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+--- Thread: Choosing between 4TB HDD - WD Red Pro, Gold & Seagate Ironwolfe Pro? (/showthread.php?tid=1071)
Choosing between 4TB HDD - WD Red Pro, Gold & Seagate Ironwolfe Pro? - Enquiries - 02-28-2020
Hello,
I currently have the 4-bay QNAP TS453mini (the original one I believe) w/ 8GB of RAM which I bought back in July 2016. At the time I also had bought 4x 4TB WD Red Pro HDD drives (64MB cache). My current configuration is in RAID 5. I mainly use this NAS as a media hub to watch TV shows and Movies.
About a year and half ago, one of my drives failed and was replaced. I had tried back in 2016 to buy from different shops to mix up the batches, just in case. 2 days ago, another one of my drives failed..or at least showed a few block errors, and therefore my NAS is in currently in a downgraded situation.
I've been going through a few of your articles/reviews over the past few days and reading up on the recent use of SRM affecting WD 2-6TB HDD. It got me thinking, and it's making me reconsider whether I should buy new 4TB HDD's of the Red Pro, the Gold version (256 MB cache) or even try out the Seagate Ironwolf Pro version (128 MB cache). I've also been reading blogs and for the time being there seems to be less evidence that the lower capacity Seagate HDD's are using SRM...So, i'm in a bit of bind.
Pricewise all three 4TB HDD versions are nearly the same (160-170 USD). I did look at doubling up and buying 8TB HDD's (to move away from the use of SRM..if that's actually the case with the WD drives), but that's not the same budget. SSD's would be a sweet deal as well, but that's even more expensive, maybe in a few years!
Here are a few questions for you, if you have time to spare:
- What would you recommend? haha. I know the WD Gold are recommended for NAS's above 4 bays...but they're the same price as the Red pro's right now! They also seem more robust based on reviews.
- What's your take on using different brands in the same NAS? 2x WD + 2x Seagates? Or even 2x Red Pro + 2x WD Gold? Using different sized HDD's isn't efficient, but if drives have difference cache sizes, would that have an impact?
- Do you know if the newer WD Gold versions are affected by the use of SRM?
- When my 1st drive failed, I had shutdown my NAS to avoid any further damage. I haven't done so this time around. What do you suggest? I originally found out one of my disks was failing when I rebooted prior to installing the latest firmware...let's just say, it took a while before I had access again after the reboot.
- Should I consider other brands (Hitachi...which is ultimately WD)?
- Concerning the use of SSD's, I read somewhere that the RAM of your NAS could limit the size of each individual SSD I could use. Is that true?
Sorry for bombarding you with all these questions. I'd greatly appreciate your feedback if you've got a bit of time.
Cheers,
Jon
Choosing between 4TB HDD - WD Red Pro, Gold & Seagate Ironwolfe Pro? - ed - 02-15-2021
Yes, WD is in a tricky situation and they have some explaining to do.If you have Pro drives, you very unlikely have SRM drive. If you do use Gold or Ironwolf Pro or Even Exos you will benefit from enterprise features. They are louder than regular drives. But should be no louder then you have already.Mixing different make drives in the same RAID is not a problem if they are similar spec like RPM. Cache functions do not matter in a RAID. But the best would be to create separate RAID in a single NAS grouping similar drives.None of the Pro drives has SRM technology.You should not leave this RAID in degraded mode, you never know when next drives will fail.RAM is needed only if you use SSD for caching, but not for regular use.I hope this helps.