The way videos start have a great first impression on viewers. The first ten seconds were funny and the intro wasn’t an hour long. Quick animations. And within the first 30 seconds we knew exactly what the video was about and the features being compared. This video was very well made and am glad it came up in search results.
I would like to see all the drives tested in the same bay because the acoustic characteristic of the NAS is different in each bay. Awesome video and thanks for all the knowledge! :)
With Synology refusing to update their HDD compatibility list trying to punt their own, can you maintain a list of drives you used on Synology to give us a sense of what works? Especially the bigger 18 and 20TB drives.
Thank you for your in-depth review. I recently upgraded to the RS2421+ and was planning to move my 8TB WD Red Pros over to the new NAS. I ended up getting the 16TBs HAT5300 and restored via Hyper Backup. Disk access noise and temps are way lower in my new setup.
I used to despise Seagate drives; I've had very back luck with their consumer drivers for many years. Working professionally with them they had high failure rates in our workplace when compared to other brands. However, Seagate Ironwolf Pros on the other hand seem to be made completely differently as they've been just as rock solid as WD Reds. HGST drives are still king when it comes to reliability but modern WD Reds and IW Pros are extremely good also.
Sea gate just killed their high capacity consumer drives, so it’s iron wolf or Xros… they said they may bring something else to high capacity consumer/compute range
Synology has really lost my respect with the propritary NAS drives REQUIRING only Synology hard drive otherwise no support... Baloney... I would never buy their drives even if they were the fastest, for principal.
I agree, I won't ever use synology because of their hard stance on supporting only their items. You pay more and are put in a box and told to kiss the ring basically.
@@dazealex I love my Synology NAS (CS407, DS1512+ and now new DS1821+). But I won't spend 4 X the price on their RAM and NVME SSd's. I will upgrade my new DS1812+ to 32GB Kingston Server rated RAM and another brand high end NVME. In case I need support I will keep Synology's 4GB RAM module and remove the NVME's before requesting support. Love the Synology NAS and DSM Software but absolutely will not allow myself to be gouged on their proprietary branded accessories which they don't even manufacture!
Hi there, I'm a big fan of your content. Thanks for all your hard work! I wanted to suggest that when you make comparisons, would you be able to add text to the video labelling which product that you are currently testing? It would really help out. Thanks!
I just ordered the Wolf Pro, 18TB. The price on Newegg was $299 minus a $9 coupon, BUT I went with Amazon for $299. I think Amazon delivery will be more conscientious. IOW I don't want someone tossing it on my porch, which Amazon never does. Respectfully, right now on Newegg, it says the MTBF on the Wolf pro, 18 TB is 2,5 Million hours also. I have LOVED my two ten TB regular, non-pro, Ironwolfs. very quiet, as fast as a hard drive gets, etc.
The Seagates are definitely louder than the WD red pro. I had a pair of them in my DS214+ and they made the whole case vibrate so badly it would kick out harmonics and I would have to tap it to stop the case from vibrating. Was so glad to finally replace them again with the WD red pros, way quieter...
I'm genuinely surprised that Seagate is infamous for faulty drives as my experience was quite the opposite. I was using WD drives before and I've had three 2TB HDD Desktop drives die on me. Most of my experience with Seagate had been on their portable drives and they had been excellent. So when I brought my first NAS last December, I only considered the IronWolf drives.
I don’t honestly think we should be too concerned about that. All manufacturers go through their bad patches. Seagate had their own controversies eight years ago. Doubtless there will be more. I was buying a new WD Red 4TB the other day and this ‘helpful’ guy decided to warn me about the SMA problem (which I know nothing about and care even less). I’ve had two WD drives fail but I was reasonably convinced in was due to excessive temperatures on the enclosure. But there’s always ‘that guy’ out there who feels good telling you that what you’ve bought will fail. Mostly it’s people on the internet. I don’t think the guy in the shop was doing anything more than responding to what he’d heard but it gives some idea of how endemic this has become, a situation Seagate are probably happy to exploit.
I bought my DS918+ late 2017, I installed 4 Seagate IronWolf 4Tb drives, the unit is on constantly from 6am till midnight, it has all my movie and TV series collection, all photos and videos that are uploaded daily from our connected phones, along with work files and other documents, apart from a dust and vaccume of the Synology every 2 months I have had zero issues at all, in fact all drives are still reporting 100% perfect state, so from my experience I would not hesitate to get these drives again, I did have WD Reds in an earlier Synology unit and unfortunately they did fail after 2 years.
I've always used WD drives at home: Velociraptors for OS boot drives, and WD Red drives for mass storage of user data. I'm aware that there's currently a controversy around WD Red drives, but that's an issue with the health monitoring software recommending people replace their drives too soon and not the drive hardware which is rock solid.
I find that my two WD Red drives run at different temperatures. One I’d 8 degrees hotter when idle. Which raises the question of which NAS drives run coolest ? Certainly my two Toshiba drives run considerably cooler that the WD for instance. What are Iron wolf like for temperature?
THANK YOU FOR YOUR VIDEOS, This helped me so much ! This is an event trying to find the right product for the synology and I just used your links ! Thanks again
Over the years I used WD Red, Seagate Ironwolf and Exos. Over the years I only had issues with WD RED, failing long before their expected end of life which resulted in a support neighmare to get them replaced and have the replacement HDDs dead as well. Since around 2 years I use seagate Exos only. My Qnap TS-653D is equipped with 6x 18TB Exos running 24/7 . Nothing, zero issues at all. Will never buy anything else.
I use 16TB WD Gold drives in my Synology DS920+. As far as I know, those are industrial level drives, suitable for NAS as well. I would be interested how WD Gold compare to WD Red Pro?
I use both in separate NAS devices. Honestly I don't notice a difference between the two when using either. They both seem to have the same sound and transfer rate. I would love to see a more indebth comparison like above for the specifics just for fun. However I love them both. I do expect the gold to last longer of corse due to the industrial level and I do put my more "valuable" data on it. But then again I always keep 2 backups of both systems. 1 on-site, and 1 offsite. Years ago before i started using NAS iv lost all data before. Never going through that process again.
AFAIK the Gold is the "civilian" version of Ultrastar, so essentially identical. While the Red Pro has an MTBF of 1M hours, the Gold is at 2.5M hours in addition to almost double the workload/yr. Also the idle power consumption is around double that of the Red Pro. How much of this actually matters is up to you :) I have been running several Ultrastars without a hitch for years now, at a lower price than any of the Red series. So to me it's a no-brainer.
Thanks for all the useful information! This was all Greek to me but I am beginning to understand thanks to you… i’m almost where I can make some good decisions… I appreciate your hard work
As someone who just went through the pain and suffering of buying drives for my little budget truenas server at home so I can upgrade from my 2tb drives that are who knows how old this was a good watch. 8 12tb's isn't cheap by any means, specially for a home lab.
I really apriciate the warranty handling of WD. I using WD Red for a very long time and I have no complains. Thank you for this interesting review. The noise those drives can produce are pretty shocking 🙉
After the WD Red. CMR/SMR fun I have moved to the Toshiba N300 NASA’s Drives and I Have found them very cost effective and reliable however they are a bit more noticeable Noise wise if pushed hard but not overly so. I never see you mentioning the Toshiba drives. Do you dislike them is there a issue I am unaware of?
Its 2023 here now and this is the first time I've even heard that synology have a range of drives. I've just put a 22Tb WD Pro into my NAS and i think I'm going to pair it in a Raid 1 with a Seagate 22Tb drive. I've steered clear of Seagate for over 25 years since my Amiga days but it seems they have got a lot better.
14:30 I agree with this. SSDs specifically will have issues with disconnecting if they don’t match the compatibility on NAS systems. Qnap is a good idea. They are a pain if they don’t match compatibility list. If you want piece of mind always buy the drives from the NAS manufacturer. Synology can’t come back and say the issues you’re having are related to drive compatibility, versions, etc.
I have a QNAP TVS-663 6-bay NAS which is currently running a mix of 2TB and 3TB drives, Seagate Barracuda and WD Red Plus. The NAS sits on my desk in my home office and the noisiest part of the NAS are the fans, which are really quite intrusive (my iPhone using DecibelX records ~46db at a distance of 30cm from the from of the NAS). Your comparison test of these three drives make it sound like the NAS has been turned in to a blender - there's no way I could tolerate that level and type of sound so close to me. My first step is to replace the fans with Noctua units and then (because I need more storage capacity) to upgrade the drives. Although the SMART scores for each of the 6 drives is "Good" the granular data (i.e. "Raw_Read_Error_Rate") for the WD drives is massively better than for the Seagate units. I appreciate that Red Plus and Barracuda may be different class of drives but it looks like I'll be opting for WD Red Plus drives across the board this time.
