Ssd or hdd for Nas

Last edited:
b0rn2sk8 said:
Have you guys not seen the latest nonsense from Stnology? Personally I’d return it and buy something else.


www.servethehome.com

Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

According to reports, Synology plans to restrict features to its own branded hard drives with the new 2025 Plus models. This is bad
www.servethehome.com www.servethehome.com
Click to expand...

Yeah I read that. Pretty disgusting move.

WD Red's are expensive enough let alone Synology drives.

HDD are stupid pricing...only way I afford 16TB was recertified WD elements....a WD Red 16Tb is 3x the price or something
 
Personally, I buy Asustor. It may not have as many apps available as Synology but the hardware is generally well ahead and ADM, the OS, is easy to use.
 
You had a look at QNAP ?

as for HDD vs SSD there are a couple of things to consider.
Cost vs Capacity. Very heavily favours HDD.

Transfer speed. Favours SSD. However the bottleneck is likely going to be your network and unless you have 10Gb network an array HDD will likely keep up vs SSD.

Latency. Favours SSD. But the majority of users will be sharing media files between a couple of users and thus latency isn't an issue. Maybe if you run a database or something then you might notice improved performance.

Lifetime. I know people get worried about SSD write cycles.but look at how the majority of domestic NAS are used. You write large quantities of data but then its read only. Even if you rewriting total capacity worth of data like CCTV for example, you are still looking at many years of usage.

Heat, noise and power. SSD but not by much. Current gen HDD are generally pretty good 9n these aspects and will power down or slow down when not being accessed. Not to day power should be dismissed, if a NAS is on 24x7 then 1w = approx £3 a year running cost and a large HDD could be 7w so 4 drives would be around £80 a year for disks.

Overall, for home users unless you have a specific use case or bundles of cash, stick with HDD.
 
I use an SSD for Volume 1 purely because that's where all the apps get installed out makes for a faster system. Volume 2 is my 3 x 8tb RAID 5 array.
 
Last edited:
cbd-flower said:
I thought shr was mainly for mixing different drive sizes. Raid 6 just seems safer. This is my first synology nas remember :D
Click to expand...
I wouldn't bother with RAID 6 for home usage. It just means IF a disk fails then there is a spare to start immediate rebuild. All decent NAS devices have alerting, emails, audio alarms, etc to notify of drive failure and you have to be very unlucky to have two drive failures within a week which is enough time to order a spare drive and rebuild the array.

Also NAS like synology and QNAP use their own redundancy format which allows mismatched size drives. With RAID you are limited by the size of the smallest drive and ideally they should.ne identical models so sectors are the same. This could limit you when adding drives in the future.

Had a friend with i think seagate drives. Had one replaced under warranty and replacement was same size but fewer platters. It still worked but benchmark showed the array was slower though real life benchmark, you couldn't notice.
 
robj20 said:
I use an SSD for Volume 1 purely because that's where all the apps get installed out makes for a faster system. Volume 2 is my 3 x 8tb RAID 6 array.
Click to expand...
Fair enough, but how often are you starting up apps on a NAS ? Its not like a desktop PC where you are constantly starting and closing apps.
 
Lunar_Fox said:
Fair enough, but how often are you starting up apps on a NAS ? Its not like a desktop PC where you are constantly starting and closing apps.
Click to expand...
All the time, Plex runs constantly, it being on an SSD means searching and browsing is instant then when you select a movie it spins up the HDDs.
The other thing for me was Plex when I didn't have an SSD kept the HDDs awake all the time they never went to sleep.
My Photo backup runs all the time as well which is where all our mobile phones backup to.
Every time my PC is on that syncs as well.
 
Lunar_Fox said:
I wouldn't bother with RAID 6 for home usage. It just means IF a disk fails then there is a spare to start immediate rebuild. All decent NAS devices have alerting, emails, audio alarms, etc to notify of drive failure and you have to be very unlucky to have two drive failures within a week which is enough time to order a spare drive and rebuild the array.
Click to expand...
That isn't what RAID6 means at all. What you are describing is a hot spare - which is essentially just an extra drive that stores no data, but is available in case of a drive failure to replace the failed drive - it applies to any raid level or SHR etc.

RAID6 is an extension of RAID5 but uses two parity stripes to store recovery information, so can tolerate any 2 drives within the array failing without data loss. The downside being that you "waste" 2 drives worth of space, and it's very computationally heavy both in writing as 2 sets of parity data have to be computed, and especially in the event of a drive failure, where the extra stress can often cause another drive to fail.


cbd-flower said:
Had a little read and raid 6 seems the safest bet.
Click to expand...
Depends entirely on how many drive bays you have available and ultimately the value of the data you are storing.

For a 2 bay NAS, your only option is RAID1.

For a 4 Bay NAS, your options are RAID5, RAID6 or RAID10 :
- RAID 5 uses the equivalent of 1 drive worth of space for parity information, and so can survive 1 drive failure. However due to the complexity and risk of a 2nd failure - it isn't recommended, unless the data isn't critical e.g. it would be ok for CCTV recordings or maybe ripped movies etc that can be replaced, and where capacity is more important than reliability
- RAID 6 uses 2 drives worth of space - meaning you are losing 50% capacity in a 4 bay NAS!
- RAID 10 is mirrored and striped. You always lose 50% capacity with RAID 10, however compared to RAID 6 it is much less complex, and a failed drive can be rebuilt much quicker with less risk (it's a 1:1 copy from the remaining drive, rather than reading all drives and doing parity calculations. This is generally the best choice for important data.

For a 5 Bay, RAID6 makes more sense than a 4 Bay, as you can use that extra bay for data.

cbd-flower said:
I thought shr was mainly for mixing different drive sizes. Raid 6 just seems safer. This is my first synology nas remember :D
Click to expand...
SHR and SHR2 are Synology implementation of RAID5/RAID6 but allow better space usage with mismatched drive sizes (as opposed to wasting space if all drives aren't the same size).
 
Thanks for all of that Armageus.
It’s manly for backups for multiple computers.
I suppose you could call that important data.
The asustor has 4nvme slots and 10 hdd.
How would you go about juggling that about.
Could I raid 0 two or more drives and raid 1 them also?
 
I haven’t the foggiest idea what to go for.
What I was trying to describe was raid 0, 4 drives.
So there was 2 lots of 2 drives each raided 0. And backup all 4 with raid 1.

If not how would you go about it?
 
RAID 0 is for speed..totally pointless in a NAS. That was used for the desktop users, getting two WD 10,000 rpm drives use them in RAID 0 for performance.

It would be better to use individual drive, no data redundancy than RAID 0!

I use individual drive, no redundancy. If the drive goes down I go back to my backup loose drives.

At least with my layout it's not wasting space.
 
cbd-flower said:
I haven’t the foggiest idea what to go for.
What I was trying to describe was raid 0, 4 drives.
So there was 2 lots of 2 drives each raided 0. And backup all 4 with raid 1.

If not how would you go about it?
Click to expand...
You can do RAID 0+1 (RAID 01) if the NAS supports it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom