One thing to consider is that sometimes the reason the exos drives are so cheap is they are being sold as enterprise or business surplus in which case as they are being resold, despite being brand new, there can be warranty issues there. Just something to keep mind
Indeed. It means that you can't register the 5 year warranty direct and have to rely on the seller to honour the warranty, so buy from a reputable supplier!
This is a general problem with oem drives, not just the professional models. But I guess you could run into that problem more often with the professional drives.
Indeed I took this chance buying 15 drives for my new NAS and I was lucky to have full warranty. But that being said this was after weighing many reviews and knowing that it was a bit of a gamble.
Good to hear and thanks for sharing your experiences. I also had a great experience with both my IronWolf Pros and Exos disks. I had a few failures on my WD Red’s, but usually at 5+ years, which is also pretty good. The disk I have that is near 8 years old is going to be replaced shortly as a precaution.
I came to the same conclusion last year and switched from WD Red to Exos. I went with the 12TB, because they are cheaper and use less power than the rest of the series for some reason. They Exos disks are noisy though, especially starting up. The bulk storage in my NAS isn't used often, so I thought I'd save some power by having them spin down, probably not the intended use for enterprise disks... but it's quite noticeable from across the room.
Almost bought an exo, but quickly changed my mind I heard that they were pretty loud. I use my nas as a media server and it's in my living room next to the couch.
@@Cobalt985They have a shit ton of cycles they are rated for. For my use case I once calculated roughly how many times per day they would spin down and up again and I think I got some number like 10+ years of runtime. I do think that they are more likely to fail for some other reason in that time, so I would not be concerned about the power cycles. Leaving them running for 10 years will probably cost me more in electricity than replacing them will, especially here in europe.
At least for the 20 TB version, with the new refresh, the Iron Wolf Pro seems to have the same MTBF, warranty, and most other important specs as the Exos, while coming with the 3 year data recovery option and being quieter.
@@mdd1963 It’s not, but if it’s striped across the drives, it’s still on there, and if you have a failure during an array rebuild, they could at least get something back for you. Data recovery is a 1z likely occurrence, but it’s really expensive in the unlikely event you need it.
The Ironwolf Pro line does have one "alleged" edge on the datasheets over the Exos line: its operating temperature range is wider, e.g. 5-60 degree C for Exos vs 0-65 degree C for Ironwolf Pro.
I'd say if your drive temperatures are in excess of 60°C, you're doing something wrong anyways. No matter what the drives specified max temperature is, you shouldn't let your drives get hotter than 50°C on a regular basis.
We discovered working on USAF recce aircraft on the cold Nebraska flightline that assorted Netapp appliances will absolutely refuse to even spin the drives up if temps are below 0C! :)
As you point out, they have been cheaper for some time now. It may not always be the case, but it certainly makes for an interesting reason to dig into how they differ and if they should be used for home or SMB NAS, because you might naturally assume that IronWolf or IronWolf Pro (or Red Plus / Red Pro) are the correct choice here. Thanks for the comment!
@@sometechguy You are correct Idol, I assumed it was IronWolf/IronWolf Pro was the correct choice, but seeing Exos has a bad rating on Amazon, can you please enlighten me why?
@@KurushimiVrishraka I can't say for sure why it has that rating on Amazon, you could check the reviews. But Amazon reviews are not very trustworthy anyway. One reason could be that a lot of the drives sold on amazon are from non authorized sellers and the drives have an unknown origin. They may not be correctly warrantied and may have been removed from systems and resold. I hear of reports of drives that are reconditioned or just not new, and once the amazon 30 day money back period expires, you really can't be sure if you can get the drive replaced. Often the drive will be 'return to base' and the drive manufacturer will direct you back to the seller. Amazon also don't pack drive appropriately often and they can get damaged in transit, but they are not the only seller that does this. So its possible that people are reviewing the state of the drives and not based on a brand new drive. But that is just based on opinion and experience and could vary. I would go look at the reviews and see the complaint is that people are making. Personally, I buy my drives from approved resellers and if there is any sign of damage to the units, they go back.
@@sometechguy I have thoroughly checked some of your video's, did more reddit research and whatnot, as long as Amazon states (Renewed/Refurbished) then I will avoid that. I have my eye on Ironwolf 20TB, they are close enough to Exos price, but I wanted it silent because I can only store it on my room and only use it for back and buying the NAS you suggested, I have to stop for few years collecting figures and focus on this investment because I have gotten so much data since 2011 and it's making me crazy. I made a mistake buying too many SSD's, instead of those, I should have bought NAS. I wish you upload this video few years ago, though, I appreciated everything you did. I rarely subscribe, but you deserve my subscription and will check on your videos! Mahalo so much man!
I'm still scared to use Seagate HDDs (even though their SSDs are extremely good in my experience). In office NAS use, those Seagates have shown consistent failures, whereas the Western Digital HDDs have shown far less. The drives I have to keep replacing and taking to the eco recycle centres are, unfortunately, Seagate. The WD drives have been retired before they fail due to them outliving their capacity.
@@WSS_the_OG I too had problems with Seagate until I realise the ones I used to buy were non-enterprise consumer grade. Now I only go for high-end enterprise or even NAS specific drives with CMRs or PMRs NOT SMRs. To bad some WDs now have SMRs.
As a home user I've never had a compelling reason to have a NAS, since online storage has so far taken care of my situation. But as most people would if they thought about it, I'd like to remove myself completely from online storage, and have all of my data together instead of spread out over three major providers and almost two hands worth of separate accounts. I have enjoyed watching this and some of your other videos on NAS drive stats, and it's made me decide to go with the Exos drives. I used to be a HUGE WD fanboi, but the shingles outbreak (in many ways just as painful as the real thing) dampened my desire for future purchases, even though it didn't erase the many great years of service I've had from my WD consumer drives. I've got a couple from 2012 that are still 100% error free, after all. But I think I'll proceed a lot more eyes-open from now on. Again, thank you. Subbed.
Thank you, and good luck! Running a NAS can give you more control, and for larger volume data it provides other benefits. I have many terabytes of data and it’s not the best use case for cloud storage. But make sure you don’t neglect backups of your important data. Using things like RAID can help protect from some failures, but it won’t protect from all and backups are easy to forget when using online storage because it’s easy to think the backup provider is taking care of this. But of course, this isn’t always true. Any disk from any manufacturer can fail, and this is true or spinning disks as well as SSD. So just treat it with the mind set that are not indestructible. Thanks for the sub, and hope you get good use of what I make. 😀
I stopped using seagate when their reliability tanked. Then became a Hitachi fan because of their reliability but went with Toshiba after Hitachi git bought by WD. Seagate seems to have fixed their reliability issues so i might give them a spin next.
I moved to enterprise drives for my NASes many years ago. I look at MTBF, uncorrectable bit error rate and warranty period, and I no longer remember when I last had to replace a disk... currently my largest RAID set consists of six Seagate 6TB drives, with power on hour counts between 47kh and 64kh (due to moving to a bigger NAS and some disk juggling between my multiple NASes several years ago). This has usually meant paying more per disk, but from past experience replacing failed disks I consider it well worth the difference. If they're now *cheaper* than the "NAS drives" it's a no-brainer in my opinion. I also usually take a look at BackBlaze's disk statistics a couple of times a year as it gives some interesting insights into reliability. (I also ran WD disks many moons ago. I remember the "secret SMR" debacle, and it was a factor, though not a very important one, in me switching to Seagate)
Yeah I have only had two hard drives die on me in my life and they were both Western digital greens. So after I watch this video originally I ended up looking for EXOs. I ended up getting refurbished ones for $250 they are x-22 20 TB. I am praying I don't have issues as this was a huge expense for a small RUclips channel
Agree, with everything. I had been a Seagate fan for years, then when they reduced warranty and quality went to WD, then lost trust in WD with the SMR scandal while Seagate had improved. Recently bought 4 14TB Exos for my new homelab Synology. My reasoning was the same as yours and am very satisfied with them. The only Exos downsides are not including data recovery as a part of the warranty but I don't need or want that so not really an issue at all (for me, and I suspect many others) and supposedly noisier but may (or not) be an issue only if you are work physically close to them.
If you have backups, you don't need data recovery. And by the way I wouldn't want to count on data recovery. There's things that can be fixed/recovered, but others can't. With a head crash on the platters, some data will just be gone, no recovery will be able to get it back. So yes, data recovery should be avoided by using a solid backup strategy.
I've been using EXOS x16 14TB drives, very nice ! Currently (4 May, 2023) $209.99 at amazon, that's $15.00 per TB which just happens to be my threshold for purchasing HDD's. Hopefully this will come down as I need many more ! For those of you who can remember Seagate, back in the day (some 20 year ago) had a 5 year warranty on all it's drives, where WD did not. Have had both, only a WD has failed on me. A 120GB drive with a 1 year warranty failed after 18 months. Decided to lookup the CEO of WD and write him a letter regarding his product, and did get a response (not directly from him, but some subordinate. And this was before social media.), wow ! I returned the failed drive and they replaced it with a reconditioned drive, albeit a 160GB version, both good and bad. Regardless, I was happy to get a response at all. WD redeemed themselves a little bit ! And then comes the SMR fiasco ... well you know the rest !
Got myself 3x Exos X12 12 TB some years ago. They were cheaper than anything else back then and they work great. Now I want to replace the 4 leftover WD Red 4 TB with larger drives and the price situation in Germany is just crazy. Right now Exos X16 and even the current X18 16 TB are cheaper - not just per TB - but in total than any 14 or 12 TB NAS drives including the smaller Exos. ^^
My EXOS disks are working great in my Synology 4 disk NAS. Very quiet - more quiet than the 4 tb WD Red's they replaced. I went with the 12 TB x 2 and I have 2 x 6tb Iron Wolf drives in my 418play
Good to know. My DS423+ arrives today and I have planned to put in a brand new 18tb exos along with (from my PC) a 18th IWP and later a 16tb IWP in it. Was a bit worried about mix and matching as opposed to noise. NAS noob here. 🙂
Excellent video, I just bought my first 4 bay NAS a couple of months ago for home use, I originally purchased 5 Seagate Ironwolf 14tb drives and upon arrival all were dead so sent them back, I then looked at WD and the reviews were somewhat lacking I then came across Toshiba N300 NAS discs and have 3 14tb in my NAS and touchwood had no problems at all, I also have 3 16tb in my DAS which I use as a backup medium, I will continue to buy Toshiba NAS drives
Great to hear about your experience with Toshiba, thanks for sharing. Synology sell their own disks, and these are actually Toshiba disks that are white labelled. Could be a different reason for you, but I had a couple of Exos that were dead on arrival. The drives had not been well packaged and were just wrapped in bubble wrap. Both drives had dents in the same corner of the drive where they had been dropped. So not a manufacturing problem in those cases, just bad shipping and handling. If you get disks delivered and they come packaged this way. Inspect them closely and if they are physically damaged, definitely return immediately.
@@sometechguy Shipping damage is probably way more frequent with hdds than most people would expect. Even with professionally packaged units, the drives have a g-rating that must not be exceeded. So if a forklift driver drops a crate, looks at it, says it looks fine and doesn't report the incident, you might end up with hundreds of damaged drives that fail in a matter of days. So when you buy a bunch of drives and they all fail immediately, I'd say shipping damage 99.9%
Exos X18 drives were insanely loud in my synology nas to the point it was unbearable being in the same room and I considered doing a new SSD or 5400 RPM nas and keeping the Exos drive nas as a backup. But I was able to do a firmware update & disable the power saving features (and later added and SSD volume for the most used packages & initial downloading) and along with all the noise tricks (velcro in the bays, putting the unit on top of anti-vibration pads and a heavy book on top) there's no crunching head parking and much less constant activity.
Under normal running they seem fine, but you are right that if the array has gone to power save and you wake it up, they are noisy for a few seconds. I will look into the firmware changes, thanks!
Thank you! This was very informative! I got screwed with a WD SMR drive as well and have since switched to Seagate also. You are absolutely correct on how hard it was to find if a drive is SMR or not. I assumed if it didn't say, then it was. Otherwise, it would celebrate it was a CMR drive. But Seagate has been working fine for me for some time now. Thanks for pointing out the differences between the Ironwolf's and Exo. I never really knew what to get. I'll certainly know next time! :)
By the way Seagate and Toshiba have been sneaking in SMR drives in their desktop lines as well without telling the customer. WD though was the only manufacturer who was brazen enough to sneak SMR drives into their NAS/RAID lines.
I heard that the HDD Exos is HW-wise (internals) exactly the same as the IronWolf Pro HDD, just with modified firmware. Horever, what's strange is that in my QNAP NASes, IronWolf Pro discs run without problems, but Exos discs don't, they continuously report sector reallocation increase and then NAS it keeps reporting a warning that the drive is not in good shape 😕
I don't know the details on the internals, but it seems to make sense that they have a lot (if not all) shared components. I guess the reallocation issue could just be software? Hence caused by whats in the firmware of the drive. Not sure if that could be fixed with an update to the QNAP software at some point.
You'd have to test this behavior with more Exos drives from another batch to rule out shipping damage. I'm always very suspicious when two, three or four drives that were bought together all fail quickly. Could be a bad production batch or - and I think that's more frequent - shipping damage. This happened to me with WD Red a couple of years ago when four drives failed in a matter of days. The shop later told me that they got back like 80% of the drives from that specific box/crate and they suspected shipping damage.
@@highks496 Well, I don't think that's my case. I've acquired each Exos disc a long time apart. The 3pieces I have, I bought continuously over the course of 1.5 years.
