Best HDD for NAS
 

any suggestions on what hdd to go with for a NAS set up?
looking to set up a qnap 4bay nas and start out with 2 2TB hdd at raid-1 and add 2 more 2TB down the road.
been researching a lot on HDDs to use for NAS and its confusing me more and more as i read on.

i prefer not to use seagate as ive bad luck with them (re click of death)
ive always been a WD fan, but runnign WD blacks is an over kill as the NAS is just for storage (songs, pics, videos). Then i figured y not run WD greens, but WD greens seem to cause issues since it powers itself down to save power thus been a "green" drive, this screws up the raid array causing false errors. so what other drives r out there that wont kill the bank yet is reliable?

I say just go and get the blacks since they aren't that much more $$ than blues or greens and the power consumption difference is negligible so that is definitely not worth the performance trade off. I also don't see it as overkill of its not costing you a lot more. Also, personally speaking , my seagate 7200.12 drives are quoted than my blacks. I really wouldn't reccomend another brand of drive since for the last 7 years I've been using seagate and wd drives and I haven't had any dead drives to date. One last thing , are you sure the NAS is cheaper than building your own home server? They aren't that costly to set up and if you have an old computer you're in business.

WD RE4, it's designed specifically for what you are looking for. Don't use a desktop drive like WD Green or Black.

^ I had one before for my Synology DS111, and it died 3 months after purchase, it was replaced with a larger WD green under warranty, disabled the parking option and I have no complaint so far. Oh, it's generally cooler, I hate it when the sensor reads 45deg inside the NAS, then the fan sucks air out at full speed.

Yeah a green with parking disabled would be good too. IIRC they make a green that is designed for surveillance and media systems, most likely it's just a regular one with this feature disabled.

A black 2tb is 209 where as a green 2tb is at 129, that a difference of 160
A re4 is double the price of a green.

If for sure I can disable the head park even in the newer greens then I'll go with greens. I've been readin online n some of the newer greens can't disable the head park?

Perhaps Samsung or Hitachi drives.

I've used the regular WD Greens in my QNAP NAS. I found they were pretty quiet. You could barely hear them spinning/writing. I had the 1TB ones. I used WDIDLE to turn off the spin down feature. Didn't have any problems in the 1 year I ran them.

I've since upgraded the NAS with the 2TB Samsung drives. I've noticed that they are a lot noisier when writing than the WD Green drives. No spin down feature to turn off on these drives though.

If you're going to RAID the drives, there's one other thing you need to look into and that's TLER/ERC/CCTL. The enterprise drives (like the RE4) support this feature while the budget drives don't. Without this feature, there's a higher probability that some of the drives might drop out of RAID. With that said, in the almost 2 years I've had my Samsung drives, I haven't had this happen so maybe the fears about them are exxagerated but still worth looking into since having 2 or more drives dropping out of a RAID 5 means you're going to be SOL. (probably won't be too big a problem if you're just doing RAID 1)

i have a WD Green right now.. although its not in RAID or NAS, it's fucking loud. not to mention it boots down

i've read online that both the head park and the TLER can be turn off/adjusted via software, so it seems to be more n more promising to go with greens