WD Black in a NAS?

mothermachine

mothermachine

mothermachine

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Joined
8 Oct 2004
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Hi folks,

We're buying a Synology NAS for our small business, and we're looking for drives for it. We have a need for as fast drives as possible so the WD Blacks are currently a lot more attractive than the Reds. I know that the Reds are "designed" for NAS use but would Blacks be perfectly usable?

The drives will be written to and read from perhaps every few minutes and potentially at the same time, by 2 users, with files that could be GB large at a time, and pulling frames etc. We have tested this using a WD Black internal drive in one of the machines with both of us writing to it at the same time over a switch and it seems fine, so we're imagining it should be much the same experience when the drives are in a NAS.

Is this a reliable option or are we being stupid and should just get Reds? The speed benefit could be significant with the Blacks...

In either case we would be using RAID5. 2 drives, 1 as backup.

Cheers,
 
lude1962 said:
a) you cant have raid 5 with 2 disks, 3 is a minimum
b) Disadvantages of RAID-5 Volumes
In general, RAID-5 volumes are not well suited for any write intensive workload, since a single write is likely to generate a disk read of the parity and two writes (to update data and to parity).
c)1 as backup. - raid is not a backup
Click to expand...

Sorry I meant RAID1. A simple mirror. RAID is a backup, of course it is. We'll also be backing up to other locations, including off-site.

Archeum - thank you. Are you sure that they're ok for simultaneous r/w operations? There's surprisingly little info out there on this.
 
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