I like the summary of CMR vs SMR, but I think there is another thing to consider in the discussion. Any HDD over 6 or 8TB is likely going to be HELIUM filled. And while Helium hard drives can be an option for companies that need high-density storage because of the lower head friction (leading to smaller heads and higher densities) and lower temps (longer life) that HELIUM-filled drives offer - users need to consider monitoring the SMART 22 attribute (if offered by the HDD) and be constantly checking the status of the helium % remaining inside of a hard drive - because no HDD seal is ever perfect, and below about 92-95% helium remaining- you're now courting a head crash, and it's time to move that data. Large companies can move data quickly. Consumers, well, that's a time consuming, costly drive replacement order possibly taking days to obtain. While annual failure rates for helium-filled drives still appear similar to air-filled drives, not all consumers can accept the potential data loss - unlike a bigger company running raid or with parity correction - and standby hot swap spares. And it could really depend on if you need lots of storage (>30TB) or can afford to have a parity drive and a spare drive or two laying around to use as a hot spare.
@@Eleriam Here's the TL;DR version: "Learn about Helium Filled High Density HDDs failures, monitoring your HDD life expectancy using smartdrive, and also be an informed buyer." I mean, if you think it will never fail, you're taking a risk with the data on the drives. For me, I'm fine using older air-filled 6TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives - but I also run my NAS with 2 disk parity (unRAID) and backup regularly. But "YMMV."
@@petera.morrison2095 why the TL;DR version? I did ask for advice. :) What does your backup structure look like? I don't have any backup set for my NAS.
I've been running a bunch of 8 TB WD Red helium-filled drives for about five to six years now (the 8 TB used to be helium-filled at first, the current 8 TB ones aren't anymore) and I did not ever have a problem with the helium levels. The smart value is still 100 and they run just fine. Half of them are on 24/7 in a Drobo Raid and the other half is only switched on twice a week for backups. The advice to monitor smart values is still good, but it applies to all drives, helium or air. None of them will last forever and they don't need a specific reason to fail. So have good backups (RAID is not a backup!) and monitor smart values.
@@Eleriam - Well, let's start with the fact that my backup structure is none of your overly inquisitive business. But in truth, I have both onsite and offsite backup copies, that I'm satisfied with. If you're fine taking a risk that the helium doesn't fail earlier than non-helium drives, then you've made a calculated decision based on your own use case. Mine, I couldn't justify it, based on statistical references and historical practices.
If it’s good enough for enterprise, it’s good enough for me. NAS drives may be perfectly fine for home use but if it’s not good enough for the “Enterprise” moniker, and if its more expensive than real enterprise drives, I see no reason to buy them
Have you also looked into WD Gold drives? (WD's equivalent to Exos). There was a time when WD Gold was nearly the same price as WD Red Pro, which is when I bought a couple 16 TB Gold here in the U.S. Not sure if it's just the drives I received, but the Gold drives turned out to be quieter overall than the IronWolf Pro that I have in another Synology NAS. For some reason, the IronWolf I have are very loud when writing data.
I know the near future with be all HD will be SSD, but what kind of capacity would we have if hard rive manufactures went back to 5 1/4 inch drives using today's technology?? 100-300Tb per drive?
Disk drives started at 24" platters, which is crazy to think about. But this was before my time, I am not this old. I do remember 5.25" hard disks, though I think the first computer built had a 42Mb 3.5" drive, a Conner if I remember correctly. If the drives were bigger, capacity could be crazy, but I guess seek time would suffer and throughput may remain where it is, meaning it might take weeks to fill a drive. 😂
I have eight 10TB Exos 10 drives that I purchased 4 years ago for about $250 each running RAID-Z3 and FreeNAS for my home media server. I am aware that RAID-Z3 is not ideal on 8 drives but that is the max number of drives my controller can handle and I needed it as bulletproof as possible because it took me several months to rip over 1,400 DVDs & BDs worth of TV series, anime and movies as well as my music CD collection. It has been running 24x7 for 4 years now without issue. I only shut it down for cleaning every 6 months or so. I am at about 86% of capacity and will eventually get a pair of 20 TB drives to backup everything and then reconfigure it to RAID-Z2 to clear up more usable space while keeping things backed up on those 20 TB drives for the extra protection.
@@serdar-ors Not any noisier than any other drives I've owned. I've been using mostly enterprise drives for the past twelve years now. My previous drives were 8x HGST 6TB SAS and before that I had 8x HGST 3TB SAS drives. These are a little quieter than those previous drives. Because these are in my media server, it is in an out of the way place in my living room and, from where I sit in relationship to it, I don't hear anything unless there is absolute silence in the room at which point I hear the light whir of the fans and might hear an occasional blip of head noise from the drives but it is pretty faint.
I bought around 150 nas hdd in twelve years. The slowest are the most reliable (despite not designed for NAS use): WD Green. The RE (raid edition) 2 Tb had a lot of trouble, also the 4 Tb RED were not so good. All the 6 Tb RED are dead after 5-6 years. I moved two years ago to EXOS 18 Tb and I'm very happy. I also had a lot of trouble 10 years ago with Seagate 3 Tb disks, due to a stupid seller which provide HDD without vibration sensor together with a 12 bays NAS. It took one year to find out what was the problem after exchanging many drives showing random errors.
I live in BRazil. I bought 4 3TB Seagate in 2010 in a travel to USA, direct from Amazon. All disks were dead 2 years after, using only in a synology NAS.
The EXOS HDs called back in the day Baracuda ES drives, they cost a lot more than the regular Baracuda's back then. I always used the ES variant for obvious reasons. Now I use Ironwolfs Pro for the NAS, and the backup disk is an EXOS 8Tb drive. Bought it cheap from my reseller, because someone gave it back. It runs now for 2 years and they are great and fast.
Weren't they 'Constellation ES' drives? IIRC Barracuda was always the consumer line ... which I've had horrible luck with. I've had a pretty good experience with Constellation & EXOS though.
I've gone for 5 x 16TB IWPs in my new Synology 1522Plus in RAID6. Good past experience with them, and 5 year warranty direct with the manufacturer, unlike EXOS where you have to rely on the supplier. The 16TB drives were nearly identical price to 16TB EXOS.
in Germany Toshiba is really aggressive in pricing with their enterprise, helium filled drives. the 18Tb one are also elaly nicely priced at around 14€/TB. and they come with 5 years manufacturer warranty.
@@sometechguy don't think they'll give a damn unfortunately. Not without some backlash from the tech community like the Adata controller swapping fiasco.
Did this whole event of "quietly integrating SMR" happen long after the QLC bait-and-switch? Because I'm looking at an article titled "Western Digital promises to do better after QLC controverse"
The SMR shambles was a year before the NAND incident. Article from blocks&files here. blocksandfiles.com/2021/08/29/western-digital-does-the-wrong-write-thing-again/ Not great for their reputation to have the two incidents, which is a shame.
i just bought WD Drives for my Server/NAS - went for the RED Plus, which are CMR drives. i went for WD because they seem to be more reliable according to the latest statistics from backblaze. Seagate was the worst in terms of failure rate. And we are talking enterprise level drives. And the WD RED were only 18 bucks more expensive than Seagate Ironwolf drives...
Just starting the video, but wanted to say that I have 3 Synology NAS units and started out way back with WD Green drives and they were slow and unreliable. I then bought some Red and found they also failed. They have all been running WD Gold for several years and out of 18 drives, haven't had a single failure and they are very fast.
That’s interesting to hear. From all the comments, it seems like there are a real mix of experiences. Some love WD drives and dislike Seagate, some find the opposite; and there is a mix of people with better experience of certain drive types to others. Seems generally positive experience of HGST, but maybe the user base is smaller for those that watched. There is limited real public data on failure rates between brands and drive types, but maybe a deeper dig is worth doing. Backblaze post good data, but the drive type sample is fairly limited. But thank you for sharing you experience.
On the pricing table at 8:00, did you swap around the 10 and 12 TB rows? Seems like a hell of a coincidence that all of the 10TB drives are more expensive than their 12TB counterparts?
This video was a while ago, but no the numbers shouldn’t have been mixed up because that detail is important. This often seems to be the case and is the case on various drives right now where larger capacity are cheaper than smaller.
Looking at the latest data from backblaze on hdd reliability, the wd and especially the hgst drives are significantly higher reliability than seagate in the 12 to 16 tb sizes where there is a lot of data. The only other consideration is the noise, with enterprise drives being considerably noisier and better suited to racks and not desktop use where ironwolf froves seem to be less annoying
In 7 years running 5 Seagate 4 TB Iron drives in a Synology NAS, one of the five cashed after 3 years and 4 months with bad sectors - shorts outsite the 3 years warrenty. One time after 7 years a drive power off (hang up), but can be reinstalled to the RAID again without an error. But for the future I switch to Toshiba, because all Toshiba drives have 5 years warranty.
I've used WD Blues, Blacks, Reds, RedPlus, and Red Pros, even had a good number of old scorpio drives for a while. I've also used Seagate Barracudas, FireCudas, EXOS, and IronWolf and Pro. all in various capacities from 1-6TBs mostly with a few 12TB+ drives here or there. Currently been trending towards the 14TB EXOS for the last year or so as i've been updating my TrueNAS Boxes and cycling out the old 2 and 4 TB drives. The EXOS 14s have been the best value per TB outside refurbs, in my instance. I've been waiting for a good deal on a disk shelf or two so I can migrate my NAS boxes to my network rack from the old Full tower cases. I've been running a load of the 2TB 2.5" FireCuda drives for a long time too. those were meant for laptops but I grabbed a heaping pile of them while they were $49 each probably 5-6 years ago to save physical space and they were surprisingly speedy and low power. I've just now started getting bad sectors or failure in that 16 drive array all clustered in 4, 5 1/4" hot swap bay adapters.
@@sometechguy from what i've seen it's been almost a dead heat between brands/vendors, over the last 20 years it's been a bit of a pendulum for which was more reliable. the Blues and greens seem to have the shortest lifespan from WD. I have yet to own any of the SMR drives, all the REDs i have are CMR. I've yet to have a WD Black, Red, or Purple fail. the scorpio drives also have yet to fail but they've been moved from my old laptops into some of my older consoles now and don't get many hours logged anymore. Barracudas have had the highest failure rate for me, the Firecuda "hybrid" drives have been vary reliable only have had 3 fail in the last 7-8 years of the 20+ i've purchased. roughly in order by age. none of my Ironwolf or EXOS drives have failed yet either. the oldest of those I have is around 6 years, and most my EXOS purchases have been in the last 2-3 years. I'm in process of Migrating towards all EXOS 14TB in my main NAS. got 4 in it currently and have 12 more to finish replacing the 4-6TB reds and 2TB blacks. I don't have any Blues or Greens left. and the Purples are in my Security System PC with the PoE camera footage.
@@sometechguy I'll also say I've had bad luck with those Arsenal DAS drives, seems like 1 in 4 have been DOA, and about 1/4-1/3 of the non DOA have started losing sectors in the first 6-8 months. but i've only bought 8 or so of them. very cheap for the capacity, (around $8 per TB on the 12TB) but I'd prefer more reliable generally.
Yes, avoid those SMR, especially if these are for a NAS. The ironwolf or ironwolf pro are both fine, depending on your needs. Or you can use WD Red Plus or Red Pro also, which are the WD equivalent. But always double check the disks are not SMR.
I'm a HUGE fan of Exos drives. been using them for years. Just picked up a pair of 8TB Exos, to replace some older drives that are just about out of space. I love these things.
@@manosalexakis Neither. I use them for both general storage, and archive storage. Being that they're enterprise-class drives, they're built more robustly than your average consumer-grade HDDs (hence the longer warranty period, and huge MTBF rating).
What separate between one drive with another within the same maker is the firmware and features. Western Digital used to divide their drives in Black for performance and Blue for cheaper drives with less cache and less features (also the number of platters)... hence cheaper while both maintained 7200rpm. It all changed when they realized they can trained their customers with color branding instead of reading the goddamn specsheets. So they started with this GREEN 5400rpm, which are the same drive as the PURPLE Surveilaince drive, and Red for NAS and so forth. Meanwhile Seagate Exo was always their top of the line drives with all the features. The problem is by now the public are all trained to buy the specific color for their specific task... Kudos WD for the savy business decision. Whomever came out with the brading is a genius. I saw Red NAS costing 50% more than the EXOs drive with same capacity... It's madness!!! and now there going after NAS maker QNAP Synology to validate those drives, I truly think their next move is to firmware lock with NAS maker so none validated drive won't initialize. And for this reason I haven't purchase a single WD drive after they started the color branding BS. I only buy EXO drives for Unraid, for couple of reasons, Unraid utilize a kind of JOBD with parity so it only spins up the drive that contains the data, second, you can mismatch capacity and third you can stress the drive before you add it to your array. But for VMs and other application which requires replication, use SAS drives instead of SATA drives, ie TrueNAS, vSAN etc. for better IOPS... or better yet, go for nvme (Asus Hyper m2 with 4 nvme) and you can also buy used enterprise SAS drives which is no no if they were SATA drives. I have 48 SAS 2.5 10k rpm 600GB drives, bought them used, it's been years and none of them failed yet.
Well, going SAS will require server hardware. It's not like you can stick a SAS drive into your Synology NAS. I don't think this is a feasible route for most people.
A good article, thanks. I've been using 14Tb IronWolf Pro's in a 10 slot NAS since 2019. I've got two cold spare drives. Within the 4 years, I've had 4 sudden drive failures for no apparent reason - all at different times. Each was covered under warranty. Some replace with new, others replaced with remanufactured drives that come with generic white labels. These also seem to be OK in terms of reliability. Like you, I've done research to actively avoid SMR drives, including replacing Barracuda drives with IronWolf's as my standard desktop drives for capacity. I just wish manufacturers would recognise that people want to know what they are buying and make good decisions. If they have to resort to hiding something, then generally that must be a bad thing, since if it was a positive thing for the customer, marketing would have it up in big red flashing letters all over the place. Exos's seem to have a longer warranty period too, which has to be a good thing. I have heard that performance is a little lower than IronWolf's, but I've not seen anything concrete here. They are also the only drive to come with SAS as well as SATA interfaces.
