NAS Units

The main difference with 5900rpm vs 7200rpm vs 10,000rpm vs 15,000rpm is speed, access speed and throughput.

If you plan on transcoding video and such the 5900 will be a bottleneck, if you plan on using it purely as a storage medium then 5900 won't be a problem. To get the best out of a Synology which photo's, videos, cctv etc you'd be better with the 7200rpm without a doubt.

In my dell poweredge I have a pair of 10,000 rpm scsi cheetahs (R1) and they are blazing fast, I can tell when I'm accessing the wd greens and the system drives. Gotta be 10 yrs old, the system runs 24/7/365, perfect example of how great seagate used to be

I used to love seagate, cheetahs, velociraptors was the mutts but after a total of 6 disk failures and a nas death, I assume much like West Digi now, and Hitachi before them they are having issues.

I personally would buy the Deskstar or Deskstar NAS drives, the DS211 ((I think) has a pair of the 2tb versions of he hitachi nas drives, the other has ultrastars. I forget which way around it is.

 

Ok I am now broke. Anyone want to buy some domains!

Bought the Synology 1513+ (5 bay) and 5 x 4tb Deskstars (and a camera to keep my other half from giving me grief about spending so much... )

I loaded in the drives already and am now figuring out the bast RAID config. I thought because these drives are reviewed as more reliable that RAID 5 would be ok, leaving me with more available space... then I read that if a disk fails and I'm rebuilding, that's the time when another disk is most likely to fail! So RAID 6?? but then lose half the capacity?

I also read about the huge amount of time for rebuilds with 5 and especially 6... so RAID 1 and mirroring? Too many decisions... my gut is saying RAID 5.

 

Your rebuild time on that array is going to be several days. I'd rather have the protection of RAID6, especially given you have bought all of the discs at the same time and subjected them to the same amount of use. I hope you bought at least one spare disk in case you have a failure because I would wish to begin rebuilding immediately.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/805

Addition: since I reread and you bought 5 drives, consider RAID5 over 4 discs with a hot spare in slot 5. When you have purchased another spare disc you can upgrade to RAID6. Alternatively RAID6 over 4 disks will give you 8Tb usable now, and keep the 5th disc as your hot spare. When you buy a 6th disc you can expand the RAID6 array so it uses all 5 discs. I cannot link you to their Wiki about this because the Synology forum is currently not responding.

 

If you are using a local USB backup incrementing a few times a week, then Raid 5 should be ok, worse case if you get a failure during a rebuild (2nd drive death) you lose a few days at worse.

Raid 5 should give you 16tb and raid 6 gives 12tb so not really half the loss, just additional 4tb.

If you're not using a local usb back up, then prob raid 6 is best bet.

Edit: with the 1513 you can add the 2 or 5 bay expansion unit as well, taking it up to 10 bays, so raid 6 may well be better with a long term view.

 

Looks like you made a good choice on the 4tb Deskstars Steven ...

Backblaze just released stats on the reliability of the thousands of drives they have in their storagepods. Makes pretty interesting reading, definitely won't be buying smaller Seagate drives after reading this!

"What Hard Drive Should I Buy?" - http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

 

Hitachi are destroying the chart, and Seagate has a shocking report on there.

I can vouch for Samsung's their F4 drives are awesome in backup device, I have a bunch of them running for backups. they only have a bunch in there so didn't really report much.