Just FYI “read error rate” is not a standard SMART value, every vender reports it differently, meaning … nothing really, you can’t compare them directly. Pretty much like the CPU frequency and core count these days. If you really want to know what really matters in SMART values, BackBlaze have an article about what are easily signs of HDD failure. Look up “What SMART Stats Tell Us About Hard Drives”
This was a great in-depth comparison. Thank you for putting so much effort into it; I can't help thinking it must have taken a long time to put this together. I was surprised and pleased to hear that the Synology drives are actually built to a higher level of quality (in some respects) than their competitors. At first when this range was announced, a lot of people just assumed (reasonably) that it was a vendor lock-in effort with no real benefit for end-users. Maybe I misunderstood, but would the Synology drives still be markedly superior in hardware even without the custom firmware integration? If so, I wonder if we'll see them ever make an effort at competing more directly with WD and Seagate with a new line that isn't meant to work specifically with their own NAS devices. I've got a QNAP TS-253D with a pair of WD Gold 14 TB in RAID1; once I realized I wanted to buy such large drives, I wanted reliability, and I've had good luck with used 4TB Golds in the past. (I'm using these for backup in my home office.) I found the 14TB ones brand new on eBay Canada marked down almost 50 percent since they were getting resold by someone who bought too many or something. They were less expensive than buying an equivalent pair of Red Pros from Amazon would have been. :) I'm a big fan of the Golds' audio profile. They're not quiet, but it's a lower-pitched tone, and not at all obnoxious when there's just 2 of them.
I bought my DS918+ late 2017, I installed 4 Seagate IronWolf 4Tb drives, the unit is on constantly from 6am till midnight, it has all my movie and TV series collection, all photos and videos that are uploaded daily from our connected phones, along with work files and other documents, apart from a dust and vaccume of the Synology every 2 months I have had zero issues at all, in fact all drives are still reporting 100% perfect state, so from my experience I would not hesitate to get these drives again, I did have WD Reds in an earlier Synology unit and unfortunately they did fail after 2 years.
Thanks for the in-depth look into these three drives. I do like the Firmware update ability of the Synology drives when using a Synology NAS but I am not sure the extra cost is worth it? I am using a Synology DS-1520+ NAS with five Seagate Iron Wolf Pro 4 TB drives. That is all that was available when I purchased them back in June 2021. I like the data recovery and price point of the Seagate IWP. At the time the Seagate IWP 4TB drives were $139 each. The Synology HAT5300 4TB is currently $199! I can get the Seagate IWP 16TB for around $250 each now. That is an additional 12TB for only $50 more each. They all have a five-year warranty but it does come down to reliability and not having to use that warranty that counts. I am not sure if the extra cost of the Synology is worth it but your video did help.
I put two Seagate Exos 16TB drives into my NAS. They run cool but they are really crunchy for noise. No spin or whine noise, but lots of head movement clicking and crunching. I don't leave my NAS running 24:7, it's used only for another system backup level, so I don't have to put up with the noise all day long. I normally purchase WD drives, but these Seagate Exos drives are priced right in Canada. $23 CAD per TB.
How long should the drives work in a home user Environment? I bought a qnap ts230 and 2 seagate ironwolf back in 2021. the qnap tells me now in 2024 that one disk has to be replaced and the other is in no good shape. I barely use my nas. Only dumped a lot of pictures to it and for the most thats it. It get‘s used maye each 2-3 monts. Thanks in advance
The question isn't whether wd red pro or ironwolf pro are the better drives. The question is why I should opt for these drives when the enterprise drives exos and wd gold are are similar in price or even cheaper and offer not 3 but 5 years of warranty?!
in The Netherlands the exos drives are 200 euro cheaper than Ironwolf. Exos 18TB = €304,94 Exos 20TB = €438,75 IronWolf Pro 18TB = 507,64 IronWolf Pro 20TB = €593 So I also dont understand why Exos is left out in the comparison Also the WD Ultrastar's as someone else mentioned are way cheaper.
The Red Pros do offer 5 years. But IMHO their higher price can't be justified compared to enterprise. It's simply a "worse" drive costing more. I've never understood this.
I choose to skip all the higher priced HDDs marketed towards NAS systems with Seagate Exos drives. I've had 4 Exos X16 drives in my Synology DS 920+ for years now with zero issues. These are enterprise drives built for long life and I'm happy I went this route.
ok I have an 8 drive 10g Synology NAS waiting to buy drives for it. Going to be in my upper shelf coat closet as my "data closet" in my home. I don't want it to sound like 10 popcorn pots on steroids... What's the cheapest 15TB+ SSD drives I can get?
Sitting on multiple Synology groups and all of them convinced me that I was an idiot using any of those as the best option is to scavenge 14TB drives from WD Elements.
It's entertaining to see all the "Seagate is crap, because I had several Seagate drives that failed x years ago." I'm not saying you're all wrong, but it's still fun. And it's funny because Seagate is one of the oldest HDD manufacturers that's still in business. They survived where Conner, Maxtor, Imprimis, Priam, Micropolis, Quantum and all the other manufacturers who are no longer with us failed. They might not always have the best products, but they are generally "Good Enough". They sure has had their share of lemons. I remember a series of, I think it was either 120 MB or 210 MB drives, from Seagate that had almost 100% failure rate within two years. But then there were similar duds from just about every manufacturer at some time. Right now Toshiba HDD's are all the rage. A few years back it was HGST. Fun thing is HGST was formed from the old IBM disk drive division which was sold to Hitachi. For a long time IBM HDD's were considered to standard to which all others were compared. Then they released the Deskstar 75GXP... This drive was plagued with reliability issues and it got so bad that it became almost impossible to sell a HDD made by IBM. It didn't matter that they redesigned the drives and made really good drives. The name was tarnished by the Deskstar 75GPX, or the DeathStar as it was popularly called. IBM eventually gave up and sold it all to Hitachi who rebranded the products as HGST, and soon they had managed to scrub the 75GXP from most peoples memory. Hitachi actually managed to sell a lot of drives. But they didn't do as well as they wanted and so they sold the business to Western Digital. Seagate has also been buying. Not so long ago... Actually it's 12 years, but who's counting? Well they bought the Samsung HDD business. Strange, it feels like it was yesterday. My point is that Seagate would not be here today if their drives were as bad as a lot of people want to make them out to be. They have had lemons, but then so have all the other manufacturers. Those that survived are the ones that were able to fix the problems they had and come back with better drives. Oh and I want you to think a bit about the "Cheap drives are crappy drives" idea. It doesn't compute! This was something a WD engineer clued me in on. We were talking storage drives for use in large storage solutions and I asked just what it was that made their professional storage drives achieve much higher MTBF and altogether higher reliability than the desktop drives. And he laughed. The answer was pretty interesting. He asked if I thought about the economics of selling HDD's. A pro storage drive back then could easily cost twice what the desktop drives of the same capacity cost. The storage drives came with, I think it was, 3 year warranty while the desktop drives had a one year warranty. There were physical differences, in general the pro drives were heavier. But then he said something interesting. The BOM for a the pro drives were not twice as high as it was for the desktop drives. This meant they made probably twice the profit if not more for each storage drive they sold compared to the desktop versions. This also means that every desktop drive that fails and had to be replaced under warranty ate up a larger part of the profit from the initial sale. With replacement drive, handling and transport they had to sell more than ten desktop drives to pay for one failed. Meanwhile a failed storage drive cost perhaps five or six sold drives, if not less than that. So they constructed and tested the desktop drives to standards that were almost as stringent as their best storage drives. So mechanically they were very similar in reliability. What really differed were the certification procedures where they were tested and certified with different RAID controllers and storage solutions. And yes, that is important. It may seem like SATA and SAS is stable tech and there shouldn't be any compatibility problems with modern drives and controllers. And yet there are. When selecting a new HDD for a storage solution you should start by looking through the storage manufacturers HCL or Hardware Compatibility List. If there are drives that's been tested and certified as compatible by the makers of the storage solution you are using you should really consider using those. It can save you a lot of pain and effort. You might get away with just about any drive you want to use, but it can go very badly if you are unlucky. Now I come at this from the professional storage sector. I've had to replace hundreds of drives because of compatibility issues. It's not the least bit fun, and it doesn't save any money. The times this happened it was usually because a customer demanded a drive capacity where the RAID controller manufacturers hadn't yet certified any drives of that capacity. So we worked with the HDD manufacturers and they were only to happy to promise that of course there would be no compatibility issues because their latest drives were perfect! And yes, this was the two big guys, Seagate and WD. The good thing is WD coughed up over three hundred drives for replacement. Still not a fun job replacing 300 drives in a bunch of storage servers at the customers site. Seagate got away with custom firmware and together with the RAID controller manufacturer they put together a update package that flashed the drives while they were still in use. But again, it's something you want to avoid if you can. So unless there is a really good reason using a certified drive can be a good idea. Now this does not mean I endorse the Synology lock in attempt. This is Synology trying to play with the big boys in the storage game. Locking in the customers is an old tradition in the enterprise storage business. But bringing it to the prosumer market is a bit rich for me.
I’ve had a 4TB WD black from 2016. And finally got an upgrade to 16TB IronWolf drive. And I was expecting to be louder alittle. But I was surprised how quiet the seagate is compared to my old WD black.
I'm thinking of buying an 8 Bay QNAP Nas for my small home based business, that noise 24 hrs a day would drive me nuts. I had no idea it was that loud. That alone kind of deters me to buy a NAS to begin with. Why are they so much louder than the HDs one has in a regular PC? And this noise is for 1 drive, an 8 bay drive would be loud as a machine saw, how do you deal with this issue?
I just returned the 8 T hard drive because I saw your video. What NAS would you reccomend that are solid state because maybe theu are better? I was choked bc i selected SSD and they sent me a HD model . Im returning the WD My Cloud Ultra EX2 Ultra 8T. Would love a long term quality reccomendation. Thank you so much
Need more space. I have DS920+ 4x4TB on Raid 5 that is 90% full. I think I should have gone SHR. What is the best way upgrade to 4x16TB? I also bought a DS220j for backups. Do you have a video on how to upgrade?
Well, thanks for this. Makes me feel better about the 2x14TB WD Red Pros I just bought for my Terramaster F x23 NAS. Now I just need to decide if I want the 2 or 4 bay system...
Hi, Thanks for another useful and interesting vid and congrats on avoiding HDD dominoes. A tiny observation: USP is _Unique_ Selling Point (or Proposition).
Hi bro, isn't Toshiba's N300 line a good one either? I'm between Toshiba (7200 NAS) and Seagate (5400 NAS) media. Which do you recommend in terms of performance?
I've just received a WD Red Pro 16TB defective from factory. It seems that they're not complying with QC. Also, they request you to send the product to them, instead of collecting themselves as Seagate does. Why sould I pay extra money if the product comes defective from factory? I can't justify that, no matter how silent they are.
A year ago I've shucked 2 14TB Seagate Backup Plus. Got Ironwolf PRO and Exos. Exos is slightly faster. Both nicely produce crunching noise while work. "Solution" was to use SSD M2 cache in QNAP. Now I hear fan more often ;) Much better is 2.5" SSD. Anyway. Drives so far reliable and affordable. Skipped WD due to SMR trash.
I'm new to all of this - I have 72TB of external drives (attached) another 12TB running wild... Basically I run a PC tower and keep plugging stuff in - I'm guessing I am doing that wrong? Can someone point me at a video to tell me how to do it right? I don't share, so wifi etc isn't an issue.
WD lost my business with the whole WD Red fake CMR drive crap. I bought a 4tb Red drive for my nas because it was supposed to be a CMR drive but it wasn't as we all know now, they are SMR drives which give horrible performance in a NAS or any read heavy environment. I have several Seagate Ironwolf 4tb and 8tb drives in my nas as well and those are great and really are CMR drives. I haven't specifically used the Pro models though. If your really gonna go for the best price per TB though, you really can't go wrong with the WP Arsenal 12TB drives! $165 for a 12TB drive is gonna be hard to beat, and they are CMR drives as well. Admittedly they are refurbished and rebranded drives, but I bought one a while back and it's been fantastic so far, and they have lots of reviews from buyers saying this as well.
Great info - thank you! Regarding cache drives that would go with a quad-drive 16TB setup for the Synology DS920+, is there any performance value in going with similar manufacturers? My own research shows Seagate 2TB NVMe Gen4 SSD is very pricey compared to something like Samsung. Any advice on the topic very much appreciated!
For me, the choices are really red plus vs wd gold vs synology. Seagate was enterprise choice from 1990-2010 but they screwed over customers heavily in the last 15yrs. WD used to be a lower end consumer company, but the WD gold and red drives have proved they are as good as any other company and their failure rate and support are better. Toshiba drives are the enterprise generic rebranded vendor drive...even dell would relabel them. The regular firmware update prove themselves in the long term. But, whoever rebrands the drive is responsible for support and replacing failed drives. Im not sure how good synology performs here. I think for low noise system, get red plus. For enterprise, get synology. For small business...WD gold might be easiest to work with, but those drives are loud.
I bought an External HDD WD Elements Desktop 8TB, 3.5" to store data, i.e. video files in general, does anyone have an idea if they are good and what exactly I should do to test it before I throw files on it that can no longer be replaced if the HDD - breaks down from the beginning due to manufacturing defects or due to defects caused by improper handling during transport.
Noise important for a NAS? DAS yes, NAS not so much IMO. You can put it 100m away from your switch in the attick or wherever you want to put it. Certain WD Golds are often cheaper in €/TB than the WD reds , probably bulk buy in for datacenters....
Ihave a gigabit enabled NAS and pc with a non-gigabit router at the moment.If1 connected both the PC and the NAS into a gigabit switch,then connected the switch into the router, would the PC and the NAS have gigabit connection read and wrt speed through each other? Regardless of my internet connection being 50mbps
Are you saying your Internet is not gigabit, or the LAN ports on your router are not gigabit? If your lan ports on your router are gigabit, then you will have no problems writing at gigabit (120 MB/s) speeds in your mentioned setup. If your router does not have gigabit lan ports, then you will be limited to whatever speed they are (presumably 100 mb if not 1,000 mb)
Yes - only the path to/through the router will run at the lower speed, as both PC and NAS are connected to each other via the gigabit switch. Of course, throughput is limitrd to what the devices can actually send and receive. I have a variaton on this, with 3 gigabit switches connected with pooled 2Gbit (so two cables, diverse routing and automatic failback to 1Gbit) trunks between the switches, to which my printer (100Mbit), Firewall leading to my router (Gbit lan, 60/12 xDSL external) and WAPs (1Gbit wired, variable wireless) are connected to the core switch. The PCs can access each other and the server at higher speed than my internet, by a long way. It does mean seven ports on the core switch are used for internal connectivity, but this is on a home network with outlets in all rooms, so the core switch is 16 port with smaller switch for the other floor and a PoE switch for devices that can use it (WAPs, IP cameras, etc). And it is rock solid. Bonus point is being able to power cycle PoE devices without getting out of my chair (sometimes needed for cameras, which security demands are difficult to access). Home built print/storage server, which also holds camera footage and is where no intruder would find it, although an old but still powered server is idling away in an obvious location as bait - covered, of course, by a camera :-) A UPS keeps the essentials alive even when the power is out. Regular backups locally, offsite and in an encrypted cloud drive. The offsite ones are on Bluray, the others HDD (well, I assume the cloud one is). I've been on Seagate drives both personally and professionally since 1988, and had a single failure out of the hundred, maybe thousands, I have set up - the replacement was on site early the next day with an RMA label to return the failing one. On a few occasions the decision was not mine to make, and other drives have had higher failure rates (IBM, before they sold out to Hitachi, HP badged with their firmware, Compaq with theirs, and a few WDs). And the RMA process took over a week in every case. The only drive I ever had with a better warranty was Micropolis, which had a lifetime (of the company, as it turned out) warranty. Mine failed once and was replaced in the same way as the Seagate one, then the replacement lasted longer than the company, and would probably still be running now if I had any use for a narrow SCSI Full height (so two optical drive bays) 5.25" 300MB HDD.
It sounded to me like thos noise tests had a lot of rattle coming from the drive sled itself as it vibrated, so perhaps not the most accurate method of testing. Also, seeing some of the other comments here regarding reliability of WD and Seagate drives. My personal experience, certainly during the 90's when involved in building PC solutions, was that Seagate drives, or SeaCrate as we used to call them, suffered far more failures than the WD Medallist drives we used back then. I haven't touched an internal Seagate drive until just having purchased a Seagate IronWolf 8Tb 7,200 rpm drive for my system. It was by far the best price for a drive of its class, but I do find it much noisier than my WD Reds.
They are ok, just a bit noisy. Synology will be moving there HAT3300 drives away from the Seagate drives, over to the N300 Toshiba very soon (the HAT3310 series)
Thanks for this. Currently have DS918+ with 4 x 6TB Toshiba N300. Won’t to upgrade them all to 12TB or 14TB drives. Was thinking either new N300’s or Iron Wolf Pro’s. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated
Big problem with the Synology drives, they are not compatible with all Synology products, even not with their server versions. So you have to see very close in their compatibly sheets before buying one. Especially with their + drives.
I bought 4 of those 14TB Seagate drives for my 4-bay QNAP NAS and 2 have failed within 10 months. That's 50% failure within that timeframe. Also, I note the Ironwolf Health reported the second drive that failed as still being healthy despite SMART reporting numerous bad blocks and the NAS warning it was failing and suggesting it be replaced soon. The NAS itself has an easy life, it being a simple backup storage of my main NAS so data only being written to it once a day (no reads from over my network). That's pretty abysmal reliability for a 'Pro' drive but yes - they were replaced under warranty.
Look I am a home user who just wants a DAS to back -up my 3 HDD's on my PC. In other words a home user. My needs are very different from an enterprise user. I will likely use RAID 1. I believe 8 or 10 HDD's will be more than adequate. So what drives should I be looking at for my app. My biggest drive in my PC is 8tb and that is more than adequate. Your video goes on and on and on with no specifity as to the application and best drives for the application. Home users typically have a limited budget and drives are not cheap. So clearly I am looking more for a VW than a Cadillac. For my app would refurbished drives be worth considering? Would be nice if you address this.
Been abusing hard drives for 16 solid years as a video capture professional and the one brand that fails more than any other in my anecdotal experience: Western Digital. I trust Seagate with my mission critical stuff through and through.
synology drives are simply a greedy cash grab and pointless. Surely someone has figured out how to flash the standard toshiba drive to a "synology" drive to use in enterprise?
I really am disappointed by how little Hard drives have went up in capacity over the last 10 years. Even tape drives have been going pretty slow. And the price for this slow storage also is not getting better. I use to get 2TB drives Brand new from Frys for less then $140 dollars Brand new. And that was the top of the line at the time. Now? The top of the line is not only about the same speed, but even worse Long term reliability. What Irks me is that today? If I wanted to just keep a copy of all my Video tapes and videos? The only way that I would be able to do that would be to go with a Tape Drive. Its the only thing that makes sense for Cold storage. And the tapes that we have today still barely eclipse a Hard drive today. What the heck happened to all the stuff IBM was working on back in the day? We had Holographic storage and so much more. But as of 2021? 500TB disks are about all that's in the lab. And the write rate is about 0.25 MBps. Yes you read that correctly. The only CHEAP method so far is tape. And by "CHEAP" I mean the tapes cost as much as a Harddrive, and the machine costs as much as a flagship computer bits and all. Its crazy really. You would think we would be in the 50TB hard drive space by now. But SSD's have already got there in a 3.5 inch form factor...???
If you put in the tittle "Which Should You Buy?" you should make a 3.3 second video..... a 33 minute video should end with "Which would You Buy?" BTW, I love your long videos :):):)
I'm not sure if your comparison sticks in this case. As far as i know Synology is marketing their drives basically as enterprise grade drives and imho they should be compared to Seagate Exos, WD Gold or HGST/WD Ultrastar drives. Not sure how this comparison would turn out when it comes to the quality, though i don't think the Synology drives are better built than the 3 mentioned or are more robust than these drives. So the only real "advantage" of the Sysnologys might be the possibility to update their firmware on the fly (note in Synology NAS' only!!!) - but honestly .... how often do you update the firmware of a hard disk during the time of use. Comparing the price of the drives does make the Synology disks even more unattractive. I've just checked the 16 TB Versions on an internet price comparison website: Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC550 16TB starts at around 275.- Euros incl shipping, Western Digital WD Gold 16TB roughly 300.- Euros incl shipping, Seagate Exos X - X18 16TB approx the same as the WD Gold, Synology HAT5300 16TB, 512e, SATA starting at around 650.- !!!!! Euros. Honestly who's supposed to buy those Discs except businesses? As far as i'm concerned i think the price of the Synology drives is basically ridiculous for private users and even hard to justify for business users if you compare them to EXOS, GOLD or HGST drives. The Firmware update might be an interesting feature for certain users but that does not justify basically twice the price per drive, let alone the fact that all those HD series above already offer capacities larger than 16 TB while the Synology drives at the moment stop at a capacity of 16TB.
I would use it as a benchmark for torshiba drive which can be much cheaper to get and is pretty much the same drive besides from some software changes Torshiba mg drive is very reliable in backblaze benchmark tho And at least in my region i can get torshiba drive much cheaper than Synology and even exos drive
@@789know Yes the Toshiba drive (modell MG08ACA i think) that is the "basis" for the Synology disc is probably the cheapest of the enterprise grade drives overall, i think you can get those for even less than the ultrastar - 16 TB for around 250.- EUROS that should be included in a comparison too of course.
Shopping around you get the Toshiba drives much cheaper than the Synology branded. I got 16TB Toshiba MG CMR drives at just over £250. Been running Toshiba 3TB drives in my old NAS for years. Replaced Seagate ST3000DM001s that kept dying and will never buy Seagate again.
This is great video but not good reasons to buy one over another except for warranty. So with that being said have backup always. Don’t know to many people going put that much pressure on drive. Just buy what’s in your budget. The noise won’t be louder than any other device in your home or office. Whoever got best deal getting my money because whatever you buy going to be playing hit and miss game.
19:58 I haven’t dealt with WD warranty but Seagate is not bad either. They send drives as soon as they see the defective drive in transit. I received my replacement drives before they received my defective drive. Toshiba sends gift cards, at least from my experience.
Seagate has the worst record for warranty replacements online. I bought a new drive from B&H Photo, and it was delivered damaged with dents. I could not return it because I unboxed it months after the valid return date. They asked me to contact Seagate since it's under warranty. I returned it to Seagate, and they sent the same broken drive back to me as a replacement. The agents are giving me conflicting reasons why. I'm considering getting a lawyer.
1. Please let us know as soon as you hear anything about the 20TB drives 2. The workload and the MTBF figures what is that. I understand what it stands for but what does it mean how is it determined I don't think there is a standard as far as I know. So Seagates 300 figure could be the equivalent of Synology's 550 figure I am not saying that's the case but I can't find anything on the testing methodology or how it's determined. I don't think they just make it up but I don't think you can compare it between brands but only within brands. Or maybe you can so if anyone knows please provide a link to how it's determined. So let's say Seagate, for example, I have watched your videos and others that explain the differences but can't find anything out there on what it is. So Seagate Iron Wolf Vs Exos are the armed made of a stronger material are the bearings different or is it just cherry-picking components cant find anything of someone doing a propper test and pulling them both apart. If there is info or a propper test out there that anyone knows please provide a link would be really curious. Cheers.
The way videos start have a great first impression on viewers. The first ten seconds were funny and the intro wasn’t an hour long. Quick animations. And within the first 30 seconds we knew exactly what the video was about and the features being compared.
This video was very well made and am glad it came up in search results.
I would like to see all the drives tested in the same bay because the acoustic characteristic of the NAS is different in each bay.
Awesome video and thanks for all the knowledge! :)
With Synology refusing to update their HDD compatibility list trying to punt their own, can you maintain a list of drives you used on Synology to give us a sense of what works? Especially the bigger 18 and 20TB drives.
Thank you for your in-depth review. I recently upgraded to the RS2421+ and was planning to move my 8TB WD Red Pros over to the new NAS. I ended up getting the 16TBs HAT5300 and restored via Hyper Backup. Disk access noise and temps are way lower in my new setup.
If you knock over a drive you can just send it to Linus so he can knock it over again in his next video...
I used to despise Seagate drives; I've had very back luck with their consumer drivers for many years. Working professionally with them they had high failure rates in our workplace when compared to other brands. However, Seagate Ironwolf Pros on the other hand seem to be made completely differently as they've been just as rock solid as WD Reds. HGST drives are still king when it comes to reliability but modern WD Reds and IW Pros are extremely good also.
Sea gate just killed their high capacity consumer drives, so it’s iron wolf or Xros… they said they may bring something else to high capacity consumer/compute range
Synology has really lost my respect with the propritary NAS drives REQUIRING only Synology hard drive otherwise no support... Baloney... I would never buy their drives even if they were the fastest, for principal.
I agree, I won't ever use synology because of their hard stance on supporting only their items. You pay more and are put in a box and told to kiss the ring basically.