I've used seller goHardDrive on the Zon for about two years now. I use DiskPrices to sort then check for longer warranty. gHD packs these drives well and they come wiped - I've had three of fifteen disks fail within the first three months of usage, returns are a snap and replacement ships before the busted ones get back. All mechanical drives fail, so I'm happy to do a bit of leg work to score disks for ~$7/TB.
When deciding on my NAS last time round, capacity was number one, though ultimately what sold me on Iron Wolf Pro was the warranty. Not only is it 5 years, but it also comes with a guarantee of data recovery in the even of failure under normal use. Not sure if the Exos did. It may be the reason why IWP are more expensive. If Segate are willing to front the costs of data recovery in the event of failure, then I judged they must be pretty confident the disks won't fail. In any case, my policy is only to run the drives for as long as the warranty lasts. This is expensive, but then I think about how long I have been creating the data, and yeah, it is worth it. Coming up again next year. It'll probably be IWP again, because I have zero complaints. Used the (WD) shingled drives for a while, they were fine for archive, but yeah, slow for continuous data transfer.
Thanks for sharing, and replacing drives before they fail is smart. It can feel painful paying out to replace a drive that is running just fine, but if the data is important then its a good investment. I also think that many people don't keep current backups for home storage in the same way, an organised business might because backing up 10's of TB of data is in itself, costly. So a RAID failure can be a rude awakening.
@@sometechguy Yeah my first server job had a faulty raid controller (a RAID 5 array - remember them?) which kept corrupting the exchange database. No my happiest time. These days, at home it is all mirrored, and at work RAID 10. Again, expensive, but data is king.
Like you, I also started out using WD particularly their MyWD series. But last year, when their OS was upgraded to OS5 and my WD Nas was too "obsolete" (to say the least for that upgrade) I gave up and decided to switched to Synology and learned that Seagate also worked hand-in-hand well together.
I love my Synology NASs. I think the software is great, reliability has also been good. I did have one suffer a known CPU related issue following a power event, but it was replaced super quick under warranty and when I put the disks back in, it just picked up where it left off. So all good.
When starting with NAS about 15 years ago I was told not use the same models of HDDs but even different manufacturers. The reason for this is to avoid serial defects. Same drive model used for a NAS RAID could result in breaking down all drives during a short time because of equal wear characteristics. And when one drive breaks, the other RAID members immideaktly have a lot more work to do while rebuilding, resulting in more possible breakdowns.
I have done some videos on AFR analysis of various drives. This shows the likelihood of various models from various manufactures failing at various times over their life. I think this reveals that whether drives are the same model or not is likely less important than the drives likelihood of failure more generally. Though if you buy disks in a batch, there is a greater chance they all got subjected to the same trauma during shipping, handling delivery etc. that probably leads to them all having an early failure though, and only if the trauma was serious enough to really damage them. But what you said does appear to have some logic, just not sure on how real that is myself. Just my take. :-)
I've been using "shucked" WD 8TB drive in my unRAID server for the last few years. Granted, my use is generally "write once" via programs running in the background, so the delay with SMR would largely go unnoticed. However, I don't like WD's shady approach to SMR. When I decided to build a second server (for offsite at a friend's house), I went with refurb 16TB Exos drives, purely for the cost per TB. So far, they're working just fine.
Shucking is a great way to get good capacity for cost, if you can find external bays with good disks. I am cautious about using them in active arrays, there could be different reasons they got put in those caddies. Maybe just excess stock, or maybe testing revealed they may not last as long as they should. As for refurbs, I am betting most of those are new but returned disks. Not sure there is much real refurbing you can do to a disk, so likely they are just a bit unknown. But if they test ok, then they could be a good bargain!
@@sometechguy Shucking was good when the external units were cheaper than the bare drive. That's not the case anymore. As for the refurbs, you are likely right. I checked the label, and they are marked Recertified Drive. The SMART system reported single digit hours (typically around 5), and the unRAID preclear analysis showed no errors. So far, so good. Not bad for $100 off per drive.
@JamieStuff, that make sense. When I tested a Red Plus drive and it wasn't recognised, I sent it back. Probably the drive works, and its a firmware issue so I guess it was tested and then resold as a refurb. If you are seeing single digit hours, that sounds like the scenario. So could be a good way to pick up a discount, as the cost of the sellers margin. But of course, I would test it thoroughly and check the SMART details to make sure it wasn't returned for some obvious reason.
I chose the cheaper of the Seagate drives fir my NAS build. Checking out some other brands except WD. Ended up with IronWolf as they were slightly cheaper at the 10TB mark. And Seagate had a quick and easy RMA process when my NAS suggested 1 was running hot and having some errors.
Maybe this was part of the comments below but I would have also contributed to the strong push to go to Seagate over WD is the issue of how WD drives flag themselves after 3 years of usage, even if it was used only lightly.
This is something that surfaced after I made the video. But yes, I agree, this isn't a good look for WD again. I get the value in knowing your disk is passing warranty because that matters to some, but it doesn't have to be any more than a 1 time informational notice.
Have been planing on going from WD to Seagate disk on my Synology myself, just because of the price to storage ratio. I only use it for media storage, nothing else.
Have to assume the most of the drive is the same, just for cost of production reasons. Certain activities on the drive are louder on the Exos drives, so maybe some components are different, but it could just be firmware changes changing behavior.
@@sometechguy I suspect server drives will be tuned for pure performance with no thoughts being wasted on noise levels, while NAS drives will be tuned to not exceed certain noise levels. I was looking at Exos vs. Ironwolf 6 TB some time ago but went for the Ironwolf because I saw some videos of the 6 TB Exos and they made some shockingly loud noises when reading/writing. They didn't seem to be louder for most of their operation, just some head movements or whatever were super loud and "clicky".
Long term reliability and endurance can still be better, or considerably better on HDD. So depending on the NAS case, they may still be the best pick. But when it comes to performance, SSD wins hands down, as long as the bottle neck is the drive and not the network or interface. SSD is quieter of course. 😊
@@meibing4912 SSDs have a limited number of write cycles because the process of writing data to their flash memory cells degrades the cells' insulating oxide layer, eventually causing wear-out and failure
@@sometechguy They are, not by much but you do not want them closer than 5 meters, in a silent case. They also start working when they are not in use, checking clusters that have not been used for a while , so not reccomended in your bedroom.
I use several EXOS 16 TB and IronWolf Pro 12 TB disks in my NAS box. Never had a single failure for the EXOS disks, but 3-4 of my IW Pros started developing bad blocks and had to be replaced under RMA. I am now transitioning fully to EXOS disks. Absolutely amazing quality and they're cheaper to boot. I don't care about the IronWolf data recovery feature since these are used in RAID-6 volumes which are backed up overnight anyway.
With a small sample size like this, I always suspect shipping damage first. Your IW Pros were shipped in a different crate than the EXOS and some forklift driver dropped the IW crate and didn't report it. And just like that, 80% of the drives in this crate are damaged. I had this happen with WD Reds a couple years ago when I bought four and three of them were basically doa and the fourth made funny noises. Brought them back to the store and the owner later told me that he got most of the drives from this shipping crate back after just a few days. The crate looked fine, the drives looked fine, they were still damaged in shipping.
@@highks496 Depends on what you mean by a small sample size. I use three dozen IW Pro and EXOS disks. They were all bought from the same three IT suppliers, all perfectly packed, at different times over several years. Over time, only IW Pro disks developed bad blocks and had to be replaced. EXOS disks are trucking away with zero issues. If there was shipping damage, disks would either arrive dead or fail very soon after being put to use, that's not been my experience.
@@little_fluffy_clouds If you bought them at different times over several years, then it's probably not shipping damage. I thought you bought them all at the same time. Perfectly packed doesn't mean they can't be damaged. They have a g-rating that must not be exceeded. If a crate falls from a fork lift, everything might look totally fine, but you could still have a couple dozen damaged drives.
My X16 14TB EXOs drive were much cheaper in the end and perform remarkably well. It seems counter intuitive for these to be cheaper than consumer drives, but in the end I felt like I was paying less for a better product.
I use Exos drives. I've actually been buying refurbished rebranded drives from company called WP Arsenal, as they are always CMR disks, not crappy SMR disks! They usually send refurbished Exos drives, and you can get a 12TB drive for only like $100! I have received one DOA drive from them but they quickly sent out another. Just do a preclear test on the drives right away, and if they pass then your good, as I've yet to have one fail that didn't already arrive DOA.
People have long memories and brands need to make more informed choices for this reason. Bad choices (or poor product quality) can have long term impacts to a brands reputation. I still don't buy Sony after their DRM/Rootkit fiasco in 2005. But that is another story. 😒
I had already moved to seagate at the time of the SMR bait and switch, but that act sealed the deal on me not buying WD for hdd for a long time. I do buy WD SSD's though.
In 25 years the only drives ive had fail are WD, so ive always used seagate drives, people like to hate them but i have 8 pcs at home 5 of which are storage based and they just work for me! Issues i have had were silly stuff like knocked power leads etc
I don't know about the pricing in this video, even within the past year, the price was jacked up really bad. Probably 3 years ago prices were down. But Seagate Exos 10TB costs around $300 now at the end of 2024 (2023 was not better neither). The $150 price shown in the video is a pipe dream now.
Recently bought 2 12TB Exos X12 drives to add my my NAS, I'm fine with mixing drives so I run them in a brtfs Raid 1 together with the 4tb IronWolf drive I have unlike other ways of doing raid, btrfs Can actually do Raid 1 with 3 diffrent drives of diffrent sizes (I think in this case half of the 4TB is mirrored to one 12TB drive, half to the other and the remaining 10TB are mirrored across the 12tb drives). I use a Rasberry Pi hooked up to a 4 bay USB enclosure instead of a dedticated NAS.
Would it make sense to build out a home NAS with different brands, so long as they share the same speed and capacity. It seems the diversity would make it less likely to have multiple disks fail around the same time.
I have the same WD EFRX running for 9 years perfectly. At a time I got another one, same model, for mirroring, but it vibrated too much and was noisier, so I got a 5400 RPM Ironwolf instead.
Sadly it is hard to find 5400rpm drives today. I prefer them too, because speed is mostly limited by the network connection. The slower drives produce less heat and noise and have reduced wear.
I built a new primary PC (for games but mostly video re-processing, ie: DVD & Blue-ray RIP & Compression) while looking for the large storage drives, I found it hard to find the CMR(good) or SMR(poor) disks, if is does not say CMR assume its SMR. When I did settle on the Ironwolf drives I was surprised that the price difference at 8TB size (currently best bang per buck) was only about £20 to £30. CMR is not only more reliable it is also much faster when writing lots of files that are in the 300MB to 2+GB sizes. I have found that SMR drives never get close to the rated speeds when writing. The SMR drives will have a significant variation in performance simply due to the fact it has to constantly verify that the data just written did not corrupt existing data and potentially re-wright that and again then check that write did not corrupt yet more existing data....… Where as the CMR drives will sustained 200MB/s with +- 20MB/s, the suposedly equivalent SMR drives will mostly only be able to sustain around 120MB/s with a +- 50-60MB/s variation. In the end I purchasing one 4TB SSD (TCL not QCL) for the OS a few games and processing, plus two 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drives one to store my video library and the other for game installations and general backups of the SSD. The video files and MP3's from CDs (MP3 as everything can read/play them), automatically get multiple backups as I use External USB HDD caddies that I connect directly to my TV's to access my media library. That way I don’t need to have a NAS running 24/7 or have my TVs connected to the LAN/Internet. My newest LG TV has some nasty user licensing terms (with built-in Echo/Alexa crap) so it only gets connect by wire for about 20 minutes a year to look for firmware updates. PS: As an old guy who started work as a trainee computer operator in the early 1982 and later spent around 25 years as a software developer. I find my mind still sometimes marvels at the disk capacity I use today. When I started the 3 HDDs on a VAX 11/780 were big self contained units each about the size of a front loading washing machine. Each had a single removable 12”, 9 platter disk pack that could store almost 300MB each and those were massive for the time.
One reason I avoided the Exos range, so I was told, was that these drives will not enter sleep mode and spin down if the hibernation option is set. perhaps someone here can tell me if this is true. Also moved to Seagate for the same reason as you. The WD SMR scandal left a bad taste in my mouth and the reliability issues I had seen for some years with Seagate drives seemed to be resolved. Plus, an Ironwolf drive cost me 20% less than the WD equivalent.
I am pretty confident that you can hibernate Exos drives, but I have heard of reports that some NAS support it and some don't and I am not sure why. I have some in a NAS here, and I am sure they spin down, because the noise is quite distinctive when they are start up again. So this might take a bit more digging.
I have all three drives types, and if you don’t think Exos are louder you need to have your hearing checked. If they are in a closet somewhere no big deal, but if they are on your desk you are going to hear them
Making the read heads smaller isn't as big a challenge, and on the shingled drives the read area is smaller. But writing smaller areas on the disk is more challenging, at least reliably, and this is what led the manufacturers down the path to SMR where the write area is larger than the read area. I did a video on the new HAMR drives that explains how Seagate (but ultimately others who are also developing this) solve the the problem of writing to smaller magnetic domains, and I think the tech is really interesting. ruclips.net/video/JNGsTHuFcvM/видео.html And of course, there is MAMR also, which also helps using a different approach.
