Q - I'm looking to build a NAS with the Drobo sometime next month to hold all my Christmas footage of family and friends when I go back home for the holidays. Is there a best choice of hard drive when building up a NAS from home use? I want to have 3TB of total space. Thanks!
Best Hard Drives to Use When Building Up Your NAS?
Good Questions
A - When you're looking for drives in a network attached storage array, you need to focus on 3 main things:
- Coolness factor (We're talking temperature here)
- Low power consumption
- Reliable brands
We also recently found out that most RAID engines on NAS use a dedicated controller and thus is bottlenecks of the drive read/write on your hard drives. See Tom's Hardware comparison chart below outlining the differences between a Samsung 5400RPM and 7200RPM drive in different RAID configs:
Because we don't really see a difference between the two, we suggest grabbing a large drive that runs at 5400RPM if you're building up your array from scratch. Since you wanted 3TB, we suggest grabbing 3 1.5TB drives and running those in RAID.
Our top choices of hard drive brands: Seagate (Barracuda LP), WD (Caviar Green), and Samsung (Eco Green F2) all have low-spindle-speed 1.5TB drives. We hope that helps!
Sent by Unplggd reader Tim York from NYC
[Image by Ricky Romero courtesy of CC license]
[Via Gizmodo via Tom's Hardware]
Comments (9)
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I'd also recommend looking into a Windows Home Server(WHS) machine.
3TB is an awful lot just to use as a NAS. With a Windows Home Server, you could also let that capacity do double duty as automated backup & more. WHS also is much easier to configure and lest hardware restrictions than NAS with RAID.
You could easily build a WHS for the price of a NAS using a Drobo box...
view jamilkb's profile
The drobo can make an awesome storage device. I would stay away from 5400 RPM drives, if you will be moving large files to and from this device faster 7200 RPM drives will make that much quicker. The drobo has a nice big fan on the back so you don't have to worry about the drives getting too hot.
As for Brands I use seagate almost exclusively at work. We usually stick to the enterprise grate 1TB drives (ES.2 series) but there is no 1.5TB enterprise drive. We have the normal 1.5TB (ST315000241AS) drives running in 4 drobos and multiple servers and they have been rock solid. There should be a 2TB 7200 RPM enterprise grade drive coming out soon if its not out already.
3TB is not a large amount of space for a NAS as the first comment claims especially with 2TB drives on the market. If you want the drobo to be a true NAS(accessible over the network) just hook it up to a drobo share, if not it will be very fast hooked up to one computer over firewire 800. Also since the drobo share runs embedded linux drobo has a large list of applications that will run on it to let it be way more than just a flie server.
view colincwilson's profile
3TB is a ton of space for a home user. I wasn't relating the 3TB as a restriction or hindrance for using NAS. I was offering an alternative to a NAS RAID set up in the form of a WHS setup. Once the 3TB is full, adding more storage to the NAS RAID setup is going to be a pain for the average home user, whereas with WHS, simply add any size drive you desire and disk allocation will be handled accordingly with little to no effort from the user.
view jamilkb's profile
BTW, I think Drobo is a great product too. WHS works better for me due to it's wireless access capabilities and automated backup functionality.
view jamilkb's profile
WHS is good if you have a junky PC laying around and wish to have a very reliable system without spending too much. That said, I've been rather paranoid if the time were to come where I could have to migrate my hard drives to another system as the software RAID config might break and cause me to lose all my data.
Drobo's nice in the fact that it's easy to just pull a drive and it'll automatically do all the backing up for you (given you have another drive as a spare).
view ekoshyun's profile
The Drobo doesn't use a true raid(0,1,5,6,10) so when the system starts to get full it marks one of the drives as "you should replace this one soon". You then just buy a bigger drive and while everything is running you pop out the old smaller one, and put the new bigger one in and the drobo now has free space for you to use. It couldn't be easier.
And now a days if you have a consumer grade HD camcorder you can fill up a couple Terabytes over the holidays quick if you want to keep raw footage around.
view colincwilson's profile
I guess that's pretty neat. I have awful memories of the complexity of RAID. Drobo's "RAID" does sound a lot more user friendly if it works as you say.
view jamilkb's profile
With the Drobo I have 2 x 1TB Hitatchi 1 x 2TB Hitatchi drives and they work great. Go to Newegg.com for best hard drive prices.
http://www.macminihometheater.info/drobo-automatic-raid/
At one time there were problems with Seagate 1.5TB drives in the Drobo, so I stay away from that brand completely.
view pixelskew's profile
Plus, Drobo accepts drives of different sizes, so you can mix and match. Drobo is also quite small, which is neat. I personally would stick to WD. They have a great warranty (3yrs) and are no hassle to deal with. Plus their drives outlasted the other brands that I used.
view range's profile