Vendor lock-in. Screw Synology. Build your own. Put on Unraid or FreeNAS.
@@dazealex I love my Synology NAS (CS407, DS1512+ and now new DS1821+). But I won't spend 4 X the price on their RAM and NVME SSd's. I will upgrade my new DS1812+ to 32GB Kingston Server rated RAM and another brand high end NVME. In case I need support I will keep Synology's 4GB RAM module and remove the NVME's before requesting support. Love the Synology NAS and DSM Software but absolutely will not allow myself to be gouged on their proprietary branded accessories which they don't even manufacture!
There's a software setting you can change which will allow support of all the expected drives
@@mingscustoms How about telling us where this setting is?
Hi there, I'm a big fan of your content. Thanks for all your hard work!
I wanted to suggest that when you make comparisons, would you be able to add text to the video labelling which product that you are currently testing? It would really help out.
Thanks!
I just ordered the Wolf Pro, 18TB. The price on Newegg was $299 minus a $9 coupon, BUT I went with Amazon for $299. I think Amazon delivery will be more conscientious. IOW I don't want someone tossing it on my porch, which Amazon never does. Respectfully, right now on Newegg, it says the MTBF on the Wolf pro, 18 TB is 2,5 Million hours also. I have LOVED my two ten TB regular, non-pro, Ironwolfs. very quiet, as fast as a hard drive gets, etc.
The Seagates are definitely louder than the WD red pro. I had a pair of them in my DS214+ and they made the whole case vibrate so badly it would kick out harmonics and I would have to tap it to stop the case from vibrating. Was so glad to finally replace them again with the WD red pros, way quieter...
Thanks
I'm genuinely surprised that Seagate is infamous for faulty drives as my experience was quite the opposite. I was using WD drives before and I've had three 2TB HDD Desktop drives die on me. Most of my experience with Seagate had been on their portable drives and they had been excellent. So when I brought my first NAS last December, I only considered the IronWolf drives.
I don’t honestly think we should be too concerned about that. All manufacturers go through their bad patches. Seagate had their own controversies eight years ago. Doubtless there will be more. I was buying a new WD Red 4TB the other day and this ‘helpful’ guy decided to warn me about the SMA problem (which I know nothing about and care even less). I’ve had two WD drives fail but I was reasonably convinced in was due to excessive temperatures on the enclosure.
But there’s always ‘that guy’ out there who feels good telling you that what you’ve bought will fail. Mostly it’s people on the internet. I don’t think the guy in the shop was doing anything more than responding to what he’d heard but it gives some idea of how endemic this has become, a situation Seagate are probably happy to exploit.
I bought my DS918+ late 2017, I installed 4 Seagate IronWolf 4Tb drives, the unit is on constantly from 6am till midnight, it has all my movie and TV series collection, all photos and videos that are uploaded daily from our connected phones, along with work files and other documents, apart from a dust and vaccume of the Synology every 2 months I have had zero issues at all, in fact all drives are still reporting 100% perfect state, so from my experience I would not hesitate to get these drives again, I did have WD Reds in an earlier Synology unit and unfortunately they did fail after 2 years.
I've always used WD drives at home: Velociraptors for OS boot drives, and WD Red drives for mass storage of user data.
I'm aware that there's currently a controversy around WD Red drives, but that's an issue with the health monitoring software recommending people replace their drives too soon and not the drive hardware which is rock solid.
I find that my two WD Red drives run at different temperatures. One I’d 8 degrees hotter when idle. Which raises the question of which NAS drives run coolest ? Certainly my two Toshiba drives run considerably cooler that the WD for instance. What are Iron wolf like for temperature?
And your videos keep getting better and better.
I still have a bad taste in my mouth from WD sticking SMR drives in the red series... Puzzled me for ages why my NAS suddenly tanked it's performance.
Thanks for the great overview! Very helpful before I buy my first ever NAS array.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR VIDEOS, This helped me so much ! This is an event trying to find the right product for the synology and I just used your links ! Thanks again
Over the years I used WD Red, Seagate Ironwolf and Exos. Over the years I only had issues with WD RED, failing long before their expected end of life which resulted in a support neighmare to get them replaced and have the replacement HDDs dead as well. Since around 2 years I use seagate Exos only. My Qnap TS-653D is equipped with 6x 18TB Exos running 24/7 . Nothing, zero issues at all. Will never buy anything else.
I use 16TB WD Gold drives in my Synology DS920+. As far as I know, those are industrial level drives, suitable for NAS as well. I would be interested how WD Gold compare to WD Red Pro?
I use both in separate NAS devices. Honestly I don't notice a difference between the two when using either. They both seem to have the same sound and transfer rate. I would love to see a more indebth comparison like above for the specifics just for fun. However I love them both. I do expect the gold to last longer of corse due to the industrial level and I do put my more "valuable" data on it. But then again I always keep 2 backups of both systems. 1 on-site, and 1 offsite. Years ago before i started using NAS iv lost all data before. Never going through that process again.
AFAIK the Gold is the "civilian" version of Ultrastar, so essentially identical. While the Red Pro has an MTBF of 1M hours, the Gold is at 2.5M hours in addition to almost double the workload/yr. Also the idle power consumption is around double that of the Red Pro. How much of this actually matters is up to you :)
I have been running several Ultrastars without a hitch for years now, at a lower price than any of the Red series. So to me it's a no-brainer.
Thanks for all the useful information! This was all Greek to me but I am beginning to understand thanks to you… i’m almost where I can make some good decisions… I appreciate your hard work
As someone who just went through the pain and suffering of buying drives for my little budget truenas server at home so I can upgrade from my 2tb drives that are who knows how old this was a good watch. 8 12tb's isn't cheap by any means, specially for a home lab.
I really apriciate the warranty handling of WD. I using WD Red for a very long time and I have no complains. Thank you for this interesting review. The noise those drives can produce are pretty shocking 🙉
After the WD Red. CMR/SMR fun I have moved to the Toshiba N300 NASA’s Drives and I Have found them very cost effective and reliable however they are a bit more noticeable Noise wise if pushed hard but not overly so. I never see you mentioning the Toshiba drives. Do you dislike them is there a issue I am unaware of?
Its 2023 here now and this is the first time I've even heard that synology have a range of drives. I've just put a 22Tb WD Pro into my NAS and i think I'm going to pair it in a Raid 1 with a Seagate 22Tb drive. I've steered clear of Seagate for over 25 years since my Amiga days but it seems they have got a lot better.
14:30 I agree with this. SSDs specifically will have issues with disconnecting if they don’t match the compatibility on NAS systems. Qnap is a good idea. They are a pain if they don’t match compatibility list. If you want piece of mind always buy the drives from the NAS manufacturer.
Synology can’t come back and say the issues you’re having are related to drive compatibility, versions, etc.
I have a QNAP TVS-663 6-bay NAS which is currently running a mix of 2TB and 3TB drives, Seagate Barracuda and WD Red Plus. The NAS sits on my desk in my home office and the noisiest part of the NAS are the fans, which are really quite intrusive (my iPhone using DecibelX records ~46db at a distance of 30cm from the from of the NAS). Your comparison test of these three drives make it sound like the NAS has been turned in to a blender - there's no way I could tolerate that level and type of sound so close to me. My first step is to replace the fans with Noctua units and then (because I need more storage capacity) to upgrade the drives. Although the SMART scores for each of the 6 drives is "Good" the granular data (i.e. "Raw_Read_Error_Rate") for the WD drives is massively better than for the Seagate units. I appreciate that Red Plus and Barracuda may be different class of drives but it looks like I'll be opting for WD Red Plus drives across the board this time.
Just FYI “read error rate” is not a standard SMART value, every vender reports it differently, meaning … nothing really, you can’t compare them directly. Pretty much like the CPU frequency and core count these days.
If you really want to know what really matters in SMART values, BackBlaze have an article about what are easily signs of HDD failure.
Look up “What SMART Stats Tell Us About Hard Drives”
This was a great in-depth comparison. Thank you for putting so much effort into it; I can't help thinking it must have taken a long time to put this together.
I was surprised and pleased to hear that the Synology drives are actually built to a higher level of quality (in some respects) than their competitors. At first when this range was announced, a lot of people just assumed (reasonably) that it was a vendor lock-in effort with no real benefit for end-users.
Maybe I misunderstood, but would the Synology drives still be markedly superior in hardware even without the custom firmware integration? If so, I wonder if we'll see them ever make an effort at competing more directly with WD and Seagate with a new line that isn't meant to work specifically with their own NAS devices.