@@sometechguy Yes, moar 'coz moar r/DataHoarder😁 I subbed for more HDD/Storage videos. Can you make somethign about Tape Backup for Home users? I have seen everything for Enterprise, they're great but only 150 reads and the tape dies? and the price? a car. If there's something more reliable for home users would be great
Just upgraded my Plex Server. Was running 2TB Seagates prior that didn't have any premature failures per say. Ran them for about 48K hours.Once they were shut off, the seized up. Not unexpected due to being in the desert. Switched over to 2x 4TB Red RX and 2x 8TB AX. They both ran well. But now I am using the 16TB EXOS Drives. They were a lot cheaper than expected IMO. WD has always been a bit too much. The product range is also a bit BS; Gold, Purple, Red, Green, Blue, Black, etc etc.
I had a WD Red fail, and during the disk rebuild, I had 1 other go a bit sideways and a couple of months later after a power outage, another one died. So it seems that running them smooth and steady is one thing, but if you interrupt their routine, this is when they die if they feel inclined to it. A good reason to keep an eye on SMART. The complexity of the range is also irritating, but that seems to be the norm from computer vendors these days with more SKUs than sense.
Im so done with WD HDD, 6 out of 6 I bought failed within 3 years of non-heavy use, I tried green, blue, red, purple, different capacities, they alll failed. Seagate on the other hand 7 years of use, not a single issue, the diagnostics shows 97% of health.
I've been running 5*20tb exos in my ds1522+ for almost 2 years now. 4 set in SHR BTRFS and 1*20tb drive formatted EXT for surveillance on four cameras never had an issue just slow my next nas will be all flash m.2.
I use a combination of 6x 3TB Hitachi Ultrastar desktop HDDs, 1x 3TB Toshiba desktop HDD, 8x 4TB WD Red HDDs, and 6x 12TB "White" (shucked Elements USB) HDDs. They all have over 35000 hours on them. Some have been running almost continuously for 15 years. My QNAP NAS is 15 years old, my D-Link NASs are nearly that old, and everything has worked flawlessly so far. I stopped buying Seagate disks for many years after the disaster that was their 8GB IDE offering, as well as numerous 1.5TB and 2TB failures. Recently bought a few 2.5" though so time will tell if they've improved.
I used to have a single WD red as a simple network drive, but a couple years ago I built myself a proper server machine with 8x 6TB exos drives. I purposefully went a bit overkill with a RAIDz2 configuration, and it had so far worked really well as a little torrent machine primarily.
I really do not like Synology's recent approach of only certifying its own rebadged and overpriced drives as compatible, with the statement that they won't provide support. This puts me off buying new models where they do this. The reality is that enterprise drives from Seagate, WD and Tosh will work just fine and I have drives not on the compatibility list running in my Synology NASs. I believe its also possible to silence any warnings, but that's a bigger topic. But sadly I think the answer is to use drives not on the list, or refuse to buy the product. I for one will not be buying their own rebranded HAT drives at all. I believe they are actually Toshiba units, but just with a greatly exaggerated price.
@@sometechguy After Drobo went under, I got rid of my two Drobos (always had two, ready to get to my data in case one unit died), I ended up going Synology. WD RED PRO used to be on their list, found it in a press release on their website. Populates with five of them, due to wanting drives with 5 year warranties. Now I need more space and I’m conflicted by the "no support" wording. It’s a mess.
Just upgraded from 2TB to 8TB for my mirrored ZFS VDEV pool - not a NAS, just my PC, as I don't need to share other than to VMs (nfs and smb), and have offsite backups, so went with the cheaper Barracudas.
I had to replace a couple of older WD Red drives with WD Red Plus and as far as I can tell, they are absolutely fine. Even in an older Drobo I didn't run into any firmware problems, they were pretty much indistinguishable from the old WD Red (pre-SMR). Personally I did switch to Seagate though and I will probably not buy WD Red plus anymore because they are just too expensive in comparison.
I bought 5 ironwolf pro 16TB drives new for around $280 each (on sale from around $320) and wish I had just got a bunch of 16TB recertificated exos drives. I’ve already exceeded the rated yearly workload for the ironwolf pros and would have paid half the cost @$140 per 16TB exos
First time into this realm. Got my 16tb exo. Just one in my pc I don’t have nas yet. Actually surprisingly not too loud. Especially when your pc is on floor has a desktop in between you and pc case is well built. It is just fast enough for many small pic browsing/4k movie steam single player games, absolutely no need for ssd for those tasks
There was a time around 2014 where it felt like I had Seagate drives failing constantly. May have just been a few but because dell's servers were mostly rebranded Seagate drives (at the time) the impact felt dramatic
I'm actually less interested in the drive choice and more your choice of NAS device. I've been using QNAP devices for years and have always thought of them as small office/enterprise devices, especially the rack mounted ones. Synology on the other hand was more of a "some granny at home wants a place to store all their pictures from their holidays". QNAP never really used ZFS but rather proper RAID and yet recently they've started down the ZFS route. It would be interesting to hear your views on why Synology over say, QNAP or Dell.
I have not used QNAP personally, though I know people that do. I had used Thecus, but there were a few reasons I chose Synology, maybe it’s worth doing a piece on that. But the quick version was that I wanted larger scale, and I use the Synology Surveillance software with IP CCTV cameras, I think their software offering there is really good. I also fairly recently changed from RAID to BTRFS/SHR for my disk arrays. I don’t think QNAP provide that support as yet and there are some benefits there. But there is a lot to dive into on all those choices.
Are there any NAS products which are optimised more for larger size file transfers? Reading reveiws, I'm surprised at how slow most NAS devices are during sustained workloads, especially just a simple 2-disk RAID1. I'm helping a friend search for a better NAS solution for the photo studio she runs. The files are all normally 35MB or 76MB raw images from cameras, with others being high res JPEGs which are still a few MB. A typical customer session might generate several GB. Macs running Lightroom and Photoshop are used to process the images (the network is of course GigE). She has a number of old Buffalo LS220D 2-bay NAS boxes, each with 2x 4TB in RAID1. One of them failed recently; I was able to recover the 3.7TB of data (onto a bunch of SSDs I had spare), but copying it back onto the unit once it was restored (using two replacement 4TB Seagate ES.3s) took an age, copying as it was at a mere 30MB/sec. Or would one be better off building a custom PC instead? I have plenty of parts. Alas though I have little experience with Linux, while using Windows wouldn't work so well because Windows gets confused by certain types of Mac file, especially metadata files. Or is there a Linux distro specifically intended for simplified NAS setups? At a minimum I suggested she step up to at least a Synology DS220+ with a couple of 8TB WD Red Pros, but the cost is apparently prohibitive. Does anyone have any experience with the Toshiba MG08-D Enterprise 8TB? It's the same price as the Exos 7E8 (which are both a good chunk cheaper than the WD Red Pro).
There are a few things to consider. SATA itself is a relatively slow interface. SAS disks are typically faster, around 2x speed. But SATA drives are usually a little pricier, but NAS that support them are often far more expensive, as built for enterprise use in most cases. Then there is the RAID type. RAID 1 is quite slow, as you are limited to the interface into the disk. RAID 5, despite requiring parity calculation is faster as you are writing data across multiple drives, and get access to higher IO. The NAS hardware itself can be important, especially if RAID is in use as the processor is going to be responsible for writing the data. Most home NAS will be purely software RAID, and lower end devices could have low spec CPUs. Networking can also be a bottleneck, and actually I wonder if that is more the problem here. Are they using 1Gbps switched networking to the device, or is anything running at 100Mbps? And if they are on wireless, that could also be a cause. And then the disk themselves have different performance properties. Spindle speed, if they are SMR etc. But mostly, all these performance aspects can be improved by buying better (read more expensive) hardware. And if cost is a major issue, they may need to accept the performance constraints. But what you can often do is write a large file and see (and hear) if the disks are running flat out. If not, its more likely a networking or NAS performance issue, rather than disks or disk IO. Definitely eliminate networking as the cause before buying NAS hardware. I don't have experience with the Tosh disks personally. Good luck with finding a good solution.
@@sometechguy Can SATA limit transfer rate? I don't have any modern or high performance drive, but i guess limit is 6gbit (3gbit if drive or controller are 10 years old) and this limits transfer to roughly 500MB/s. I think that 7200rpm 4TB drive has roughly 250MB/s at start and 16GB may have double data stored per track and double track density so it may reach this. But question is how many people have 10gbit network (card, nas and router) which won't bottleneck it. PCs have 2.5gbit cards today while 2.5gbit routers are not yet common.
You raise a good point, and I think its unlikely that SATA is the bottleneck in this scenario. My first suspect would be the network. But that 6Gbps is half duplex, so it would depend what is being read as well. And depending on what else is happening on the disk, such as the NAS performing tasks.
@@sometechguy I could understand it if there were multiple client systems accessing the boxes all at the same time, but this generally isn't the case. There are only four Macs and about six NAS boxes, so often the Macs aren't even accessing the same units. Plus, I couldn't get more than the stated bandwidth even with my own network which I know runs peachy, with just one machine accessing the NAS. It is it seems by all accounts just a slow box, but I get the impression from reviews that none of these products are particularly fast. I mentioned backup; this is where a custom PC would have a real advantage, able to easily and quickly copy a RAID contents elsewhere, whereas copying from a NAS to a backup device is slow. It blows my mind that there isn't a reasonably priced decent 2-bay NAS from any vendor that includes TypeC USB for fast backup. For what these boxes actually do, I don't think the pricing justifies the hw one is paying for. It's also hard to find relevant review data because so much coverage focuses on things like video encoding which isn't relevant for my friend's use case. Oh, don't even get me started on what a convoluted mess it was to reset the NAS. Such a klunky design, with flawed functionality in the fw & control programs, a reset methodolgy that involves bizarre changes in IP address during setup, a confusing web interface and a secondary web GUI that defaults to Chinese. :D
For much better performance, look in to have 10Gbps networking instead of 1Gbps or 2.5Gbps. It will take some investment, sure, but those 10Gbps file transfers are very fast.
I totally understand. I did some analysis and they do appear to be shipping the best built and reliable drives, especially in the enterprise drive class, which is also often the most efficient. So I have been buying some of these recently, but I tread very carefully, thoroughly check specs and have to hold my nose a bit. I do also have a video I am putting together currently comparing their Blue range, which contain SMR and CMR units and 5400rpm 7200rpm spindle speeds, which are still very unclearly marked, so see how they really compare for performance.
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
SMR saga was literally my reason to go with Ironwolfs.
One thing to consider is that sometimes the reason the exos drives are so cheap is they are being sold as enterprise or business surplus in which case as they are being resold, despite being brand new, there can be warranty issues there. Just something to keep mind
Indeed. It means that you can't register the 5 year warranty direct and have to rely on the seller to honour the warranty, so buy from a reputable supplier!
This is a general problem with oem drives, not just the professional models. But I guess you could run into that problem more often with the professional drives.
Indeed I took this chance buying 15 drives for my new NAS and I was lucky to have full warranty. But that being said this was after weighing many reviews and knowing that it was a bit of a gamble.
One reason they are cheaper is they dont come with data recovery services. Iron Wolf does
@@BrianGarside Data recovery is irrevelant if you are using RAID 5 or 6 and do some backups.
30 exos drives been used for years. Zero issue so far.
Good to hear and thanks for sharing your experiences. I also had a great experience with both my IronWolf Pros and Exos disks. I had a few failures on my WD Red’s, but usually at 5+ years, which is also pretty good. The disk I have that is near 8 years old is going to be replaced shortly as a precaution.
Knock on wood 😆
@@juschuWD is the brand of the single most reliable HDD in enterprise, based on data center statistics.
@@surewhynot6259did they receive a JD Power award for that? 😂
How many years to be exact? Why not ironwolf? Please let me know if it's okay?
for those who are looking for Exos vs Ironwolf Pro, you may skip to 5:32, the beginning part is just filler to get 10min for youtube ads.
Thank you for letting us know and calling out this bullshit, time wasting practise.
I came to the same conclusion last year and switched from WD Red to Exos. I went with the 12TB, because they are cheaper and use less power than the rest of the series for some reason.
They Exos disks are noisy though, especially starting up. The bulk storage in my NAS isn't used often, so I thought I'd save some power by having them spin down, probably not the intended use for enterprise disks... but it's quite noticeable from across the room.
This is a good point, I also notice this if the disks are parked and are woken up.
Almost bought an exo, but quickly changed my mind I heard that they were pretty loud. I use my nas as a media server and it's in my living room next to the couch.
@@ThesavagesoulsAssuming you went with a WD Red or Ultrastar?
Yeah, spinning down disks frequently isn't great for disk health. I'd hope the Exos are built well enough they can take it, though.
@@Cobalt985They have a shit ton of cycles they are rated for. For my use case I once calculated roughly how many times per day they would spin down and up again and I think I got some number like 10+ years of runtime. I do think that they are more likely to fail for some other reason in that time, so I would not be concerned about the power cycles. Leaving them running for 10 years will probably cost me more in electricity than replacing them will, especially here in europe.
At least for the 20 TB version, with the new refresh, the Iron Wolf Pro seems to have the same MTBF, warranty, and most other important specs as the Exos, while coming with the 3 year data recovery option and being quieter.
Never really understood the 'upsell'/value-added of the 'data recovery' option; what sort of moron only stores important data on a single drive? :)
@@mdd1963 It’s not, but if it’s striped across the drives, it’s still on there, and if you have a failure during an array rebuild, they could at least get something back for you. Data recovery is a 1z likely occurrence, but it’s really expensive in the unlikely event you need it.
The Ironwolf Pro line does have one "alleged" edge on the datasheets over the Exos line: its operating temperature range is wider, e.g. 5-60 degree C for Exos vs 0-65 degree C for Ironwolf Pro.
I'd say if your drive temperatures are in excess of 60°C, you're doing something wrong anyways. No matter what the drives specified max temperature is, you shouldn't let your drives get hotter than 50°C on a regular basis.
