NAS WD Red 6TB vs Ironwolf 6TB

[tikker]

As the title says. How are the Ironwolf disks? I've always went with WD myself mostly because of brand loyalty, but my main HDD has been a 2TB Seagate drive for a while now and I've never had problems with it.

The Ironwolfs are a little cheaper compared to the WD Reds (only ~15 euros however though). I've come across some stories about Seagate drives and failures, but I'm not sure how much of that to believe.

Which one would you get?

[SilkyDistress]

5 minutes ago, tikker said:

-snip-

I would look into WD Purple drives cause they are meant for video surveillance servers and they are already high quality. I've seen a lot of cases of WD Red's failing in my company on their servers

[tikker]

6 minutes ago, SilkyDistress said:

I would look into WD Purple drives cause they are meant for video surveillance servers and they are already high quality. I've seen a lot of cases of WD Red's failing in my company on their servers

That would make them more suitable for sustained writes, no? I'm mostly using this as a Plex and file server so better reads are more of a focus. There's no difference in price though.

[SilkyDistress]

5 minutes ago, tikker said:

That would make them more suitable for sustained writes, no?

Yes they are more suitable for sustained writes.

5 minutes ago, tikker said:

I'm mostly using this as a Plex and file server so better reads are more of a focus. There's no difference in price though.

They have decent speeds.

 

Take look at this article to understand WD's "Rainbow" : Link

 

They recommend WD Red drives but I find WD Purple's much better on server. I have RAID 0 in my rig atm and RAID 5 on my server (36 TB's = 6x 6 TB's)

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

The Ironwolf drives should be good.  Seagate mostly got a bad rep because of their 3TB ST3000DM001 model that had a 30+% annual failure rate.  Later models seem to be doing not significantly worse than the competition.

 

That being said, I'm still kinda nervous about such large drives.  When a drive fails (and at some point in time that WILL happen) and you replace it, it's not uncommon for a second drive to fail while the RAID array is rebuilding.  The larger your drives, the longer the stressful rebuild is going to take and hence the more likely you are to lose more drives.

 

Personally I have eight 4TB WD Reds in my NAS, running RAIDZ2 (RAID6 basically, so 2 drives redundancy).

[Tiberiusisgame]

This is subject to so many factors, but I've run Red's for... as long as I can remember? I've had a handful of failures but the drives were always more than 5 years old.

 

If you want your drives to last longer, make sure your NAS sleeps when it's not in use. As for which drive is better, pick what's cheaper as long as the warranty is the same.

[tikker]

1 hour ago, Captain Chaos said:

The Ironwolf drives should be good.  Seagate mostly got a bad rep because of their 3TB ST3000DM001 model that had a 30+% annual failure rate.  Later models seem to be doing not significantly worse than the competition.

 

That being said, I'm still kinda nervous about such large drives.  When a drive fails (and at some point in time that WILL happen) and you replace it, it's not uncommon for a second drive to fail while the RAID array is rebuilding.  The larger your drives, the longer the stressful rebuild is going to take and hence the more likely you are to lose more drives.

 

Personally I have eight 4TB WD Reds in my NAS, running RAIDZ2 (RAID6 basically, so 2 drives redundancy).

I understand the fear, I also don't like having a lot of data on one large drive. My motherboard only has 6 SATA ports though, so I took the middle ground with 6 TB which should give 30 TB with RAID 5 I guess. Not yet too big for comfort.

56 minutes ago, Tiberiusisgame said:

This is subject to so many factors, but I've run Red's for... as long as I can remember? I've had a handful of failures but the drives were always more than 5 years old.

 

If you want your drives to last longer, make sure your NAS sleeps when it's not in use. As for which drive is better, pick what's cheaper as long as the warranty is the same.

The warranty is the same , 3 years.

 

I still have to make it a proper NAS. Right now it's just my old gaming rig converted to a linux box with each drive drive dedicated to one type of storage (e.g. movies, tv show etc.). Once I've amassed my army of drives I'll convert it.

I guess I'll save a bit of money then and go for the Ironwolf. In the worst case I'll be a guinea pig

[Tiberiusisgame]

Plenty of folks use IronWolfs, don't worry, you aren't a guinea pig for them. At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this forum, if all you're doing is streaming movies and shows or other consumable media, have you considered a Synology? They're very cheap (especially if you already have drives) and your power footprint and management of said drives is significantly cheaper/easier. I love mine. My wife loves it, too. She calls it her personal Netflix. Saves my bandwidth when she watches the same show over and over. ;-)

[tikker]

1 hour ago, Tiberiusisgame said:

Plenty of folks use IronWolfs, don't worry, you aren't a guinea pig for them. At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this forum, if all you're doing is streaming movies and shows or other consumable media, have you considered a Synology? They're very cheap (especially if you already have drives) and your power footprint and management of said drives is significantly cheaper/easier. I love mine. My wife loves it, too. She calls it her personal Netflix. Saves my bandwidth when she watches the same show over and over. ;-)

I have glanced at them and they certainly look nice. I mainly used my old PC as they are probably not really worth any money nowadays and this way they'd do something else besides taking up space collecting dust.