I've got a QNAP TS-253D with a pair of WD Gold 14 TB in RAID1; once I realized I wanted to buy such large drives, I wanted reliability, and I've had good luck with used 4TB Golds in the past. (I'm using these for backup in my home office.) I found the 14TB ones brand new on eBay Canada marked down almost 50 percent since they were getting resold by someone who bought too many or something. They were less expensive than buying an equivalent pair of Red Pros from Amazon would have been. :)
I'm a big fan of the Golds' audio profile. They're not quiet, but it's a lower-pitched tone, and not at all obnoxious when there's just 2 of them.
I bought my DS918+ late 2017, I installed 4 Seagate IronWolf 4Tb drives, the unit is on constantly from 6am till midnight, it has all my movie and TV series collection, all photos and videos that are uploaded daily from our connected phones, along with work files and other documents, apart from a dust and vaccume of the Synology every 2 months I have had zero issues at all, in fact all drives are still reporting 100% perfect state, so from my experience I would not hesitate to get these drives again, I did have WD Reds in an earlier Synology unit and unfortunately they did fail after 2 years.
Thanks for the in-depth look into these three drives. I do like the Firmware update ability of the Synology drives when using a Synology NAS but I am not sure the extra cost is worth it? I am using a Synology DS-1520+ NAS with five Seagate Iron Wolf Pro 4 TB drives. That is all that was available when I purchased them back in June 2021. I like the data recovery and price point of the Seagate IWP. At the time the Seagate IWP 4TB drives were $139 each. The Synology HAT5300 4TB is currently $199! I can get the Seagate IWP 16TB for around $250 each now. That is an additional 12TB for only $50 more each. They all have a five-year warranty but it does come down to reliability and not having to use that warranty that counts. I am not sure if the extra cost of the Synology is worth it but your video did help.
I put two Seagate Exos 16TB drives into my NAS. They run cool but they are really crunchy for noise. No spin or whine noise, but lots of head movement clicking and crunching. I don't leave my NAS running 24:7, it's used only for another system backup level, so I don't have to put up with the noise all day long. I normally purchase WD drives, but these Seagate Exos drives are priced right in Canada. $23 CAD per TB.
How long should the drives work in a home user Environment? I bought a qnap ts230 and 2 seagate ironwolf back in 2021. the qnap tells me now in 2024 that one disk has to be replaced and the other is in no good shape. I barely use my nas. Only dumped a lot of pictures to it and for the most thats it. It get‘s used maye each 2-3 monts.
Thanks in advance
10 years or more
So what is the quietest drive for NAS? For me sleeping in the same room as old IronWolf drives (like 6 or 8TB) was impossible :/
The question isn't whether wd red pro or ironwolf pro are the better drives. The question is why I should opt for these drives when the enterprise drives exos and wd gold are are similar in price or even cheaper and offer not 3 but 5 years of warranty?!
in The Netherlands the exos drives are 200 euro cheaper than Ironwolf.
Exos 18TB = €304,94
Exos 20TB = €438,75
IronWolf Pro 18TB = 507,64
IronWolf Pro 20TB = €593
So I also dont understand why Exos is left out in the comparison
Also the WD Ultrastar's as someone else mentioned are way cheaper.
The Red Pros do offer 5 years. But IMHO their higher price can't be justified compared to enterprise. It's simply a "worse" drive costing more. I've never understood this.
Did you compare heat and power consumption?
Are the Ironwolf Pro drives supported by Synology for the DS1522+?
I’ve tried setting up a new DS1522+ with Ironwolf Pro 16TB drives, and cannot get past the DSM install step (“formatting issue”)
I choose to skip all the higher priced HDDs marketed towards NAS systems with Seagate Exos drives. I've had 4 Exos X16 drives in my Synology DS 920+ for years now with zero issues. These are enterprise drives built for long life and I'm happy I went this route.
ok I have an 8 drive 10g Synology NAS waiting to buy drives for it. Going to be in my upper shelf coat closet as my "data closet" in my home. I don't want it to sound like 10 popcorn pots on steroids... What's the cheapest 15TB+ SSD drives I can get?
And what about a reed and whrite speed test?
wd red pro seems rated at 550tb/2.5M hours too, is this new or are you looking at the red plus ?
Sitting on multiple Synology groups and all of them convinced me that I was an idiot using any of those as the best option is to scavenge 14TB drives from WD Elements.
It's entertaining to see all the "Seagate is crap, because I had several Seagate drives that failed x years ago."
I'm not saying you're all wrong, but it's still fun. And it's funny because Seagate is one of the oldest HDD manufacturers that's still in business. They survived where Conner, Maxtor, Imprimis, Priam, Micropolis, Quantum and all the other manufacturers who are no longer with us failed.
They might not always have the best products, but they are generally "Good Enough". They sure has had their share of lemons. I remember a series of, I think it was either 120 MB or 210 MB drives, from Seagate that had almost 100% failure rate within two years. But then there were similar duds from just about every manufacturer at some time. Right now Toshiba HDD's are all the rage. A few years back it was HGST. Fun thing is HGST was formed from the old IBM disk drive division which was sold to Hitachi.
For a long time IBM HDD's were considered to standard to which all others were compared. Then they released the Deskstar 75GXP...
This drive was plagued with reliability issues and it got so bad that it became almost impossible to sell a HDD made by IBM. It didn't matter that they redesigned the drives and made really good drives. The name was tarnished by the Deskstar 75GPX, or the DeathStar as it was popularly called. IBM eventually gave up and sold it all to Hitachi who rebranded the products as HGST, and soon they had managed to scrub the 75GXP from most peoples memory. Hitachi actually managed to sell a lot of drives. But they didn't do as well as they wanted and so they sold the business to Western Digital.
Seagate has also been buying. Not so long ago... Actually it's 12 years, but who's counting? Well they bought the Samsung HDD business. Strange, it feels like it was yesterday.
My point is that Seagate would not be here today if their drives were as bad as a lot of people want to make them out to be. They have had lemons, but then so have all the other manufacturers. Those that survived are the ones that were able to fix the problems they had and come back with better drives.
Oh and I want you to think a bit about the "Cheap drives are crappy drives" idea. It doesn't compute!
This was something a WD engineer clued me in on. We were talking storage drives for use in large storage solutions and I asked just what it was that made their professional storage drives achieve much higher MTBF and altogether higher reliability than the desktop drives. And he laughed. The answer was pretty interesting. He asked if I thought about the economics of selling HDD's. A pro storage drive back then could easily cost twice what the desktop drives of the same capacity cost. The storage drives came with, I think it was, 3 year warranty while the desktop drives had a one year warranty. There were physical differences, in general the pro drives were heavier. But then he said something interesting. The BOM for a the pro drives were not twice as high as it was for the desktop drives. This meant they made probably twice the profit if not more for each storage drive they sold compared to the desktop versions. This also means that every desktop drive that fails and had to be replaced under warranty ate up a larger part of the profit from the initial sale. With replacement drive, handling and transport they had to sell more than ten desktop drives to pay for one failed. Meanwhile a failed storage drive cost perhaps five or six sold drives, if not less than that.
So they constructed and tested the desktop drives to standards that were almost as stringent as their best storage drives. So mechanically they were very similar in reliability. What really differed were the certification procedures where they were tested and certified with different RAID controllers and storage solutions. And yes, that is important. It may seem like SATA and SAS is stable tech and there shouldn't be any compatibility problems with modern drives and controllers. And yet there are.
When selecting a new HDD for a storage solution you should start by looking through the storage manufacturers HCL or Hardware Compatibility List. If there are drives that's been tested and certified as compatible by the makers of the storage solution you are using you should really consider using those. It can save you a lot of pain and effort. You might get away with just about any drive you want to use, but it can go very badly if you are unlucky.
Now I come at this from the professional storage sector. I've had to replace hundreds of drives because of compatibility issues. It's not the least bit fun, and it doesn't save any money. The times this happened it was usually because a customer demanded a drive capacity where the RAID controller manufacturers hadn't yet certified any drives of that capacity. So we worked with the HDD manufacturers and they were only to happy to promise that of course there would be no compatibility issues because their latest drives were perfect!
And yes, this was the two big guys, Seagate and WD. The good thing is WD coughed up over three hundred drives for replacement. Still not a fun job replacing 300 drives in a bunch of storage servers at the customers site. Seagate got away with custom firmware and together with the RAID controller manufacturer they put together a update package that flashed the drives while they were still in use.
But again, it's something you want to avoid if you can. So unless there is a really good reason using a certified drive can be a good idea.