We discovered working on USAF recce aircraft on the cold Nebraska flightline that assorted Netapp appliances will absolutely refuse to even spin the drives up if temps are below 0C! :)
Thanks for this. Was noticing the price difference with Exos being cheaper so was curious about the differences.
As you point out, they have been cheaper for some time now. It may not always be the case, but it certainly makes for an interesting reason to dig into how they differ and if they should be used for home or SMB NAS, because you might naturally assume that IronWolf or IronWolf Pro (or Red Plus / Red Pro) are the correct choice here. Thanks for the comment!
@@sometechguy You are correct Idol, I assumed it was IronWolf/IronWolf Pro was the correct choice, but seeing Exos has a bad rating on Amazon, can you please enlighten me why?
@@KurushimiVrishraka I can't say for sure why it has that rating on Amazon, you could check the reviews. But Amazon reviews are not very trustworthy anyway. One reason could be that a lot of the drives sold on amazon are from non authorized sellers and the drives have an unknown origin. They may not be correctly warrantied and may have been removed from systems and resold. I hear of reports of drives that are reconditioned or just not new, and once the amazon 30 day money back period expires, you really can't be sure if you can get the drive replaced. Often the drive will be 'return to base' and the drive manufacturer will direct you back to the seller. Amazon also don't pack drive appropriately often and they can get damaged in transit, but they are not the only seller that does this.
So its possible that people are reviewing the state of the drives and not based on a brand new drive. But that is just based on opinion and experience and could vary. I would go look at the reviews and see the complaint is that people are making.
Personally, I buy my drives from approved resellers and if there is any sign of damage to the units, they go back.
@@sometechguy I have thoroughly checked some of your video's, did more reddit research and whatnot, as long as Amazon states (Renewed/Refurbished) then I will avoid that. I have my eye on Ironwolf 20TB, they are close enough to Exos price, but I wanted it silent because I can only store it on my room and only use it for back and buying the NAS you suggested, I have to stop for few years collecting figures and focus on this investment because I have gotten so much data since 2011 and it's making me crazy. I made a mistake buying too many SSD's, instead of those, I should have bought NAS. I wish you upload this video few years ago, though, I appreciated everything you did. I rarely subscribe, but you deserve my subscription and will check on your videos! Mahalo so much man!
I'm still scared to use Seagate HDDs (even though their SSDs are extremely good in my experience). In office NAS use, those Seagates have shown consistent failures, whereas the Western Digital HDDs have shown far less. The drives I have to keep replacing and taking to the eco recycle centres are, unfortunately, Seagate. The WD drives have been retired before they fail due to them outliving their capacity.
Not been my experience with Exos drives.
@@BrianGarside What sample size have you worked with?
@@WSS_the_OG 14TB X16 model ST14000NM001G. I have 8 in a NAS and 2 on standby.
@@BrianGarside That's actually quite encouraging. Thanks for the info! We're in the market for HDDs again as it's "upgrade" time again.
@@WSS_the_OG I too had problems with Seagate until I realise the ones I used to buy were non-enterprise consumer grade. Now I only go for high-end enterprise or even NAS specific drives with CMRs or PMRs NOT SMRs. To bad some WDs now have SMRs.
There was a lot of bad reviews in forums about WD Red, so we still using or WD Purple, or Seagate Exos.
As a home user I've never had a compelling reason to have a NAS, since online storage has so far taken care of my situation. But as most people would if they thought about it, I'd like to remove myself completely from online storage, and have all of my data together instead of spread out over three major providers and almost two hands worth of separate accounts. I have enjoyed watching this and some of your other videos on NAS drive stats, and it's made me decide to go with the Exos drives.
I used to be a HUGE WD fanboi, but the shingles outbreak (in many ways just as painful as the real thing) dampened my desire for future purchases, even though it didn't erase the many great years of service I've had from my WD consumer drives. I've got a couple from 2012 that are still 100% error free, after all. But I think I'll proceed a lot more eyes-open from now on. Again, thank you. Subbed.
Thank you, and good luck!
Running a NAS can give you more control, and for larger volume data it provides other benefits. I have many terabytes of data and it’s not the best use case for cloud storage. But make sure you don’t neglect backups of your important data. Using things like RAID can help protect from some failures, but it won’t protect from all and backups are easy to forget when using online storage because it’s easy to think the backup provider is taking care of this. But of course, this isn’t always true. Any disk from any manufacturer can fail, and this is true or spinning disks as well as SSD. So just treat it with the mind set that are not indestructible. Thanks for the sub, and hope you get good use of what I make. 😀
I stopped using seagate when their reliability tanked. Then became a Hitachi fan because of their reliability but went with Toshiba after Hitachi git bought by WD. Seagate seems to have fixed their reliability issues so i might give them a spin next.
I moved to enterprise drives for my NASes many years ago. I look at MTBF, uncorrectable bit error rate and warranty period, and I no longer remember when I last had to replace a disk... currently my largest RAID set consists of six Seagate 6TB drives, with power on hour counts between 47kh and 64kh (due to moving to a bigger NAS and some disk juggling between my multiple NASes several years ago). This has usually meant paying more per disk, but from past experience replacing failed disks I consider it well worth the difference. If they're now *cheaper* than the "NAS drives" it's a no-brainer in my opinion. I also usually take a look at BackBlaze's disk statistics a couple of times a year as it gives some interesting insights into reliability.
(I also ran WD disks many moons ago. I remember the "secret SMR" debacle, and it was a factor, though not a very important one, in me switching to Seagate)
Yeah I have only had two hard drives die on me in my life and they were both Western digital greens. So after I watch this video originally I ended up looking for EXOs. I ended up getting refurbished ones for $250 they are x-22 20 TB. I am praying I don't have issues as this was a huge expense for a small RUclips channel
Agree, with everything. I had been a Seagate fan for years, then when they reduced warranty and quality went to WD, then lost trust in WD with the SMR scandal while Seagate had improved. Recently bought 4 14TB Exos for my new homelab Synology. My reasoning was the same as yours and am very satisfied with them. The only Exos downsides are not including data recovery as a part of the warranty but I don't need or want that so not really an issue at all (for me, and I suspect many others) and supposedly noisier but may (or not) be an issue only if you are work physically close to them.
Agreed on the data recovery. I use mine in RAID arrays, so failed disks get swapped out. But its a good point that this isn't offered on the Exos.
If you have backups, you don't need data recovery. And by the way I wouldn't want to count on data recovery. There's things that can be fixed/recovered, but others can't. With a head crash on the platters, some data will just be gone, no recovery will be able to get it back. So yes, data recovery should be avoided by using a solid backup strategy.
are they noiser than wd
I've been using EXOS x16 14TB drives, very nice !
Currently (4 May, 2023) $209.99 at amazon, that's $15.00 per TB which just happens to be my threshold for purchasing HDD's.
Hopefully this will come down as I need many more !
For those of you who can remember Seagate, back in the day (some 20 year ago) had a 5 year warranty on all it's drives,
where WD did not.
Have had both, only a WD has failed on me. A 120GB drive with a 1 year warranty failed after 18 months.
Decided to lookup the CEO of WD and write him a letter regarding his product, and did get a response (not directly from him, but some subordinate. And this was before social media.), wow !
I returned the failed drive and they replaced it with a reconditioned drive, albeit a 160GB version, both good and bad.
Regardless, I was happy to get a response at all. WD redeemed themselves a little bit !
And then comes the SMR fiasco ... well you know the rest !
@@HendriuGaming Sorry I missed it !
I have seen those drives at over 600 dollars!
Got myself 3x Exos X12 12 TB some years ago. They were cheaper than anything else back then and they work great. Now I want to replace the 4 leftover WD Red 4 TB with larger drives and the price situation in Germany is just crazy. Right now Exos X16 and even the current X18 16 TB are cheaper - not just per TB - but in total than any 14 or 12 TB NAS drives including the smaller Exos. ^^
And Exos x22 out now, so it will only keep moving in that direction!
My EXOS disks are working great in my Synology 4 disk NAS. Very quiet - more quiet than the 4 tb WD Red's they replaced. I went with the 12 TB x 2 and I have 2 x 6tb Iron Wolf drives in my 418play
This is what I was looking to know was the noise relative to other offerings, since they're enterprise drives. Thanks!
Good to know. My DS423+ arrives today and I have planned to put in a brand new 18tb exos along with (from my PC) a 18th IWP and later a 16tb IWP in it. Was a bit worried about mix and matching as opposed to noise. NAS noob here. 🙂
Hi! What about the noice between Exos and Iron Wolfs? Is it a significant dfference there?
@@keldonn2 Not in my experience. My drives are still going strong. I'm still very happy with my EXOS disks. Performance on my NAS is great.
Excellent video, I just bought my first 4 bay NAS a couple of months ago for home use, I originally purchased 5 Seagate Ironwolf 14tb drives and upon arrival all were dead so sent them back, I then looked at WD and the reviews were somewhat lacking
I then came across Toshiba N300 NAS discs and have 3 14tb in my NAS and touchwood had no problems at all, I also have 3 16tb in my DAS which I use as a backup medium, I will continue to buy Toshiba NAS drives
Great to hear about your experience with Toshiba, thanks for sharing. Synology sell their own disks, and these are actually Toshiba disks that are white labelled.
Could be a different reason for you, but I had a couple of Exos that were dead on arrival. The drives had not been well packaged and were just wrapped in bubble wrap. Both drives had dents in the same corner of the drive where they had been dropped. So not a manufacturing problem in those cases, just bad shipping and handling.
If you get disks delivered and they come packaged this way. Inspect them closely and if they are physically damaged, definitely return immediately.
@@sometechguy Shipping damage is probably way more frequent with hdds than most people would expect. Even with professionally packaged units, the drives have a g-rating that must not be exceeded. So if a forklift driver drops a crate, looks at it, says it looks fine and doesn't report the incident, you might end up with hundreds of damaged drives that fail in a matter of days.
So when you buy a bunch of drives and they all fail immediately, I'd say shipping damage 99.9%
Exos X18 drives were insanely loud in my synology nas to the point it was unbearable being in the same room and I considered doing a new SSD or 5400 RPM nas and keeping the Exos drive nas as a backup. But I was able to do a firmware update & disable the power saving features (and later added and SSD volume for the most used packages & initial downloading) and along with all the noise tricks (velcro in the bays, putting the unit on top of anti-vibration pads and a heavy book on top) there's no crunching head parking and much less constant activity.
Under normal running they seem fine, but you are right that if the array has gone to power save and you wake it up, they are noisy for a few seconds. I will look into the firmware changes, thanks!
As I was working in storage-virtualization industry I must say, You nailed this one here :)
Big shout out to You.
Really appreciate that, especially from someone in the field. ☺️
Thank you! This was very informative! I got screwed with a WD SMR drive as well and have since switched to Seagate also. You are absolutely correct on how hard it was to find if a drive is SMR or not. I assumed if it didn't say, then it was. Otherwise, it would celebrate it was a CMR drive. But Seagate has been working fine for me for some time now. Thanks for pointing out the differences between the Ironwolf's and Exo. I never really knew what to get. I'll certainly know next time! :)
By the way Seagate and Toshiba have been sneaking in SMR drives in their desktop lines as well without telling the customer. WD though was the only manufacturer who was brazen enough to sneak SMR drives into their NAS/RAID lines.
I heard that the HDD Exos is HW-wise (internals) exactly the same as the IronWolf Pro HDD, just with modified firmware. Horever, what's strange is that in my QNAP NASes, IronWolf Pro discs run without problems, but Exos discs don't, they continuously report sector reallocation increase and then NAS it keeps reporting a warning that the drive is not in good shape 😕
I don't know the details on the internals, but it seems to make sense that they have a lot (if not all) shared components. I guess the reallocation issue could just be software? Hence caused by whats in the firmware of the drive. Not sure if that could be fixed with an update to the QNAP software at some point.
You'd have to test this behavior with more Exos drives from another batch to rule out shipping damage. I'm always very suspicious when two, three or four drives that were bought together all fail quickly. Could be a bad production batch or - and I think that's more frequent - shipping damage. This happened to me with WD Red a couple of years ago when four drives failed in a matter of days. The shop later told me that they got back like 80% of the drives from that specific box/crate and they suspected shipping damage.
@@highks496 Well, I don't think that's my case. I've acquired each Exos disc a long time apart. The 3pieces I have, I bought continuously over the course of 1.5 years.
I like the summary of CMR vs SMR, but I think there is another thing to consider in the discussion. Any HDD over 6 or 8TB is likely going to be HELIUM filled. And while Helium hard drives can be an option for companies that need high-density storage because of the lower head friction (leading to smaller heads and higher densities) and lower temps (longer life) that HELIUM-filled drives offer - users need to consider monitoring the SMART 22 attribute (if offered by the HDD) and be constantly checking the status of the helium % remaining inside of a hard drive - because no HDD seal is ever perfect, and below about 92-95% helium remaining- you're now courting a head crash, and it's time to move that data. Large companies can move data quickly. Consumers, well, that's a time consuming, costly drive replacement order possibly taking days to obtain. While annual failure rates for helium-filled drives still appear similar to air-filled drives, not all consumers can accept the potential data loss - unlike a bigger company running raid or with parity correction - and standby hot swap spares. And it could really depend on if you need lots of storage (>30TB) or can afford to have a parity drive and a spare drive or two laying around to use as a hot spare.
So what do you recommend us doing?
@@Eleriam Here's the TL;DR version: "Learn about Helium Filled High Density HDDs failures, monitoring your HDD life expectancy using smartdrive, and also be an informed buyer." I mean, if you think it will never fail, you're taking a risk with the data on the drives. For me, I'm fine using older air-filled 6TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives - but I also run my NAS with 2 disk parity (unRAID) and backup regularly. But "YMMV."
@@petera.morrison2095 why the TL;DR version? I did ask for advice. :)
What does your backup structure look like? I don't have any backup set for my NAS.
