What DRIVE FOR NAS?

[VFXGuy]

I am buying a Synology NAS. I don't know what drives to buy.

The options are:

3.5" SATA HDD

2.5" SATA HDD

2.5" SATA SSD

M.2 2280 NVMe SSD

 

What are the differences and pros and cons of each? What would you recommend? And what brands would your recommend?

[Electronics Wizardy]

How many bays do you have? What model nas?

 

How many TB usable do you want?

 

Id go with 3.5in hdds for storage, and m.2 ssds for caching.

[Deeya]

I utilize a mix in my storage server.

 

A mix of high capacity Western Digital Red drives, and Samsung SSDs to utilize as cache drives.

[Radium_Angel]

If you have a proper backup schema, then it doesn't matter what drives you buy, so long as they are all identical for the RAID level you are creating.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Eviljuche said:

2.5' HDD's are usually made for laptops and are slower than regular ones (I have a NAS based on 2.5's, and it's max speed is roughly 10 Mbps, which is not much). Either way, you'll need the RAID-ready HDD/SSD's. RAID-optimized SSD's are expensive and, in a way, are an overkill (NAS RAID array will make your HDD's kinda 2x faster anyway), so staying with HDD's would probably be your choice. Choose the RAID-optimized HDD's as you choose your regular ones, that is mostly an alright strategy

I will add on, for reference the SLOWEST SATA SSD's are around 500 Mbps

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, Eviljuche said:

2.5' HDD's are usually made for laptops and are slower than regular ones (I have a NAS based on 2.5's, and it's max speed is roughly 10 Mbps, which is not much). Either way, you'll need the RAID-ready HDD/SSD's. RAID-optimized SSD's are expensive and, in a way, are an overkill (NAS RAID array will make your HDD's kinda 2x faster anyway), so staying with HDD's would probably be your choice. Choose the RAID-optimized HDD's as you choose your regular ones, that is mostly an alright strategy

How are you measing those speeds, those seems really slow for a laptop drive, something like 60-120mB/s is what Id expect from a lpatop drive.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Eviljuche said:

They are bad - 4mb of cache level of bad. It is even worse on Wi-Fi than on the Ethernet. And I have a top-tier pro level router, and the whole thing is in ReiserFS which means the drives are faster than usual too.

I think wifi/100m ethernet here is your issue, not the drive its self. 

 

Reiserfs really doesn't affect perofrmance that much, esp with hdds that are slow.

[PhilAstisxh]

I really would recognize to go witch Seagate Irenwolf (Pro) NAS drives and also use M2. NVME drives for Cache.

[NelizMastr]

SSD's are useless in all Synology NAS devices with 2 or less gigabit ethernet ports.

Stick to NAS grade harddrives that fit your capacity needs.

 

Without giving us any details, that's all the recommendation you'll get.

[flibberdipper]

Your best bet for something that's actually affordable would be some shucked EasyStores in 8 or 12TB capacities, as those usually seem to go on the best sales.

 

10 minutes ago, Eviljuche said:

They are bad - 4mb of cache level of bad. It is even worse on Wi-Fi than on the Ethernet. And I have a top-tier pro level router, and the whole thing is in ReiserFS(that famous filesystem made by a psychopathic wife-slaughterer, that is known for being the fastest FS on the benchmarks) which means the drives are faster than usual too.

The amount of cache they have really shouldn't make that much of a difference. The slowest 2.5" SATA HDD I have is an 80GB 5400RPM Travelstar from mid-2008, and even all on its lonesome that drive can muster up something like 35MB/s sequentials. Hell, the slowest 2.5" HDD I have is a 40GB IDE Travelstar in a Pentium II laptop with an ATA-66 interface (in other words, max theoretical of 66Mbps), and even that drive is able to churn out around 6.5MB/s (or 52Mbps).

 

Seems like you have other things which are ruining their performance. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