Maybe I should take another look at them though.

[Tiberiusisgame]

30 minutes ago, tikker said:

I have glanced at them and they certainly look nice. I mainly used my old PC as they are probably not really worth any money nowadays and this way they'd do something else besides taking up space collecting dust.

Maybe I should take another look at them though.

For the ease of maintenance (file moving, permissions, etc), the multitude of services they provide (afp, ftp, http(s), etc), they're a logical choice. And Synology is good about security patches, too. if you build it yourself, you have to do all of that yourself.

[tikker]

3 minutes ago, Tiberiusisgame said:

For the ease of maintenance (file moving, permissions, etc), the multitude of services they provide (afp, ftp, http(s), etc), they're a logical choice. And Synology is good about security patches, too. if you build it yourself, you have to do all of that yourself.

Is it possible to gradually add drives with a Synology? I'm considering unRaid because of that; not planning to drop >1000 on drives in one go  

[Tiberiusisgame]

It is! If you buy a Synology with an expandable port on the back and you format them with the Synology FS, this can be done. Research them first. Make sure to watch one of the Techtuber's review of Synology's offerings for 2018. I think Linus did one but it could also have been Steve?

[tikker]

On 12-1-2018 at 7:24 PM, Tiberiusisgame said:

It is! If you buy a Synology with an expandable port on the back and you format them with the Synology FS, this can be done. Research them first. Make sure to watch one of the Techtuber's review of Synology's offerings for 2018. I think Linus did one but it could also have been Steve?

I've decided to save up some money to buy 4 drives and a Synology DS418play so that I can also play my 4k content. I'll save money on power consumption in the first place (they list 29W when accessing vs my 4690k's 60W-ish at idle alone) and the small footprint is also nice. The occasional transcoding can be done on my main PC anyway.

As for the drives, even though more people seem to prefere the WD Reds, I'm going to go and give the Ironwolfs a go since I can save a bit more money there as well while probably not sacrificing quality.

 

Thanks for the input.

[seagate_surfer]

1 hour ago, tikker said:

I've decided to save up some money to buy 4 drives and a Synology DS418play so that I can also play my 4k content. I'll save money on power consumption in the first place (they list 29W when accessing vs my 4690k's 60W-ish at idle alone) and the small footprint is also nice. The occasional transcoding can be done on my main PC anyway.

As for the drives, even though more people seem to prefere the WD Reds, I'm going to go and give the Ironwolfs a go since I can save a bit more money there as well while probably not sacrificing quality.

 

Thanks for the input.

Here you can find a list of compatible capacities/models of IronWolf drives and Synology diskstations capable of advanced health monitoring known as IHM (IronWolf Health Management)  and more info on IHM, which goes beyond traditional S.M.A.R.T monitoring to proactively give your courses of action in the event of potential drive troubles. Where you're looking at investing in a Synology NAS and IronWolf disks, it may be a good idea to ensure you have support for these features as well so you're getting the most out of that investment.

[tikker]

3 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

Here you can find a list of compatible capacities/models of IronWolf drives and Synology diskstations capable of advanced health monitoring known as IHM (IronWolf Health Management)  and more info on IHM, which goes beyond traditional S.M.A.R.T monitoring to proactively give your courses of action in the event of potential drive troubles. Where you're looking at investing in a Synology NAS and IronWolf disks, it may be a good idea to ensure you have support for these features as well so you're getting the most out of that investment.

Thanks for that link. I don't see the new x18 lineup listed. Is it because they have just been released or are they not compatible (yet)?

[seagate_surfer]

1 minute ago, tikker said:

Thanks for that link. I don't see the new x18 lineup listed. Is it because they have just been released or are they not compatible (yet)?

Confession? Wanted to include info about that specific model in original reply, don't think the sheet has been updated to reflect newer model releases yet. We reached out to a resource with more info on that, currently waiting to hear back.

Will reply back when we have more concrete info to share.

[redtute]

I like the Ironwolf Pro.

They include a recovery warranty.

[seagate_surfer]

18 hours ago, tikker said:

Thanks for that link. I don't see the new x18 lineup listed. Is it because they have just been released or are they not compatible (yet)?

Got our answer. The DS418play is compatible with IHM. This Synology Knowledge Base link shows that and other compatible units and has been updated for 18-series enclosures. We are still working on updating info on our end.

[tikker]

58 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

Got our answer. The DS418play is compatible with IHM. This Synology Knowledge Base link shows that and other compatible units and has been updated for 18-series enclosures. We are still working on updating info on our end.

Wow that was quick! Thanks for letting me know. My choice is made