I've been running a bunch of 8 TB WD Red helium-filled drives for about five to six years now (the 8 TB used to be helium-filled at first, the current 8 TB ones aren't anymore) and I did not ever have a problem with the helium levels. The smart value is still 100 and they run just fine. Half of them are on 24/7 in a Drobo Raid and the other half is only switched on twice a week for backups.
The advice to monitor smart values is still good, but it applies to all drives, helium or air. None of them will last forever and they don't need a specific reason to fail. So have good backups (RAID is not a backup!) and monitor smart values.
@@Eleriam - Well, let's start with the fact that my backup structure is none of your overly inquisitive business. But in truth, I have both onsite and offsite backup copies, that I'm satisfied with. If you're fine taking a risk that the helium doesn't fail earlier than non-helium drives, then you've made a calculated decision based on your own use case. Mine, I couldn't justify it, based on statistical references and historical practices.
If it’s good enough for enterprise, it’s good enough for me.
NAS drives may be perfectly fine for home use but if it’s not good enough for the “Enterprise” moniker, and if its more expensive than real enterprise drives, I see no reason to buy them
Have you also looked into WD Gold drives? (WD's equivalent to Exos).
There was a time when WD Gold was nearly the same price as WD Red Pro, which is when I bought a couple 16 TB Gold here in the U.S.
Not sure if it's just the drives I received, but the Gold drives turned out to be quieter overall than the IronWolf Pro that I have in another Synology NAS. For some reason, the IronWolf I have are very loud when writing data.
I know the near future with be all HD will be SSD, but what kind of capacity would we have if hard rive manufactures went back to 5 1/4 inch drives using today's technology?? 100-300Tb per drive?
Disk drives started at 24" platters, which is crazy to think about. But this was before my time, I am not this old. I do remember 5.25" hard disks, though I think the first computer built had a 42Mb 3.5" drive, a Conner if I remember correctly. If the drives were bigger, capacity could be crazy, but I guess seek time would suffer and throughput may remain where it is, meaning it might take weeks to fill a drive. 😂
The exos drives also do not include the data recovery service.
I have eight 10TB Exos 10 drives that I purchased 4 years ago for about $250 each running RAID-Z3 and FreeNAS for my home media server. I am aware that RAID-Z3 is not ideal on 8 drives but that is the max number of drives my controller can handle and I needed it as bulletproof as possible because it took me several months to rip over 1,400 DVDs & BDs worth of TV series, anime and movies as well as my music CD collection. It has been running 24x7 for 4 years now without issue. I only shut it down for cleaning every 6 months or so. I am at about 86% of capacity and will eventually get a pair of 20 TB drives to backup everything and then reconfigure it to RAID-Z2 to clear up more usable space while keeping things backed up on those 20 TB drives for the extra protection.
are 10tb exos noisy ?
@@serdar-ors Not any noisier than any other drives I've owned. I've been using mostly enterprise drives for the past twelve years now. My previous drives were 8x HGST 6TB SAS and before that I had 8x HGST 3TB SAS drives. These are a little quieter than those previous drives. Because these are in my media server, it is in an out of the way place in my living room and, from where I sit in relationship to it, I don't hear anything unless there is absolute silence in the room at which point I hear the light whir of the fans and might hear an occasional blip of head noise from the drives but it is pretty faint.
I bought around 150 nas hdd in twelve years. The slowest are the most reliable (despite not designed for NAS use): WD Green. The RE (raid edition) 2 Tb had a lot of trouble, also the 4 Tb RED were not so good. All the 6 Tb RED are dead after 5-6 years. I moved two years ago to EXOS 18 Tb and I'm very happy.
I also had a lot of trouble 10 years ago with Seagate 3 Tb disks, due to a stupid seller which provide HDD without vibration sensor together with a 12 bays NAS. It took one year to find out what was the problem after exchanging many drives showing random errors.
I live in BRazil. I bought 4 3TB Seagate in 2010 in a travel to USA, direct from Amazon. All disks were dead 2 years after, using only in a synology NAS.
The EXOS HDs called back in the day Baracuda ES drives, they cost a lot more than the regular Baracuda's back then. I always used the ES variant for obvious reasons. Now I use Ironwolfs Pro for the NAS, and the backup disk is an EXOS 8Tb drive. Bought it cheap from my reseller, because someone gave it back. It runs now for 2 years and they are great and fast.
Weren't they 'Constellation ES' drives? IIRC Barracuda was always the consumer line ... which I've had horrible luck with. I've had a pretty good experience with Constellation & EXOS though.
I've gone for 5 x 16TB IWPs in my new Synology 1522Plus in RAID6. Good past experience with them, and 5 year warranty direct with the manufacturer, unlike EXOS where you have to rely on the supplier. The 16TB drives were nearly identical price to 16TB EXOS.
in Germany Toshiba is really aggressive in pricing with their enterprise, helium filled drives. the 18Tb one are also elaly nicely priced at around 14€/TB. and they come with 5 years manufacturer warranty.
The Toshiba drives used to run really hot. Do they still run warm?
Seagate IronWolf Pro was my last one with 24TB. LOVE IT!
WD also did this with the SSDs. Some of WD Green SSDs use QLC flash instead of TLC and there is no easy way to find out which is which.
Yes, you would think they would learn…. Wouldn’t you? 🙄
@@sometechguy don't think they'll give a damn unfortunately. Not without some backlash from the tech community like the Adata controller swapping fiasco.
I got stung by WD with SMR, I won’t buy from them again.
Did this whole event of "quietly integrating SMR" happen long after the QLC bait-and-switch? Because I'm looking at an article titled "Western Digital promises to do better after QLC controverse"
The SMR shambles was a year before the NAND incident. Article from blocks&files here.
blocksandfiles.com/2021/08/29/western-digital-does-the-wrong-write-thing-again/
Not great for their reputation to have the two incidents, which is a shame.
4 x 18tb exos in synology 420+. Seems to be working fine. The drives are a bit noisy but i also dont have any other hdds to compare them to
i just bought WD Drives for my Server/NAS - went for the RED Plus, which are CMR drives. i went for WD because they seem to be more reliable according to the latest statistics from backblaze. Seagate was the worst in terms of failure rate. And we are talking enterprise level drives. And the WD RED were only 18 bucks more expensive than Seagate Ironwolf drives...
Just starting the video, but wanted to say that I have 3 Synology NAS units and started out way back with WD Green drives and they were slow and unreliable. I then bought some Red and found they also failed. They have all been running WD Gold for several years and out of 18 drives, haven't had a single failure and they are very fast.
That’s interesting to hear. From all the comments, it seems like there are a real mix of experiences. Some love WD drives and dislike Seagate, some find the opposite; and there is a mix of people with better experience of certain drive types to others. Seems generally positive experience of HGST, but maybe the user base is smaller for those that watched.
There is limited real public data on failure rates between brands and drive types, but maybe a deeper dig is worth doing. Backblaze post good data, but the drive type sample is fairly limited.
But thank you for sharing you experience.
On the pricing table at 8:00, did you swap around the 10 and 12 TB rows? Seems like a hell of a coincidence that all of the 10TB drives are more expensive than their 12TB counterparts?
This video was a while ago, but no the numbers shouldn’t have been mixed up because that detail is important. This often seems to be the case and is the case on various drives right now where larger capacity are cheaper than smaller.
@@sometechguy how very peculiar. Cheers.
Looking at the latest data from backblaze on hdd reliability, the wd and especially the hgst drives are significantly higher reliability than seagate in the 12 to 16 tb sizes where there is a lot of data. The only other consideration is the noise, with enterprise drives being considerably noisier and better suited to racks and not desktop use where ironwolf froves seem to be less annoying
I have a detailed video looking at that data actually, and yes, that seems to be the case.
In 7 years running 5 Seagate 4 TB Iron drives in a Synology NAS, one of the five cashed after 3 years and 4 months with bad sectors - shorts outsite the 3 years warrenty. One time after 7 years a drive power off (hang up), but can be reinstalled to the RAID again without an error. But for the future I switch to Toshiba, because all Toshiba drives have 5 years warranty.
I've used WD Blues, Blacks, Reds, RedPlus, and Red Pros, even had a good number of old scorpio drives for a while. I've also used Seagate Barracudas, FireCudas, EXOS, and IronWolf and Pro. all in various capacities from 1-6TBs mostly with a few 12TB+ drives here or there.
Currently been trending towards the 14TB EXOS for the last year or so as i've been updating my TrueNAS Boxes and cycling out the old 2 and 4 TB drives. The EXOS 14s have been the best value per TB outside refurbs, in my instance. I've been waiting for a good deal on a disk shelf or two so I can migrate my NAS boxes to my network rack from the old Full tower cases.
I've been running a load of the 2TB 2.5" FireCuda drives for a long time too. those were meant for laptops but I grabbed a heaping pile of them while they were $49 each probably 5-6 years ago to save physical space and they were surprisingly speedy and low power. I've just now started getting bad sectors or failure in that 16 drive array all clustered in 4, 5 1/4" hot swap bay adapters.
That's a good variety of drives, what are the anecdotal observations on reliability between the vendors and drives?
@@sometechguy from what i've seen it's been almost a dead heat between brands/vendors, over the last 20 years it's been a bit of a pendulum for which was more reliable.
the Blues and greens seem to have the shortest lifespan from WD. I have yet to own any of the SMR drives, all the REDs i have are CMR. I've yet to have a WD Black, Red, or Purple fail. the scorpio drives also have yet to fail but they've been moved from my old laptops into some of my older consoles now and don't get many hours logged anymore.
Barracudas have had the highest failure rate for me, the Firecuda "hybrid" drives have been vary reliable only have had 3 fail in the last 7-8 years of the 20+ i've purchased. roughly in order by age.
none of my Ironwolf or EXOS drives have failed yet either. the oldest of those I have is around 6 years, and most my EXOS purchases have been in the last 2-3 years.
I'm in process of Migrating towards all EXOS 14TB in my main NAS. got 4 in it currently and have 12 more to finish replacing the 4-6TB reds and 2TB blacks.
I don't have any Blues or Greens left. and the Purples are in my Security System PC with the PoE camera footage.
@@sometechguy I'll also say I've had bad luck with those Arsenal DAS drives, seems like 1 in 4 have been DOA, and about 1/4-1/3 of the non DOA have started losing sectors in the first 6-8 months.
but i've only bought 8 or so of them. very cheap for the capacity, (around $8 per TB on the 12TB) but I'd prefer more reliable generally.
what about exos x16 sound comparing to others you tried having 7200rpm. are exos x16 noisy ?
Normally I would go for WDs. But now I've heard about SMRs, I'll have to be careful. I guess I can now go for Seagate IronWolf range.
Yes, avoid those SMR, especially if these are for a NAS. The ironwolf or ironwolf pro are both fine, depending on your needs. Or you can use WD Red Plus or Red Pro also, which are the WD equivalent. But always double check the disks are not SMR.
@@sometechguy Noted. Thanks.
I'm a HUGE fan of Exos drives. been using them for years. Just picked up a pair of 8TB Exos, to replace some older drives that are just about out of space. I love these things.
do u use them for photo or video edit? thx
@@manosalexakis Neither. I use them for both general storage, and archive storage. Being that they're enterprise-class drives, they're built more robustly than your average consumer-grade HDDs (hence the longer warranty period, and huge MTBF rating).
@@manosalexakisI use mine for photo editing. Work fine in a nas and cheap.
What separate between one drive with another within the same maker is the firmware and features. Western Digital used to divide their drives in Black for performance and Blue for cheaper drives with less cache and less features (also the number of platters)... hence cheaper while both maintained 7200rpm. It all changed when they realized they can trained their customers with color branding instead of reading the goddamn specsheets. So they started with this GREEN 5400rpm, which are the same drive as the PURPLE Surveilaince drive, and Red for NAS and so forth. Meanwhile Seagate Exo was always their top of the line drives with all the features. The problem is by now the public are all trained to buy the specific color for their specific task... Kudos WD for the savy business decision. Whomever came out with the brading is a genius.
I saw Red NAS costing 50% more than the EXOs drive with same capacity... It's madness!!! and now there going after NAS maker QNAP Synology to validate those drives, I truly think their next move is to firmware lock with NAS maker so none validated drive won't initialize.
And for this reason I haven't purchase a single WD drive after they started the color branding BS. I only buy EXO drives for Unraid, for couple of reasons, Unraid utilize a kind of JOBD with parity so it only spins up the drive that contains the data, second, you can mismatch capacity and third you can stress the drive before you add it to your array. But for VMs and other application which requires replication, use SAS drives instead of SATA drives, ie TrueNAS, vSAN etc. for better IOPS... or better yet, go for nvme (Asus Hyper m2 with 4 nvme) and you can also buy used enterprise SAS drives which is no no if they were SATA drives. I have 48 SAS 2.5 10k rpm 600GB drives, bought them used, it's been years and none of them failed yet.
Well, going SAS will require server hardware. It's not like you can stick a SAS drive into your Synology NAS. I don't think this is a feasible route for most people.
A good article, thanks.
I've been using 14Tb IronWolf Pro's in a 10 slot NAS since 2019. I've got two cold spare drives. Within the 4 years, I've had 4 sudden drive failures for no apparent reason - all at different times. Each was covered under warranty. Some replace with new, others replaced with remanufactured drives that come with generic white labels. These also seem to be OK in terms of reliability.
Like you, I've done research to actively avoid SMR drives, including replacing Barracuda drives with IronWolf's as my standard desktop drives for capacity. I just wish manufacturers would recognise that people want to know what they are buying and make good decisions. If they have to resort to hiding something, then generally that must be a bad thing, since if it was a positive thing for the customer, marketing would have it up in big red flashing letters all over the place.
