a XEON E5-2650L v4 processor. I found it for less than 200 Euro's and it has 64GB ECC DDR4 2400 RAM in it. So it's not going to be that power efficient to begin with. I have a Synology DS with a WD Red Pro in it. But I wanted to build a more powerful NAS for main storage at location that will only be spun up once a day for syncronizing with the synology. With the latter syncing to my laptops using Synology Drive. I've been keeping my data since 1996 on consumer HDD's. Last week I pulled an old Maxtor IDE 640 GB from my basement which hadn't been touched since 2008 and it still had all the original data intact. I'm starting to wonder if all these NAS drives are really that much different. I have dozens of 2,5" drives lying around and almost all of them still are intact, bootable and contain all the data. Of course I can't check for bitrot as I don't have the original source files anymore. Except for the IDE drive. Which was EXT3.
My point is that I want a future proof RAID 1 setup with means to check for data integrity. And then back it up to a cloud as well. I also chose the workstation as it has the power to run VM's and other CPU intensive stuff.
Point is, it wil not be on 24/7, I want to be able to spin it up with WOL and it won't need to access the internet like the Synology does. Although perhaps in the future it will. I wanted to buy the DS923+ from Synology, but the hardware is just way too low end. I know people pay for DSM and for good reason. It's really well made. But until I have a bigger budget to buy a more power efficient NAS and even expand it to more bays, I want a solution that isn't bound to Synology's ecosystem. In other words. I want to able to take my mirrored HDD's out and place them in another machine in the future and be able to read all the data, without having to rely on third party software that's most likely expensive and pulls you back in another ecosystem.
Is ZFS the right choice for this? I don't know. Future will tell. I might as well put consumer grade HDD's in there as well. HDD's in the early 2000's had much lower data density and that's probably why my old IDE drive survived after all those years. I don't know how long 20TB drives will last as there is no way to know that right now.
One thing to keep an eye out for is that some higher capacity HDDs are filled with helium (usually 14TB and up, depends on the model tho) which provides less friction and noise, better efficiency, resistance to moisture etc.
I'm actually less interested in the drive choice and more your choice of NAS device. I've been using QNAP devices for years and have always thought of them as small office/enterprise devices, especially the rack mounted ones. Synology on the other hand was more of a "some granny at home wants a place to store all their pictures from their holidays". QNAP never really used ZFS but rather proper RAID and yet recently they've started down the ZFS route. It would be interesting to hear your views on why Synology over say, QNAP or Dell.
I have not used QNAP personally, though I know people that do. I had used Thecus, but there were a few reasons I chose Synology, maybe it’s worth doing a piece on that. But the quick version was that I wanted larger scale, and I use the Synology Surveillance software with IP CCTV cameras, I think their software offering there is really good.
I also fairly recently changed from RAID to BTRFS/SHR for my disk arrays. I don’t think QNAP provide that support as yet and there are some benefits there.
But there is a lot to dive into on all those choices.
Often you are limited in drive size capacity by the controller chip. I have a 7 year old adapter for my RPi2, and it can handle 12TB 3.5" SATA3, however _all_ the newer versions designed for RPi3 & RPi4 have controllers that can only handle upto 10TB 3.5" SATA3 . as a side effect I have been watching Amazon EXOS pricing for 10 & 12 TB 3.5" drives for 7 years, and since the introduction of refurbished 10TB EXOS drives, the price for "renewed" and "new" EXOS 10 & 12 TB has remained around 200 dollars US
WD also did this with the SSDs. Some of WD Green SSDs use QLC flash instead of TLC and there is no easy way to find out which is which.
Yes, you would think they would learn…. Wouldn’t you? 🙄
@@sometechguy don't think they'll give a damn unfortunately. Not without some backlash from the tech community like the Adata controller swapping fiasco.
Do you think I can run Exos X18 18TB on a Sysnology DS720+?
If not what about X18 16TB then?
