Posted: 3/24/2013 6:42:27 AM EDT
|
Hey guys,
I have a DLINK DNS-321 NAS. I have (2) 1.5 TB WD Green drives in there (5400 RPM) Mirrored.. To be honest, I've never been thrilled with the performance. Lately, it stops working often and I have been doing hard restarts. Almost every day now. One thing I hate is my hard drives go to sleep and it takes about 12 seconds to "spin up". I would rather have something that was always ready to go, or better yet, be able to schedule sleep times and awake times. I am ready to spend some $ on this to get a good solution. I'd say $300-350 tops. I can re-use my hard drives, or sell them and start over. I really don't need more than 1.5 TB of total storage, but 2TB might be a better bang for my buck. I think I am currently storing about 600 GB worth of stuff. Needs: NAS or DIY file server. Low maintenance. Not super expensive, loud, or power hungry Any suggestions? I feel like my DNS-321 is going to die soon, so I need to work on migrating that data over. |
|
Synology devices are expensive, but well liked. Since you are doing an upgrade, I would recommend looking at Western Digital Red series drives. They are 5400rpm drives designed specifically for NAS and RAID usage. If you want to spend a little extra, you can get Western Digital RE series drives. They are performance oriented, enterprise drives.
If you are after performance, you will need to have a four disk enclosure and run RAID 10 (striping two mirrored sets) or RAID 5 (striping with parity). RAID 10 will give fast read/write times. RAID 5 with give fast read times, slower write times, and more storage space than RAID 10. If you get four 2TB drives, you will get 4TB of storage in RAID 10 and 6TB of storage in RAID 5. Quoted:
The green drives are designed to spindown when not in use. If you want speed then you need to look at the black drives. The spindown is a function of the NAS, not the drives. |
|
Green drives are slow. Western Digital also messes with their drives firmware so they can not be effectively used in a RAID system unless you pay for the expensive enterprise drives.
I am using a netgear ready nas. Not the best in performance either. I usually get about 50MB/s out of it. |
|
Quoted:
Quoted:
The green drives are designed to spindown when not in use. If you want speed then you need to look at the black drives. The spindown is a function of the NAS, not the drives. Odd then that WD has a utility that will allow you to adjust the spindown timer. http://www.storagereview.com/how_to_stop_excessive_load_cycles_on_the_western_digital_2tb_caviar_green_wd20ears_with_wdidle3 |
|
Quoted:
Quoted:
Quoted:
The green drives are designed to spindown when not in use. If you want speed then you need to look at the black drives. The spindown is a function of the NAS, not the drives. Odd then that WD has a utility that will allow you to adjust the spindown timer. http://www.storagereview.com/how_to_stop_excessive_load_cycles_on_the_western_digital_2tb_caviar_green_wd20ears_with_wdidle3 The heads auto-parking != auto-spindown. |
|
Since I have been researching NAS units quite a bit lately...I feel like I should weigh in. Hard drives - You want Western Digital RED Hard drives - Specifically Designed for NAS. I picked up 3x3TB red drives last week for $149 each
3rd Place: Drobo - Think of Drobo as the "Bose" of the NAS world. The product they have does what it was designed to do VERY WELL. It looks just as good as it performs within its specified parameters. But if you want to step anywhere 'outside of the box' designed by Drobo...you are wading into deep murky waters. Prepare to be self supportive in this case. 2nd Place: QNAP - Another great brand of NAS. Right there with Synology in terms of reliability and performance, as well as 3rd party app support. A large community of people use these units and can provide lots of help. They are slower than the Drobo units thought because they don't utilize a SSD cache drive. 1st Place: Synology - Probably the best NAS solution out there. The community is huge, the apps are endless, the performance is great, and the reliability is slightly better than QNAP (QNAP had a problem with their power supplys at one point). Although the Drobo 5N has better performance than Synology devices, Synology offers a much more rounded out package with more than adequate speeds. Since you are only running 2 disks in RAID, and you don't plan on running more...and your price range is only $300ish, I would suggest this guy: |