Exos's seem to have a longer warranty period too, which has to be a good thing. I have heard that performance is a little lower than IronWolf's, but I've not seen anything concrete here. They are also the only drive to come with SAS as well as SATA interfaces.
I've used seller goHardDrive on the Zon for about two years now. I use DiskPrices to sort then check for longer warranty. gHD packs these drives well and they come wiped - I've had three of fifteen disks fail within the first three months of usage, returns are a snap and replacement ships before the busted ones get back. All mechanical drives fail, so I'm happy to do a bit of leg work to score disks for ~$7/TB.
Thank you for the video I was thinking of upgrading hdd and had the same questions
I've been using 4x 16TB Seagate Exos drives in my NAS since 2019, awesome performance. Used mainly for media storage movies etc.
I find it funny how we all hint at what we do with our NAS... but never actually say it. I have 8TB of ... stuff.
When deciding on my NAS last time round, capacity was number one, though ultimately what sold me on Iron Wolf Pro was the warranty. Not only is it 5 years, but it also comes with a guarantee of data recovery in the even of failure under normal use. Not sure if the Exos did. It may be the reason why IWP are more expensive. If Segate are willing to front the costs of data recovery in the event of failure, then I judged they must be pretty confident the disks won't fail.
In any case, my policy is only to run the drives for as long as the warranty lasts. This is expensive, but then I think about how long I have been creating the data, and yeah, it is worth it. Coming up again next year. It'll probably be IWP again, because I have zero complaints.
Used the (WD) shingled drives for a while, they were fine for archive, but yeah, slow for continuous data transfer.
Thanks for sharing, and replacing drives before they fail is smart. It can feel painful paying out to replace a drive that is running just fine, but if the data is important then its a good investment. I also think that many people don't keep current backups for home storage in the same way, an organised business might because backing up 10's of TB of data is in itself, costly. So a RAID failure can be a rude awakening.
@@sometechguy Yeah my first server job had a faulty raid controller (a RAID 5 array - remember them?) which kept corrupting the exchange database. No my happiest time.
These days, at home it is all mirrored, and at work RAID 10. Again, expensive, but data is king.
Like you, I also started out using WD particularly their MyWD series. But last year, when their OS was upgraded to OS5 and my WD Nas was too "obsolete" (to say the least for that upgrade) I gave up and decided to switched to Synology and learned that Seagate also worked hand-in-hand well together.
I love my Synology NASs. I think the software is great, reliability has also been good. I did have one suffer a known CPU related issue following a power event, but it was replaced super quick under warranty and when I put the disks back in, it just picked up where it left off. So all good.
When starting with NAS about 15 years ago I was told not use the same models of HDDs but even different manufacturers. The reason for this is to avoid serial defects. Same drive model used for a NAS RAID could result in breaking down all drives during a short time because of equal wear characteristics. And when one drive breaks, the other RAID members immideaktly have a lot more work to do while rebuilding, resulting in more possible breakdowns.
I have done some videos on AFR analysis of various drives. This shows the likelihood of various models from various manufactures failing at various times over their life. I think this reveals that whether drives are the same model or not is likely less important than the drives likelihood of failure more generally.
Though if you buy disks in a batch, there is a greater chance they all got subjected to the same trauma during shipping, handling delivery etc. that probably leads to them all having an early failure though, and only if the trauma was serious enough to really damage them.
But what you said does appear to have some logic, just not sure on how real that is myself. Just my take. :-)
I've been using "shucked" WD 8TB drive in my unRAID server for the last few years. Granted, my use is generally "write once" via programs running in the background, so the delay with SMR would largely go unnoticed. However, I don't like WD's shady approach to SMR.
When I decided to build a second server (for offsite at a friend's house), I went with refurb 16TB Exos drives, purely for the cost per TB. So far, they're working just fine.
Shucking is a great way to get good capacity for cost, if you can find external
bays with good disks. I am cautious about using them in active arrays, there could be different reasons they got put in those caddies. Maybe just excess stock, or maybe testing revealed they may not last as long as they should.
As for refurbs, I am betting most of those are new but returned disks. Not sure there is much real refurbing you can do to a disk, so likely they are just a bit unknown. But if they test ok, then they could be a good bargain!
@@sometechguy Shucking was good when the external units were cheaper than the bare drive. That's not the case anymore.
As for the refurbs, you are likely right. I checked the label, and they are marked Recertified Drive. The SMART system reported single digit hours (typically around 5), and the unRAID preclear analysis showed no errors. So far, so good. Not bad for $100 off per drive.
@JamieStuff, that make sense. When I tested a Red Plus drive and it wasn't recognised, I sent it back. Probably the drive works, and its a firmware issue so I guess it was tested and then resold as a refurb. If you are seeing single digit hours, that sounds like the scenario. So could be a good way to pick up a discount, as the cost of the sellers margin. But of course, I would test it thoroughly and check the SMART details to make sure it wasn't returned for some obvious reason.
Remember that on a Refurb drive they can set the hours in-use clock back to 0 !
@@EJSmith-dk3yg I am pretty sure they *always* set back the counter to zero in refurbs!
I chose the cheaper of the Seagate drives fir my NAS build. Checking out some other brands except WD. Ended up with IronWolf as they were slightly cheaper at the 10TB mark. And Seagate had a quick and easy RMA process when my NAS suggested 1 was running hot and having some errors.
Maybe this was part of the comments below but I would have also contributed to the strong push to go to Seagate over WD is the issue of how WD drives flag themselves after 3 years of usage, even if it was used only lightly.
This is something that surfaced after I made the video. But yes, I agree, this isn't a good look for WD again. I get the value in knowing your disk is passing warranty because that matters to some, but it doesn't have to be any more than a 1 time informational notice.
Have been planing on going from WD to Seagate disk on my Synology myself, just because of the price to storage ratio. I only use it for media storage, nothing else.
I just replaced my old HGST 4TB disks with 18TB Ironwolf Pro for my 5 bay NAS.
Going from 12TB to around 54TB of total space was amazing. (Yes RAID 6)
When I registered my 18TB IronWolf Pros, they initially showed up as Exos X16s, but now show as IronWolf Pros.
Have to assume the most of the drive is the same, just for cost of production reasons. Certain activities on the drive are louder on the Exos drives, so maybe some components are different, but it could just be firmware changes changing behavior.
@@sometechguy I suspect server drives will be tuned for pure performance with no thoughts being wasted on noise levels, while NAS drives will be tuned to not exceed certain noise levels. I was looking at Exos vs. Ironwolf 6 TB some time ago but went for the Ironwolf because I saw some videos of the 6 TB Exos and they made some shockingly loud noises when reading/writing. They didn't seem to be louder for most of their operation, just some head movements or whatever were super loud and "clicky".
Using EXOS for large storage. Did well so far - zero failures. Moving to SSD NAS. There is a cost - but there is also a lot more peace of mind. YMMV.
Long term reliability and endurance can still be better, or considerably better on HDD. So depending on the NAS case, they may still be the best pick. But when it comes to performance, SSD wins hands down, as long as the bottle neck is the drive and not the network or interface. SSD is quieter of course. 😊
@@sometechguy nobody can convince me moving parts beat chips for reliability in an active NAS.
@@meibing4912 SSDs have a limited number of write cycles because the process of writing data to their flash memory cells degrades the cells' insulating oxide layer, eventually causing wear-out and failure
Been using in my server a few 14TB exos drives and 10TB Ironwolf, just jbod with my plex library.
People ask about how loud those drives are. Did you notice them being any louder than the normal desktop disks?
@@sometechguy They are, not by much but you do not want them closer than 5 meters, in a silent case. They also start working when they are not in use, checking clusters that have not been used for a while , so not reccomended in your bedroom.
@@manofwar556 which one is nosier, exos x16 or ironwolf
@@serdar-ors the exox is louder, a bit louder than ironwolf pro.
@@manofwar556 ok thanks, i want to use only one hdd in my pc for bacup purpose but noise is an important factor.
I woke up this morning to a clicking WD Red Plus in my NAS. A little over a year old. Switching to Seagate
That’s no fun at all. 😢
I use several EXOS 16 TB and IronWolf Pro 12 TB disks in my NAS box. Never had a single failure for the EXOS disks, but 3-4 of my IW Pros started developing bad blocks and had to be replaced under RMA. I am now transitioning fully to EXOS disks. Absolutely amazing quality and they're cheaper to boot. I don't care about the IronWolf data recovery feature since these are used in RAID-6 volumes which are backed up overnight anyway.
With a small sample size like this, I always suspect shipping damage first. Your IW Pros were shipped in a different crate than the EXOS and some forklift driver dropped the IW crate and didn't report it. And just like that, 80% of the drives in this crate are damaged. I had this happen with WD Reds a couple years ago when I bought four and three of them were basically doa and the fourth made funny noises. Brought them back to the store and the owner later told me that he got most of the drives from this shipping crate back after just a few days. The crate looked fine, the drives looked fine, they were still damaged in shipping.
@@highks496 Depends on what you mean by a small sample size. I use three dozen IW Pro and EXOS disks. They were all bought from the same three IT suppliers, all perfectly packed, at different times over several years. Over time, only IW Pro disks developed bad blocks and had to be replaced. EXOS disks are trucking away with zero issues. If there was shipping damage, disks would either arrive dead or fail very soon after being put to use, that's not been my experience.
@@little_fluffy_clouds If you bought them at different times over several years, then it's probably not shipping damage. I thought you bought them all at the same time.
Perfectly packed doesn't mean they can't be damaged. They have a g-rating that must not be exceeded. If a crate falls from a fork lift, everything might look totally fine, but you could still have a couple dozen damaged drives.
My X16 14TB EXOs drive were much cheaper in the end and perform remarkably well. It seems counter intuitive for these to be cheaper than consumer drives, but in the end I felt like I was paying less for a better product.
I use Exos drives. I've actually been buying refurbished rebranded drives from company called WP Arsenal, as they are always CMR disks, not crappy SMR disks! They usually send refurbished Exos drives, and you can get a 12TB drive for only like $100! I have received one DOA drive from them but they quickly sent out another. Just do a preclear test on the drives right away, and if they pass then your good, as I've yet to have one fail that didn't already arrive DOA.
I had multiple bad experiences with seagate in the past (about 15 years ago). Not sure I will ever use them again.
People have long memories and brands need to make more informed choices for this reason. Bad choices (or poor product quality) can have long term impacts to a brands reputation. I still don't buy Sony after their DRM/Rootkit fiasco in 2005. But that is another story. 😒
It is my understanding that Ironwolf & Exos drives are the same hardware with different firmware
now confirmed
Holy shit, this was fantastic. Smashed subscribe harder than the core of a neutron star.
🥳
I had already moved to seagate at the time of the SMR bait and switch, but that act sealed the deal on me not buying WD for hdd for a long time. I do buy WD SSD's though.
In 25 years the only drives ive had fail are WD, so ive always used seagate drives, people like to hate them but i have 8 pcs at home 5 of which are storage based and they just work for me! Issues i have had were silly stuff like knocked power leads etc
I don't know about the pricing in this video, even within the past year, the price was jacked up really bad. Probably 3 years ago prices were down. But Seagate Exos 10TB costs around $300 now at the end of 2024 (2023 was not better neither). The $150 price shown in the video is a pipe dream now.
Recently bought 2 12TB Exos X12 drives to add my my NAS, I'm fine with mixing drives so I run them in a brtfs Raid 1 together with the 4tb IronWolf drive I have unlike other ways of doing raid, btrfs Can actually do Raid 1 with 3 diffrent drives of diffrent sizes (I think in this case half of the 4TB is mirrored to one 12TB drive, half to the other and the remaining 10TB are mirrored across the 12tb drives). I use a Rasberry Pi hooked up to a 4 bay USB enclosure instead of a dedticated NAS.
Thanks. I recently decided to go with 12TB Exos disks for my unraid server.
Would it make sense to build out a home NAS with different brands, so long as they share the same speed and capacity. It seems the diversity would make it less likely to have multiple disks fail around the same time.
I have the same WD EFRX running for 9 years perfectly. At a time I got another one, same model, for mirroring, but it vibrated too much and was noisier, so I got a 5400 RPM Ironwolf instead.
Sadly it is hard to find 5400rpm drives today. I prefer them too, because speed is mostly limited by the network connection. The slower drives produce less heat and noise and have reduced wear.
I built a new primary PC (for games but mostly video re-processing, ie: DVD & Blue-ray RIP & Compression) while looking for the large storage drives, I found it hard to find the CMR(good) or SMR(poor) disks, if is does not say CMR assume its SMR. When I did settle on the Ironwolf drives I was surprised that the price difference at 8TB size (currently best bang per buck) was only about £20 to £30.
CMR is not only more reliable it is also much faster when writing lots of files that are in the 300MB to 2+GB sizes. I have found that SMR drives never get close to the rated speeds when writing. The SMR drives will have a significant variation in performance simply due to the fact it has to constantly verify that the data just written did not corrupt existing data and potentially re-wright that and again then check that write did not corrupt yet more existing data....…
Where as the CMR drives will sustained 200MB/s with +- 20MB/s, the suposedly equivalent SMR drives will mostly only be able to sustain around 120MB/s with a +- 50-60MB/s variation.
In the end I purchasing one 4TB SSD (TCL not QCL) for the OS a few games and processing, plus two 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drives one to store my video library and the other for game installations and general backups of the SSD.
The video files and MP3's from CDs (MP3 as everything can read/play them), automatically get multiple backups as I use External USB HDD caddies that I connect directly to my TV's to access my media library. That way I don’t need to have a NAS running 24/7 or have my TVs connected to the LAN/Internet. My newest LG TV has some nasty user licensing terms (with built-in Echo/Alexa crap) so it only gets connect by wire for about 20 minutes a year to look for firmware updates.