I don’t think these drives are on the compatibility list for this NAS. However, I run drives that are not on the compatibility list and they work fine. There are two things to consider. Firstly, the drive may just not be tested by Synology. This doesn’t mean it won’t work, just it wasn’t verified. This is going to be the majority of disks that are unlisted. The second is that the drive may provide hardware features, such as encryption that the NAS can’t use as it doesn’t have the right software installed. This may mean that the drive won’t work functionally, and this would be a bigger problem. However, experience is that this is the far rarer case.
In your example, if you have the disk already you can try it and make sure it’s operable, and you could test SMART functionality. If you don’t have the disk, and are thinking of buying then I would do some research to see if other have tried and tested this. Consider that if it’s not on the compatibility list, if you do run into problems and raise a case about the drives use to Synology, you could be told simply that that config isn’t supported.
I highly doubt there will be a difference between the X18 16Tb and 18TB.
Some DSM does give very persistent warnings about incompatible drives, which is really annoying if the disks are working perfectly. There are work around to this, but it’s too involved to go into in a comment.
Sorry if it’s not a definitive answer, but I hope it helps.
@@sometechguy thanks a lot for such a detailed answer, highly appreciate that! 😊👍
It was not easy to find others asking the same question. But I have found that it is working fine for some. I think I will give it a try, since I can get the x18 18Tb cheaper than the 16tb right now
I ended up participating in the Kickstarter for the u Green 6-Bay Pro model. I have never run an ass and I usually use a 8 TB HDD with a 500 GB cache. My big issue is file sizes with the cache. I think I need up to a terabyte of cache because my CF Express card is 1 GB. So there is a chance I might be moving over a terabyte at a time. If anyone could give me some recommendations it would really help
I got stung by WD with SMR, I won’t buy from them again.
I'm thinking of buying a new laptop, any clue how to make sure you can fit one of these into it?
I use what ever are the least expensive drives that I can find, use ZFS RAIDZ 2 or 3, have a spare or two always ready, and a back up (ZFS RAIDZ 3).
I'm still scared to use Seagate HDDs (even though their SSDs are extremely good in my experience). In office NAS use, those Seagates have shown consistent failures, whereas the Western Digital HDDs have shown far less. The drives I have to keep replacing and taking to the eco recycle centres are, unfortunately, Seagate. The WD drives have been retired before they fail due to them outliving their capacity.
Not been my experience with Exos drives.
@@BrianGarside What sample size have you worked with?
@@WSS_the_OG 14TB X16 model ST14000NM001G. I have 8 in a NAS and 2 on standby.
@@BrianGarside That's actually quite encouraging. Thanks for the info! We're in the market for HDDs again as it's "upgrade" time again.
Are there any NAS products which are optimised more for larger size file transfers? Reading reveiws, I'm surprised at how slow most NAS devices are during sustained workloads, especially just a simple 2-disk RAID1.
I'm helping a friend search for a better NAS solution for the photo studio she runs. The files are all normally 35MB or 76MB raw images from cameras, with others being high res JPEGs which are still a few MB. A typical customer session might generate several GB. Macs running Lightroom and Photoshop are used to process the images (the network is of course GigE). She has a number of old Buffalo LS220D 2-bay NAS boxes, each with 2x 4TB in RAID1. One of them failed recently; I was able to recover the 3.7TB of data (onto a bunch of SSDs I had spare), but copying it back onto the unit once it was restored (using two replacement 4TB Seagate ES.3s) took an age, copying as it was at a mere 30MB/sec.
Or would one be better off building a custom PC instead? I have plenty of parts. Alas though I have little experience with Linux, while using Windows wouldn't work so well because Windows gets confused by certain types of Mac file, especially metadata files. Or is there a Linux distro specifically intended for simplified NAS setups?
At a minimum I suggested she step up to at least a Synology DS220+ with a couple of 8TB WD Red Pros, but the cost is apparently prohibitive.