Now this does not mean I endorse the Synology lock in attempt. This is Synology trying to play with the big boys in the storage game. Locking in the customers is an old tradition in the enterprise storage business. But bringing it to the prosumer market is a bit rich for me.
is wd red pro something else than plus?
I’ve had a 4TB WD black from 2016. And finally got an upgrade to 16TB IronWolf drive. And I was expecting to be louder alittle. But I was surprised how quiet the seagate is compared to my old WD black.
What about that noise every 5 sec wd red has? do the other ones have it also?
I'm thinking of buying an 8 Bay QNAP Nas for my small home based business, that noise 24 hrs a day would drive me nuts. I had no idea it was that loud. That alone kind of deters me to buy a NAS to begin with. Why are they so much louder than the HDs one has in a regular PC? And this noise is for 1 drive, an 8 bay drive would be loud as a machine saw, how do you deal with this issue?
Shouldn't you be comparing Synology HAT5300 drives more against the Seagate Exos & WD Ultrastar rather than these drives?
Running WD Gold and some Ironwolf Pro. Both good so far.
I just returned the 8 T hard drive because I saw your video. What NAS would you reccomend that are solid state because maybe theu are better? I was choked bc i selected SSD and they sent me a HD model . Im returning the WD My Cloud Ultra EX2 Ultra 8T. Would love a long term quality reccomendation. Thank you so much
please give more detail about NAS firmware vs standard 'desktop firmware. thank you
Is there any real difference in energy consumption between the drives?
Need more space. I have DS920+ 4x4TB on Raid 5 that is 90% full. I think I should have gone SHR. What is the best way upgrade to 4x16TB? I also bought a DS220j for backups. Do you have a video on how to upgrade?
Well, thanks for this. Makes me feel better about the 2x14TB WD Red Pros I just bought for my Terramaster F x23 NAS. Now I just need to decide if I want the 2 or 4 bay system...
Bigger is better
Great review but the noise comparison is not quite what I experienced with a DS224+/Seagate Ironwolf pro 16tb. I find this setup quiet under load.
what phone are you using?
Why do the WD and Synology drives look almost identical?
Hi, Thanks for another useful and interesting vid and congrats on avoiding HDD dominoes.
A tiny observation: USP is _Unique_ Selling Point (or Proposition).
Hi bro,
isn't Toshiba's N300 line a good one either? I'm between Toshiba (7200 NAS) and Seagate (5400 NAS) media. Which do you recommend in terms of performance?
Can I merge Toshiba N300 media with Seagate IronWolf? For example, 2 HD N300 4TB and 2 IronWolf 6TB?
I've just received a WD Red Pro 16TB defective from factory. It seems that they're not complying with QC.
Also, they request you to send the product to them, instead of collecting themselves as Seagate does. Why sould I pay extra money if the product comes defective from factory? I can't justify that, no matter how silent they are.
For me it's either WD Gold or Seagate Exos. I've had great luck with both so I shop based on price, which is an vary significantly at times.
Have you tried sticky tape to secure the drives? 🙂
A year ago I've shucked 2 14TB Seagate Backup Plus. Got Ironwolf PRO and Exos. Exos is slightly faster. Both nicely produce crunching noise while work. "Solution" was to use SSD M2 cache in QNAP. Now I hear fan more often ;) Much better is 2.5" SSD. Anyway. Drives so far reliable and affordable. Skipped WD due to SMR trash.
I'm new to all of this - I have 72TB of external drives (attached) another 12TB running wild... Basically I run a PC tower and keep plugging stuff in - I'm guessing I am doing that wrong? Can someone point me at a video to tell me how to do it right? I don't share, so wifi etc isn't an issue.
WD lost my business with the whole WD Red fake CMR drive crap. I bought a 4tb Red drive for my nas because it was supposed to be a CMR drive but it wasn't as we all know now, they are SMR drives which give horrible performance in a NAS or any read heavy environment.
I have several Seagate Ironwolf 4tb and 8tb drives in my nas as well and those are great and really are CMR drives. I haven't specifically used the Pro models though.
If your really gonna go for the best price per TB though, you really can't go wrong with the WP Arsenal 12TB drives! $165 for a 12TB drive is gonna be hard to beat, and they are CMR drives as well. Admittedly they are refurbished and rebranded drives, but I bought one a while back and it's been fantastic so far, and they have lots of reviews from buyers saying this as well.
Great info - thank you! Regarding cache drives that would go with a quad-drive 16TB setup for the Synology DS920+, is there any performance value in going with similar manufacturers? My own research shows Seagate 2TB NVMe Gen4 SSD is very pricey compared to something like Samsung. Any advice on the topic very much appreciated!
For me, the choices are really red plus vs wd gold vs synology. Seagate was enterprise choice from 1990-2010 but they screwed over customers heavily in the last 15yrs. WD used to be a lower end consumer company, but the WD gold and red drives have proved they are as good as any other company and their failure rate and support are better. Toshiba drives are the enterprise generic rebranded vendor drive...even dell would relabel them. The regular firmware update prove themselves in the long term. But, whoever rebrands the drive is responsible for support and replacing failed drives. Im not sure how good synology performs here. I think for low noise system, get red plus. For enterprise, get synology. For small business...WD gold might be easiest to work with, but those drives are loud.
I bought an External HDD WD Elements Desktop 8TB, 3.5" to store data, i.e. video files in general, does anyone have an idea if they are good and what exactly I should do to test it before I throw files on it that can no longer be replaced if the HDD - breaks down from the beginning due to manufacturing defects or due to defects caused by improper handling during transport.
Great review (or comparison)! Thank you for that :)
Noise important for a NAS? DAS yes, NAS not so much IMO. You can put it 100m away from your switch in the attick or wherever you want to put it.
Certain WD Golds are often cheaper in €/TB than the WD reds , probably bulk buy in for datacenters....
Ihave a gigabit enabled NAS and pc with a
non-gigabit router at the moment.If1
connected both the PC and the NAS into a
gigabit switch,then connected the switch into
the router, would the PC and the NAS have
gigabit connection read and wrt speed
through each other? Regardless of my
internet connection being 50mbps
Are you saying your Internet is not gigabit, or the LAN ports on your router are not gigabit? If your lan ports on your router are gigabit, then you will have no problems writing at gigabit (120 MB/s) speeds in your mentioned setup. If your router does not have gigabit lan ports, then you will be limited to whatever speed they are (presumably 100 mb if not 1,000 mb)
Yes - only the path to/through the router will run at the lower speed, as both PC and NAS are connected to each other via the gigabit switch. Of course, throughput is limitrd to what the devices can actually send and receive.
I have a variaton on this, with 3 gigabit switches connected with pooled 2Gbit (so two cables, diverse routing and automatic failback to 1Gbit) trunks between the switches, to which my printer (100Mbit), Firewall leading to my router (Gbit lan, 60/12 xDSL external) and WAPs (1Gbit wired, variable wireless) are connected to the core switch. The PCs can access each other and the server at higher speed than my internet, by a long way. It does mean seven ports on the core switch are used for internal connectivity, but this is on a home network with outlets in all rooms, so the core switch is 16 port with smaller switch for the other floor and a PoE switch for devices that can use it (WAPs, IP cameras, etc). And it is rock solid. Bonus point is being able to power cycle PoE devices without getting out of my chair (sometimes needed for cameras, which security demands are difficult to access).
Home built print/storage server, which also holds camera footage and is where no intruder would find it, although an old but still powered server is idling away in an obvious location as bait - covered, of course, by a camera :-) A UPS keeps the essentials alive even when the power is out. Regular backups locally, offsite and in an encrypted cloud drive. The offsite ones are on Bluray, the others HDD (well, I assume the cloud one is).
I've been on Seagate drives both personally and professionally since 1988, and had a single failure out of the hundred, maybe thousands, I have set up - the replacement was on site early the next day with an RMA label to return the failing one. On a few occasions the decision was not mine to make, and other drives have had higher failure rates (IBM, before they sold out to Hitachi, HP badged with their firmware, Compaq with theirs, and a few WDs). And the RMA process took over a week in every case.
The only drive I ever had with a better warranty was Micropolis, which had a lifetime (of the company, as it turned out) warranty. Mine failed once and was replaced in the same way as the Seagate one, then the replacement lasted longer than the company, and would probably still be running now if I had any use for a narrow SCSI Full height (so two optical drive bays) 5.25" 300MB HDD.
Most of these noise are amplified significantly by cheap case you were using for test. You should use quality hdd case.
very good info & neat video
Thanks. Just to mention USP means Unique Selling Proposition. You say „Universal … Point“ 😊.
