Shucking a WD elements external drive for Synology

pc-guy said:
depend on your storage capacity 4 disk usually do either 10 or 5 to get max capacity. For 4 bay stick to 6-8tb drives.

If you really want 14TB drives I would stick with 10. Faster and you have at least 1 drive redundancy. You get 28TB.
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I'm not dead set on 14TB drives, only that they were on offer. I have about 13TB usable from memory in the Synology, so either option works for me. RAID10 on 14TB drives would be ideal, but I don't have that sort of wedge to drop on drives this side of Christmas... unless I got 2 now and 2 at a later date I guess? Anyone know if FreeNAS supports migrating a RAID mirror to RAID10 per chance?
 
randal said:
I'm not dead set on 14TB drives, only that they were on offer. I have about 13TB usable from memory in the Synology, so either option works for me. RAID10 on 14TB drives would be ideal, but I don't have that sort of wedge to drop on drives this side of Christmas... unless I got 2 now and 2 at a later date I guess? Anyone know if FreeNAS supports migrating a RAID mirror to RAID10 per chance?
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the deals will come and go. i think if you are plannign on raid10, you really should plan to get all your drives at the same time. it will save you a bunch of tears and effort.

freenas zfs gives your much more flexibility in terms of redundancy and you can mix and match. which is great if you dont have the cash to get all the drives right now, but the downside is the load on the drives when the raid is redistributed.

anyway if you are planning on using freenas, it is a great option to go to. though i have not read too much into the raid building process and how that will affect the drives if such large platter drive (14TB) fails and you replace with another then the raid potentially become vulnerable. have a quick read below, it gives a good introduction. I would say large raid volumn ie you want 3+ disk equivalent of storage space, you need to be looking at 6 bay to 8 bay NAS solutions cos the shear amount of data and the risk of disk falling over during rebuild.

https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/zfs-pools-in-freenas/

before NAS graded HDD drive was a thing, I used to run barracudas in my NAS raids. i remember this time that my 4 bay NAS had a drive fell over. I replaced it with another barracuda drive, but at the end of the rebuild, another old Barracuda failed. that prompted me to replace the enitre raid with Ironwolfs. so things like that can and will happen.
 
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pc-guy said:
depend on your storage capacity 4 disk usually do either 10 or 5 to get max capacity. For 4 bay stick to 6-8tb drives.

If you really want 14TB drives I would stick with 10. Faster and you have at least 1 drive redundancy. You get 28TB.
Click to expand...

Seems a rather poor use of four disks when UnRAID with four 14TBs gives 42TB usable with one parity. Even if two disks fail you can still access the data on the remaining data drives...

Or 28TB with two parity disks.

Is there any reason why anyone would use RAID in a domestic environment?
 
FreeStream said:
Seems a rather poor use of four disks when UnRAID with four 14TBs gives 42TB usable with one parity. Even if two disks fail you can still access the data on the remaining data drives...

Or 28TB with two parity disks.

Is there any reason why anyone would use RAID in a domestic environment?
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the issue is not data being available, the issue is when 1 drive fails during the resilver/rebuild process, the load on the remaining disk is high. this will increase the change of an additional drive falling over.

unraid uses ZFS correct? it is similar to how freenas works.

raid in home environment gives space/speed/redundancy. it is not just SMB or Enterprises or data centres use RAID. i have been using raid storage systems at my home for nearly over 20 years. initially started as raid 0 strips on HDDs to improve windows performances as raptors were freaking expensive then started moving to redundancy raids to perseve data loss (had quite a few).
 
UnRAID does not use ZFS.

It’s JBOD (formatted to your choice) + Parity in basic terms. If the array fails, disks die or the machine fails you plug your disks in anywhere and they are readable.

Your RAID 10 falls over for whatever reason? Your stuffed!

Many years ago I used to use RAID, quickly got fed up with it and switched to UnRAID, which has been solid and the feature set these days is great.

Single stream throughput is limited to the performance of the disk your reading/writing to, and if you need more than that (again, in a home environment???) then you can setup a BRTFS SSD/HDD RAID 0/1 cache pool too.

I would recommend to the OP that they have a look at UnRAID, they have a trial version to see if it works for them.

TL;DR - still can’t see why you’d use RAID over something like UnRAID at home.
 
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I have freenas and unraid running at home.

Only installed unraid recently and I do really like it. The GUI is one of the best I've used.

Freenas wins with speed though. I have a 10gbe network and fully saturate my network without a problem (ssd raid 10). Can't do that on unraid even with nvme cache drives.
 
When I write to unraid using cache drive I get 600-700Mb/s, I can read from it at 1Gb/s so the hardware is fine.

I've read on the forums that its to do with overheads, I may have to tinker further but others seem to get the same issue.
 
Seriously conflicted about way forward for NAS drives. As of today I only need about 8TB of storage in total, planning on running 4 x HDD in Synology DS920+. Usage will be for Home media, plus photography RAW files.

So I could go and shuck 4 x 6TB externals for £400 now and then upgrade at future date, or 4 x 12TB at £820 and potentially never use that additional storage. From what I've read going to larger capacity externals tends to net a better drive inside?

Looking at Red NAS drives, it's going to set me back £620ish if I buy internal HDDs outright. So why wouldn't i then go for the 4 x 12TB at £820?

Would welcome thoughts, I've been holding off pulling the trigger as I second guess myself!
 
How noisy are the Exos drives?

I'm toying either a 14tb Seagate or WD Elements, the latter is a known quantity but I've heard good things about Seagate's newer drives.
 
Waiting for that 12 or 14TB to come back on special, prices have crept back up again and availability seems to be getting sparse. :(
 
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