Does anyone have any experience with the Toshiba MG08-D Enterprise 8TB? It's the same price as the Exos 7E8 (which are both a good chunk cheaper than the WD Red Pro).
There are a few things to consider. SATA itself is a relatively slow interface. SAS disks are typically faster, around 2x speed. But SATA drives are usually a little pricier, but NAS that support them are often far more expensive, as built for enterprise use in most cases.
Then there is the RAID type. RAID 1 is quite slow, as you are limited to the interface into the disk. RAID 5, despite requiring parity calculation is faster as you are writing data across multiple drives, and get access to higher IO.
The NAS hardware itself can be important, especially if RAID is in use as the processor is going to be responsible for writing the data. Most home NAS will be purely software RAID, and lower end devices could have low spec CPUs.
Networking can also be a bottleneck, and actually I wonder if that is more the problem here. Are they using 1Gbps switched networking to the device, or is anything running at 100Mbps? And if they are on wireless, that could also be a cause.
And then the disk themselves have different performance properties. Spindle speed, if they are SMR etc.
But mostly, all these performance aspects can be improved by buying better (read more expensive) hardware. And if cost is a major issue, they may need to accept the performance constraints.
But what you can often do is write a large file and see (and hear) if the disks are running flat out. If not, its more likely a networking or NAS performance issue, rather than disks or disk IO. Definitely eliminate networking as the cause before buying NAS hardware.
I don't have experience with the Tosh disks personally. Good luck with finding a good solution.
@@sometechguy Can SATA limit transfer rate? I don't have any modern or high performance drive, but i guess limit is 6gbit (3gbit if drive or controller are 10 years old) and this limits transfer to roughly 500MB/s. I think that 7200rpm 4TB drive has roughly 250MB/s at start and 16GB may have double data stored per track and double track density so it may reach this. But question is how many people have 10gbit network (card, nas and router) which won't bottleneck it. PCs have 2.5gbit cards today while 2.5gbit routers are not yet common.
You raise a good point, and I think its unlikely that SATA is the bottleneck in this scenario. My first suspect would be the network. But that 6Gbps is half duplex, so it would depend what is being read as well. And depending on what else is happening on the disk, such as the NAS performing tasks.
@@sometechguy I could understand it if there were multiple client systems accessing the boxes all at the same time, but this generally isn't the case. There are only four Macs and about six NAS boxes, so often the Macs aren't even accessing the same units. Plus, I couldn't get more than the stated bandwidth even with my own network which I know runs peachy, with just one machine accessing the NAS. It is it seems by all accounts just a slow box, but I get the impression from reviews that none of these products are particularly fast.
I mentioned backup; this is where a custom PC would have a real advantage, able to easily and quickly copy a RAID contents elsewhere, whereas copying from a NAS to a backup device is slow. It blows my mind that there isn't a reasonably priced decent 2-bay NAS from any vendor that includes TypeC USB for fast backup. For what these boxes actually do, I don't think the pricing justifies the hw one is paying for. It's also hard to find relevant review data because so much coverage focuses on things like video encoding which isn't relevant for my friend's use case.
Oh, don't even get me started on what a convoluted mess it was to reset the NAS. Such a klunky design, with flawed functionality in the fw & control programs, a reset methodolgy that involves bizarre changes in IP address during setup, a confusing web interface and a secondary web GUI that defaults to Chinese. :D
For much better performance, look in to have 10Gbps networking instead of 1Gbps or 2.5Gbps. It will take some investment, sure, but those 10Gbps file transfers are very fast.
If I just want a storage disk for my stationary computer that I am in the same room with and noise levels are iimportant, which would you suggest? What I have read is that some of these disk makes noise all the time, and not only when you read/write to them. I want the most silent option when not accessing the disk. Thinking the 12GB to 20GB range.
You can set power saving, and the disks are typically going to make noise when they are being accessed. So if the computer is idle or in power save, they should not be noisy. If you are downloading something over night, then you will hear the noisier disks (enterprise and NAS pro disks).
The desktop disks will park their heads and use power saving more actively, but they do t go up to the larger capacities. So either set power saving or turn off the PC, or use a NAS disk. You could go with the Ironwolf up to 12Tb, which would probably be a bit quieter.
@@sometechguy Thanks for the answer. I think I was a bit unclear. I have 2 SSDs for most things. The storage disk will only be used for data I seldom access. I never have the computer on at night and it isn't in the room I sleep in, so it isn't a massive thing. I just don't want a disk that make clicking noises etc. all the time even when i'm not accessing data on that specific disk. I read that the WD Red Plus is supposed to be one of the more quiet larger disks, but it's a bit more expensive so of one of the other enterprise disks only makes noise when writing or reading data from it, that would be interesting.
Most of the noise, especially the 'clicking' is during disk access. Its going to be the drive moving the heads around, which is only going to happen when data is being accessed or written, and especially if there are non-sequential reads or writes, namely reading files spread around the disk, or writing multiple files at the same time...or things like disk defragmentations.
So I don't think its going to be a big issue, especially the disk isn't used during normal use of the PC (OS files, swap space etc) and is used for storing and then retrieving large files occasionally
I hope that's a help.
It does, thank you. Keep up the good work!@@sometechguy
I'm so lucky, I'm just shuck Seagate Expansion Desktop 10TB and got Exos drive inside 😂
Usually people get "Seagate Archive" drive and it perform so slowly in read (especially when you use that drive for store movies and videos, don't even think that drive for gaming)
Nice find, and thanks for sharing.
I don't know if the choice of drive they put in the enclosures is down to excessive inventory or because the drive didn't meet certain test standards. Even if the later is true, it doesn't mean it would fail but they certainly don't have to provide the same warranty. I don't think I would personally shuck drives for a 24x7 array, but that may just be an abundance of caution. Perhaps I should do this as a test and see if the drive has a shorter life.
The archive drives are SMR typically, so read performance may not be significantly worse (depends on spindle speed also), but the write performance for large files like movies could be bad, especially if the drive is already fairly full.
@@sometechguy obviously shucked external HDD means voiding the warranty, but as long as you didn't use the drive for "heavy use" like video editing, moving huge files back and forward, i think HDD will perform okay for 3-5 years until it get any bad sector.
Agreed, it may well be totally fine for heavy use, but for less intense work it’s a great way to get bargain storage. And if you can open the caddy without any obvious damage, if it fails quickly then it’s probably returnable also. And disks tend to have a bathtub like failure curve, as ‘bad’ drives often fail early.
I am sure it will serve you well 😎
One reason I avoided the Exos range, so I was told, was that these drives will not enter sleep mode and spin down if the hibernation option is set. perhaps someone here can tell me if this is true.
Also moved to Seagate for the same reason as you. The WD SMR scandal left a bad taste in my mouth and the reliability issues I had seen for some years with Seagate drives seemed to be resolved. Plus, an Ironwolf drive cost me 20% less than the WD equivalent.
I am pretty confident that you can hibernate Exos drives, but I have heard of reports that some NAS support it and some don't and I am not sure why. I have some in a NAS here, and I am sure they spin down, because the noise is quite distinctive when they are start up again.
So this might take a bit more digging.
@@sometechguy Thanks for responding. I am running DSM 7.2, so wondered if having Exos drives hibernate won't be a problem.
in your opinion, whats the best sata single drive large capacity out there?
Right now, I have been buying 18TB Exos, as it’s not just the cost per TB on the disk, but you have to factor in the cost of the drive bay, as they are limited. I am looking at the 20Tb at the moment, as the prices are getting into the same ball park per TB. But prices change all the time, so it’s a loving target.
@@sometechguy thanks!