PS: As an old guy who started work as a trainee computer operator in the early 1982 and later spent around 25 years as a software developer. I find my mind still sometimes marvels at the disk capacity I use today. When I started the 3 HDDs on a VAX 11/780 were big self contained units each about the size of a front loading washing machine. Each had a single removable 12”, 9 platter disk pack that could store almost 300MB each and those were massive for the time.
One reason I avoided the Exos range, so I was told, was that these drives will not enter sleep mode and spin down if the hibernation option is set. perhaps someone here can tell me if this is true.
Also moved to Seagate for the same reason as you. The WD SMR scandal left a bad taste in my mouth and the reliability issues I had seen for some years with Seagate drives seemed to be resolved. Plus, an Ironwolf drive cost me 20% less than the WD equivalent.
I am pretty confident that you can hibernate Exos drives, but I have heard of reports that some NAS support it and some don't and I am not sure why. I have some in a NAS here, and I am sure they spin down, because the noise is quite distinctive when they are start up again.
So this might take a bit more digging.
@@sometechguy Thanks for responding. I am running DSM 7.2, so wondered if having Exos drives hibernate won't be a problem.
I have all three drives types, and if you don’t think Exos are louder you need to have your hearing checked. If they are in a closet somewhere no big deal, but if they are on your desk you are going to hear them
Came for the title of Exos vs Ironwolf Pro but over half the video is about WD!
I don't have a problem with slow Shingle tech; but this also means that they could make read/write heads smaller
Making the read heads smaller isn't as big a challenge, and on the shingled drives the read area is smaller. But writing smaller areas on the disk is more challenging, at least reliably, and this is what led the manufacturers down the path to SMR where the write area is larger than the read area.
I did a video on the new HAMR drives that explains how Seagate (but ultimately others who are also developing this) solve the the problem of writing to smaller magnetic domains, and I think the tech is really interesting.
ruclips.net/video/JNGsTHuFcvM/видео.html
And of course, there is MAMR also, which also helps using a different approach.
@@sometechguy Yes, moar 'coz moar r/DataHoarder😁
I subbed for more HDD/Storage videos.
Can you make somethign about Tape Backup for Home users? I have seen everything for Enterprise, they're great but only 150 reads and the tape dies? and the price? a car. If there's something more reliable for home users would be great
Just upgraded my Plex Server. Was running 2TB Seagates prior that didn't have any premature failures per say. Ran them for about 48K hours.Once they were shut off, the seized up. Not unexpected due to being in the desert.
Switched over to 2x 4TB Red RX and 2x 8TB AX. They both ran well. But now I am using the 16TB EXOS Drives. They were a lot cheaper than expected IMO. WD has always been a bit too much. The product range is also a bit BS; Gold, Purple, Red, Green, Blue, Black, etc etc.
I had a WD Red fail, and during the disk rebuild, I had 1 other go a bit sideways and a couple of months later after a power outage, another one died. So it seems that running them smooth and steady is one thing, but if you interrupt their routine, this is when they die if they feel inclined to it. A good reason to keep an eye on SMART.
The complexity of the range is also irritating, but that seems to be the norm from computer vendors these days with more SKUs than sense.
MY WD RED 3tb raid 5 server never spins down. 15,0000+ hours 11 years... I've lost 2 disks in that time. Thanks for this video!
Your welcome, and thanks for watching. 11 years of service is nice!
I love my Exos drives but they are kind of “crunchy”. I understand there is a newer firmware to mitigate the noise but I CBA.
That was my experience as well.
what capacity do u use. x16 or x18 version ?
Im so done with WD HDD, 6 out of 6 I bought failed within 3 years of non-heavy use, I tried green, blue, red, purple, different capacities, they alll failed. Seagate on the other hand 7 years of use, not a single issue, the diagnostics shows 97% of health.
Wow 14TB IronWolf for 207 USD? Thats what 8TB IronWolf costs here, 14TB is for about 400+ USD
I've been running 5*20tb exos in my ds1522+ for almost 2 years now. 4 set in SHR BTRFS and 1*20tb drive formatted EXT for surveillance on four cameras never had an issue just slow my next nas will be all flash m.2.
I use a combination of 6x 3TB Hitachi Ultrastar desktop HDDs, 1x 3TB Toshiba desktop HDD, 8x 4TB WD Red HDDs, and 6x 12TB "White" (shucked Elements USB) HDDs. They all have over 35000 hours on them. Some have been running almost continuously for 15 years. My QNAP NAS is 15 years old, my D-Link NASs are nearly that old, and everything has worked flawlessly so far.
I stopped buying Seagate disks for many years after the disaster that was their 8GB IDE offering, as well as numerous 1.5TB and 2TB failures. Recently bought a few 2.5" though so time will tell if they've improved.
I ended up getting some refurbished exos x20 20 TB drives.
I used to have a single WD red as a simple network drive, but a couple years ago I built myself a proper server machine with 8x 6TB exos drives. I purposefully went a bit overkill with a RAIDz2 configuration, and it had so far worked really well as a little torrent machine primarily.
In hadn’t come across RAIDz, thanks for sharing that. I use SHR2 on one of my NAS devices. I will dig deeper into RAIDz!
WHen you have 8x drives, I consider RAIDZ2 the perfect choice...
Sadly, no 3rd party Enterprise Drives are listed as compatible with the DS1522+ Synology.
I really do not like Synology's recent approach of only certifying its own rebadged and overpriced drives as compatible, with the statement that they won't provide support. This puts me off buying new models where they do this. The reality is that enterprise drives from Seagate, WD and Tosh will work just fine and I have drives not on the compatibility list running in my Synology NASs. I believe its also possible to silence any warnings, but that's a bigger topic.
But sadly I think the answer is to use drives not on the list, or refuse to buy the product. I for one will not be buying their own rebranded HAT drives at all. I believe they are actually Toshiba units, but just with a greatly exaggerated price.
@@sometechguy After Drobo went under, I got rid of my two Drobos (always had two, ready to get to my data in case one unit died), I ended up going Synology. WD RED PRO used to be on their list, found it in a press release on their website. Populates with five of them, due to wanting drives with 5 year warranties. Now I need more space and I’m conflicted by the "no support" wording. It’s a mess.
Just upgraded from 2TB to 8TB for my mirrored ZFS VDEV pool - not a NAS, just my PC, as I don't need to share other than to VMs (nfs and smb), and have offsite backups, so went with the cheaper Barracudas.
First i was using WD RED non Pro, meanwhile i use the Seagate Exos X18, they are a bit louder but also very fast, and more bang for the buck.
I had to replace a couple of older WD Red drives with WD Red Plus and as far as I can tell, they are absolutely fine. Even in an older Drobo I didn't run into any firmware problems, they were pretty much indistinguishable from the old WD Red (pre-SMR).
Personally I did switch to Seagate though and I will probably not buy WD Red plus anymore because they are just too expensive in comparison.
It is possibly my Plus drive was just DOA. It happens.
I bought 5 ironwolf pro 16TB drives new for around $280 each (on sale from around $320) and wish I had just got a bunch of 16TB recertificated exos drives. I’ve already exceeded the rated yearly workload for the ironwolf pros and would have paid half the cost @$140 per 16TB exos
First time into this realm. Got my 16tb exo. Just one in my pc I don’t have nas yet. Actually surprisingly not too loud. Especially when your pc is on floor has a desktop in between you and pc case is well built. It is just fast enough for many small pic browsing/4k movie steam single player games, absolutely no need for ssd for those tasks
I got a new 8TB Exos for my AM5 build. Was best price per gigabyte within my budget and rocked a 5 yr warranty.
There was a time around 2014 where it felt like I had Seagate drives failing constantly. May have just been a few but because dell's servers were mostly rebranded Seagate drives (at the time) the impact felt dramatic
I'm actually less interested in the drive choice and more your choice of NAS device. I've been using QNAP devices for years and have always thought of them as small office/enterprise devices, especially the rack mounted ones. Synology on the other hand was more of a "some granny at home wants a place to store all their pictures from their holidays". QNAP never really used ZFS but rather proper RAID and yet recently they've started down the ZFS route. It would be interesting to hear your views on why Synology over say, QNAP or Dell.
I have not used QNAP personally, though I know people that do. I had used Thecus, but there were a few reasons I chose Synology, maybe it’s worth doing a piece on that. But the quick version was that I wanted larger scale, and I use the Synology Surveillance software with IP CCTV cameras, I think their software offering there is really good.
I also fairly recently changed from RAID to BTRFS/SHR for my disk arrays. I don’t think QNAP provide that support as yet and there are some benefits there.
But there is a lot to dive into on all those choices.
Are there any NAS products which are optimised more for larger size file transfers? Reading reveiws, I'm surprised at how slow most NAS devices are during sustained workloads, especially just a simple 2-disk RAID1.
I'm helping a friend search for a better NAS solution for the photo studio she runs. The files are all normally 35MB or 76MB raw images from cameras, with others being high res JPEGs which are still a few MB. A typical customer session might generate several GB. Macs running Lightroom and Photoshop are used to process the images (the network is of course GigE). She has a number of old Buffalo LS220D 2-bay NAS boxes, each with 2x 4TB in RAID1. One of them failed recently; I was able to recover the 3.7TB of data (onto a bunch of SSDs I had spare), but copying it back onto the unit once it was restored (using two replacement 4TB Seagate ES.3s) took an age, copying as it was at a mere 30MB/sec.
Or would one be better off building a custom PC instead? I have plenty of parts. Alas though I have little experience with Linux, while using Windows wouldn't work so well because Windows gets confused by certain types of Mac file, especially metadata files. Or is there a Linux distro specifically intended for simplified NAS setups?
At a minimum I suggested she step up to at least a Synology DS220+ with a couple of 8TB WD Red Pros, but the cost is apparently prohibitive.
Does anyone have any experience with the Toshiba MG08-D Enterprise 8TB? It's the same price as the Exos 7E8 (which are both a good chunk cheaper than the WD Red Pro).
There are a few things to consider. SATA itself is a relatively slow interface. SAS disks are typically faster, around 2x speed. But SATA drives are usually a little pricier, but NAS that support them are often far more expensive, as built for enterprise use in most cases.
Then there is the RAID type. RAID 1 is quite slow, as you are limited to the interface into the disk. RAID 5, despite requiring parity calculation is faster as you are writing data across multiple drives, and get access to higher IO.
The NAS hardware itself can be important, especially if RAID is in use as the processor is going to be responsible for writing the data. Most home NAS will be purely software RAID, and lower end devices could have low spec CPUs.
Networking can also be a bottleneck, and actually I wonder if that is more the problem here. Are they using 1Gbps switched networking to the device, or is anything running at 100Mbps? And if they are on wireless, that could also be a cause.
And then the disk themselves have different performance properties. Spindle speed, if they are SMR etc.
But mostly, all these performance aspects can be improved by buying better (read more expensive) hardware. And if cost is a major issue, they may need to accept the performance constraints.
But what you can often do is write a large file and see (and hear) if the disks are running flat out. If not, its more likely a networking or NAS performance issue, rather than disks or disk IO. Definitely eliminate networking as the cause before buying NAS hardware.
I don't have experience with the Tosh disks personally. Good luck with finding a good solution.
@@sometechguy Can SATA limit transfer rate? I don't have any modern or high performance drive, but i guess limit is 6gbit (3gbit if drive or controller are 10 years old) and this limits transfer to roughly 500MB/s. I think that 7200rpm 4TB drive has roughly 250MB/s at start and 16GB may have double data stored per track and double track density so it may reach this. But question is how many people have 10gbit network (card, nas and router) which won't bottleneck it. PCs have 2.5gbit cards today while 2.5gbit routers are not yet common.
You raise a good point, and I think its unlikely that SATA is the bottleneck in this scenario. My first suspect would be the network. But that 6Gbps is half duplex, so it would depend what is being read as well. And depending on what else is happening on the disk, such as the NAS performing tasks.
@@sometechguy I could understand it if there were multiple client systems accessing the boxes all at the same time, but this generally isn't the case. There are only four Macs and about six NAS boxes, so often the Macs aren't even accessing the same units. Plus, I couldn't get more than the stated bandwidth even with my own network which I know runs peachy, with just one machine accessing the NAS. It is it seems by all accounts just a slow box, but I get the impression from reviews that none of these products are particularly fast.
I mentioned backup; this is where a custom PC would have a real advantage, able to easily and quickly copy a RAID contents elsewhere, whereas copying from a NAS to a backup device is slow. It blows my mind that there isn't a reasonably priced decent 2-bay NAS from any vendor that includes TypeC USB for fast backup. For what these boxes actually do, I don't think the pricing justifies the hw one is paying for. It's also hard to find relevant review data because so much coverage focuses on things like video encoding which isn't relevant for my friend's use case.
Oh, don't even get me started on what a convoluted mess it was to reset the NAS. Such a klunky design, with flawed functionality in the fw & control programs, a reset methodolgy that involves bizarre changes in IP address during setup, a confusing web interface and a secondary web GUI that defaults to Chinese. :D
For much better performance, look in to have 10Gbps networking instead of 1Gbps or 2.5Gbps. It will take some investment, sure, but those 10Gbps file transfers are very fast.
So from what I took from this is, basically just go for the Exos version. Correct?
Haven’t touched WD since their sleazy SMR BS either. It also didn’t help that the WD Reds were failing a lot more frequently.
I totally understand. I did some analysis and they do appear to be shipping the best built and reliable drives, especially in the enterprise drive class, which is also often the most efficient. So I have been buying some of these recently, but I tread very carefully, thoroughly check specs and have to hold my nose a bit.
I do also have a video I am putting together currently comparing their Blue range, which contain SMR and CMR units and 5400rpm 7200rpm spindle speeds, which are still very unclearly marked, so see how they really compare for performance.