NAS - Go Larger: When I bought my Synology NAS five years ago, I filled it with two WD Red NAS 3TB drives at a cost of $230 each. Those drive are more than half full, and I'm looking...

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

When I bought my Synology NAS five years ago, I filled it with two WD Red NAS 3TB drives at a cost of $230 each. Those drive are more than half full, and I'm looking for something larger. Amazon has a WD 4TB Red NAS drive for just $110. That's a significant drop in price. Of course, I could save money by editing the thousands of files I'm backup up - delete stuff I'll never need. Decisions, decisions.

https://smile.amazon.com/Red-4TB-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B00EHBERSE/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=nas+hard+drive&qid=1552391586&s=gateway&sr=8-3

Tomcat5133 Loc: Gladwyne PA

jerryc41 wrote:

When I bought my Synology NAS five years ago, I fi... (show quote)

As you probably know by now Jerry I do some videography for cash and pro bono. I move very big
files through my system. No 4k often but HD Sony hybrid files and photography. The amazing part how my editing picks up the working files instantly on the WD drives. What I wouldnt do is buy a super big WD drive. largest I have is 4T. Rather see you with a number of drives and distribute your files. And duplicate
the most keepers on at least 2 drives. Just a thought.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

jerryc41 wrote:

When I bought my Synology NAS five years ago, I fi... (show quote)

Of course, you could always buy one of these, open the case up, pull the SATA drive out and put it in your NAS case....backup drives do not need to be super fast.

https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Desktop-Hard-Drive-WDBWLG0080HBK-NESN/dp/B07D5V2ZXD/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=wd+my+book+8tb&qid=1552396288&s=gateway&sr=8-3

When I spring for a new drive myself to populate my disk box, it will be an 8 or 10 TB, probably one of these. Cost is right.

I have a 4 TB in it now that I use dedicated as my Time Machine backup, no issues except it only has backups on it from October 2017 and I might want to stretch that out more. :) I also have a 2 TB drive in there for music backups and a 2 TB drive with nothing on it yet.

Backups are backups, so I do not worry about RAID for backup... I also backup everything to CrashPlan in the cloud.

cam.79 Loc: Gray, GA

Back during the Christmas sales, I picked up 2 - 8TB WD external drives for $130 Each, Took them out of the cases and found them to be Red drives. Installed them into the Thecus Raid box I bought for $110 and now have a large Raid backup. Along with a 6TB Seagate backup drive on one computer and an 8TB Seagate backup on the main PC.

Hopefully, I don't need anymore drives anytime soon.

BboH Loc: s of 2/21, Ellicott City, MD

Look at Buffalo - had an external drive for 9 years before replacing it. Had not gone bad but was told failure was just waiting to happen

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

cam.79 wrote:

Back during the Christmas sales, I picked up 2 - 8TB WD external drives for $130 Each, Took them out of the cases and found them to be Red drives.

Good deal!

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Dngallagher wrote:

Of course, you could always buy one of these, open the case up, pull the SATA drive out and put it in your NAS case....backup drives do not need to be super fast.

https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Desktop-Hard-Drive-WDBWLG0080HBK-NESN/dp/B07D5V2ZXD/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=wd+my+book+8tb&qid=1552396288&s=gateway&sr=8-3

Definitely a good price, but what's inside the box? A year or so ago, someone posted here that there was a sale on the WD 8TB Black drive for about $170. That was a good deal. I like the Red drives for NAS, but I'm going to see if I can delete some stuff I really don't need before I spend $200 on larger drives.

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

jerryc41 wrote:

When I bought my Synology NAS five years ago, I fi... (show quote)

The one thing I learned the hard way is to purchase a NAS device that does not require matched hard drives. Read and question carefully and have fun drooling at all the choices now on the market.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

jerryc41 wrote:

Definitely a good price, but what's inside the box? A year or so ago, someone posted here that there was a sale on the WD 8TB Black drive for about $170. That was a good deal. I like the Red drives for NAS, but I'm going to see if I can delete some stuff I really don't need before I spend $200 on larger drives.

One thing to remember, there is quite a difference between a business/multiuser NAS and a single user NAS.

While a more expensive fast drive might be required for a business/multiuser NAS, a single user NAS has reduced requirements.

In all honesty, I can see very little difference in speed/performance between my WD green drives vs my WD red drives for what I do with my system daily.

Depending on what you do will determine the performance/cost needs.

Back when I managed the servers for the Court system, 10,000 rpm drives were needed, for large multiuser NAS systems and even internal storage for servers, for me today I am happy with 5,600 rpm green drives that run 24x7 for my home system.

jhkfly

I must have been out to lunch for a while: What are "NAS" and "red / green" hard drives?

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

jhkfly wrote:

I must have been out to lunch for a while: What are "NAS" and "red / green" hard drives?

NAS = Networked Attached Storage.

RED/GREEN = Western Digital hard drives available with different requirements / performance. Green are cheaper, slower rotating, cooler operating, lower performance, may be less power consuming and may last longer. RED are more expensive, usually faster rotating, higher performance, run a little hotter, usually listed as higher performing.

There are several different “colors” of WD drives...

https://www.unifore.net/product-highlights/wd-hard-drive-color-differences-blue-green-black-red-purple.html

Curmudgeon Loc: SE Arizona

jerryc41 wrote:

When I bought my Synology NAS five years ago, I filled it with two WD Red NAS 3TB drives at a cost of $230 each. Those drive are more than half full, and I'm looking for something larger. Amazon has a WD 4TB Red NAS drive for just $110. That's a significant drop in price. Of course, I could save money by editing the thousands of files I'm backup up - delete stuff I'll never need. Decisions, decisions.

I don't have anywhere the number of files you do but as technology changes, photos that we had previously trashed are now recoverable and as you found out storage is getting cheaper almost by the day. I still have tons of negatives and slides I can't bring myself to throw away and file boxes are much bigger than external drives. Good luck on making the right choice.

jhkfly

Thanks Sir Gallagher!

I've been using a 500 GB and 1000 GB from Western Digital as external backups for a decade or more, happily. Occasionally one or the other will fail to show up when the computer boots, but if I turn the offending drive off and on, it reappears. I bought the 1 TB drive to replace a WD 500 GB that had failed completely (alas it was out of warranty).

nadelewitz Loc: Ithaca NY

I setup my home NAS with two drives as a RAID mirror. When I decided to look at the drives individually by connecting them to computers via USB, I learned, happily before it became an emergency issue, that RAID should NOT be thought of and used as a "backup" method. A drive configured by a RAID controller can only be read by the SAME controller. If you connect a drive (even from a simple mirror) from a RAID array by itself to a computer, not as a RAID drive, you will NOT be able to read what is in that drive.

RAID is intended to be able to replace a bad drive in the RAID array with a bare drive and have the RAID controller configure the new drive to re-complete the array.
Any drive in any RAID array should NOT be counted on as a free-standing backup that would be readable by itself.

nadelewitz Loc: Ithaca NY

jerryc41 wrote:

When I bought my Synology NAS five years ago, I fi... (show quote)

Spending money to go from 3 TB to 4 TB doesn't make much sense. You should not be storing that much data on one drive long term. Move rarely-used data to additional external drives or other media. Backup your quick-access-necessary data to other drives for protection.

My home NAS is a $35.00 Raspberry Pi computer running OpenMediaVault NAS operating system. It has four hard drives connected to it. The shared drive, and other three as USB Backups as often as I deem necessary. The backup process is supposed to be schedulable to run automatically, though it hasn't worked for me.