It sounded to me like thos noise tests had a lot of rattle coming from the drive sled itself as it vibrated, so perhaps not the most accurate method of testing.
Also, seeing some of the other comments here regarding reliability of WD and Seagate drives. My personal experience, certainly during the 90's when involved in building PC solutions, was that Seagate drives, or SeaCrate as we used to call them, suffered far more failures than the WD Medallist drives we used back then. I haven't touched an internal Seagate drive until just having purchased a Seagate IronWolf 8Tb 7,200 rpm drive for my system. It was by far the best price for a drive of its class, but I do find it much noisier than my WD Reds.
Any thoughts on the Toshiba N300?
They are ok, just a bit noisy. Synology will be moving there HAT3300 drives away from the Seagate drives, over to the N300 Toshiba very soon (the HAT3310 series)
Thanks for this. Currently have DS918+ with 4 x 6TB Toshiba N300. Won’t to upgrade them all to 12TB or 14TB drives. Was thinking either new N300’s or Iron Wolf Pro’s. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated
For my home business and Plex
Big problem with the Synology drives, they are not compatible with all Synology products, even not with their server versions. So you have to see very close in their compatibly sheets before buying one. Especially with their + drives.
I bought 4 of those 14TB Seagate drives for my 4-bay QNAP NAS and 2 have failed within 10 months. That's 50% failure within that timeframe. Also, I note the Ironwolf Health reported the second drive that failed as still being healthy despite SMART reporting numerous bad blocks and the NAS warning it was failing and suggesting it be replaced soon. The NAS itself has an easy life, it being a simple backup storage of my main NAS so data only being written to it once a day (no reads from over my network). That's pretty abysmal reliability for a 'Pro' drive but yes - they were replaced under warranty.
Look I am a home user who just wants a DAS to back -up my 3 HDD's on my PC. In other words a home user. My needs are very different from an enterprise user. I will likely use RAID 1. I believe 8 or 10 HDD's will be more than adequate. So what drives should I be looking at for my app. My biggest drive in my PC is 8tb and that is more than adequate.
Your video goes on and on and on with no specifity as to the application and best drives for the application. Home users typically have a limited budget and drives are not cheap. So clearly I am looking more for a VW than a Cadillac. For my app would refurbished drives be worth considering? Would be nice if you address this.
Am I really going to suffer if I just buy the best price per GB random HDD I can find?
No, as long as you steer away from SMR drives. They are only good for cold storage.
Great in-depth review! Sub earned!
Been abusing hard drives for 16 solid years as a video capture professional and the one brand that fails more than any other in my anecdotal experience: Western Digital.
I trust Seagate with my mission critical stuff through and through.
synology drives are simply a greedy cash grab and pointless. Surely someone has figured out how to flash the standard toshiba drive to a "synology" drive to use in enterprise?
Great and informative as usual, but please, please, please....... USP means "unique" not universal selling point! Sorry, I'm austic, lol!!
I really am disappointed by how little Hard drives have went up in capacity over the last 10 years. Even tape drives have been going pretty slow. And the price for this slow storage also is not getting better.
I use to get 2TB drives Brand new from Frys for less then $140 dollars Brand new. And that was the top of the line at the time. Now? The top of the line is not only about the same speed, but even worse Long term reliability.
What Irks me is that today? If I wanted to just keep a copy of all my Video tapes and videos? The only way that I would be able to do that would be to go with a Tape Drive. Its the only thing that makes sense for Cold storage. And the tapes that we have today still barely eclipse a Hard drive today.
What the heck happened to all the stuff IBM was working on back in the day? We had Holographic storage and so much more. But as of 2021? 500TB disks are about all that's in the lab. And the write rate is about 0.25 MBps. Yes you read that correctly.
The only CHEAP method so far is tape. And by "CHEAP" I mean the tapes cost as much as a Harddrive, and the machine costs as much as a flagship computer bits and all.
Its crazy really. You would think we would be in the 50TB hard drive space by now. But SSD's have already got there in a 3.5 inch form factor...???
I have recently purchased 2x WD Red Plus 4TB from Amazon UK - both were faulty. Reading Amazon reviews I was not the first one ;-(
another excellent informative course.
My Reds have been solid for 10 years now.
It's surprising how much the prices have dropped in the US. Just got the WD Red Pro 20TB for $210.
If you put in the tittle "Which Should You Buy?" you should make a 3.3 second video..... a 33 minute video should end with "Which would You Buy?"
BTW, I love your long videos :):):)
UltraStar Helios drives are the only mass storage drive I use.
I'm not sure if your comparison sticks in this case. As far as i know Synology is marketing their drives basically as enterprise grade drives and imho they should be compared to Seagate Exos, WD Gold or HGST/WD Ultrastar drives. Not sure how this comparison would turn out when it comes to the quality, though i don't think the Synology drives are better built than the 3 mentioned or are more robust than these drives. So the only real "advantage" of the Sysnologys might be the possibility to update their firmware on the fly (note in Synology NAS' only!!!) - but honestly .... how often do you update the firmware of a hard disk during the time of use. Comparing the price of the drives does make the Synology disks even more unattractive. I've just checked the 16 TB Versions on an internet price comparison website: Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC550 16TB starts at around 275.- Euros incl shipping, Western Digital WD Gold 16TB roughly 300.- Euros incl shipping, Seagate Exos X - X18 16TB approx the same as the WD Gold, Synology HAT5300 16TB, 512e, SATA starting at around 650.- !!!!! Euros. Honestly who's supposed to buy those Discs except businesses?
As far as i'm concerned i think the price of the Synology drives is basically ridiculous for private users and even hard to justify for business users if you compare them to EXOS, GOLD or HGST drives. The Firmware update might be an interesting feature for certain users but that does not justify basically twice the price per drive, let alone the fact that all those HD series above already offer capacities larger than 16 TB while the Synology drives at the moment stop at a capacity of 16TB.
I would use it as a benchmark for torshiba drive which can be much cheaper to get and is pretty much the same drive besides from some software changes
Torshiba mg drive is very reliable in backblaze benchmark tho
And at least in my region i can get torshiba drive much cheaper than Synology and even exos drive
@@789know Yes the Toshiba drive (modell MG08ACA i think) that is the "basis" for the Synology disc is probably the cheapest of the enterprise grade drives overall, i think you can get those for even less than the ultrastar - 16 TB for around 250.- EUROS that should be included in a comparison too of course.
Shopping around you get the Toshiba drives much cheaper than the Synology branded. I got 16TB Toshiba MG CMR drives at just over £250.
Been running Toshiba 3TB drives in my old NAS for years. Replaced Seagate ST3000DM001s that kept dying and will never buy Seagate again.
Thank you. I think you mean typical not atypical
Next time would you kindly include WD Ultrastar?
This is great video but not good reasons to buy one over another except for warranty. So with that being said have backup always. Don’t know to many people going put that much pressure on drive. Just buy what’s in your budget. The noise won’t be louder than any other device in your home or office. Whoever got best deal getting my money because whatever you buy going to be playing hit and miss game.
USP typically means Unique Selling Points (not Universal Selling Points) - apart from that, good stuff ;-)
Good vid m8.
19:58 I haven’t dealt with WD warranty but Seagate is not bad either. They send drives as soon as they see the defective drive in transit.
I received my replacement drives before they received my defective drive.
Toshiba sends gift cards, at least from my experience.
Seagate has the worst record for warranty replacements online. I bought a new drive from B&H Photo, and it was delivered damaged with dents. I could not return it because I unboxed it months after the valid return date. They asked me to contact Seagate since it's under warranty. I returned it to Seagate, and they sent the same broken drive back to me as a replacement. The agents are giving me conflicting reasons why. I'm considering getting a lawyer.
1. Please let us know as soon as you hear anything about the 20TB drives
2. The workload and the MTBF figures what is that. I understand what it stands for but what does it mean how is it determined I don't think there is a standard as far as I know. So Seagates 300 figure could be the equivalent of Synology's 550 figure I am not saying that's the case but I can't find anything on the testing methodology or how it's determined. I don't think they just make it up but I don't think you can compare it between brands but only within brands. Or maybe you can so if anyone knows please provide a link to how it's determined. So let's say Seagate, for example, I have watched your videos and others that explain the differences but can't find anything out there on what it is. So Seagate Iron Wolf Vs Exos are the armed made of a stronger material are the bearings different or is it just cherry-picking components cant find anything of someone doing a propper test and pulling them both apart. If there is info or a propper test out there that anyone knows please provide a link would be really curious. Cheers.
Noise is a good think to see.coz if 1 or 2 disk.not make more noise..when you have 5-10 hdd it will make you sick