Exos vs IronWolf Pro - Which is the best HDD option for your NAS?

[@scineram]

SMR saga was literally my reason to go with Ironwolfs.

[@magicmanchloe]

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

[@ColinDyckes]

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!

[@highks496]

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.

[@jonmayer]

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.

[@BrianGarside]

One reason they are cheaper is they dont come with data recovery services. Iron Wolf does

[@esunisen3862]

@@BrianGarside Data recovery is irrevelant if you are using RAID 5 or 6 and do some backups.

[@raymond1058]

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.

[@tehaiks]

Thank you for letting us know and calling out this bullshit, time wasting practise.

[@Thorarin]

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.

[@sometechguy]

This is a good point, I also notice this if the disks are parked and are woken up.

[@Thesavagesouls]

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.

[@tredfxman]

​@@ThesavagesoulsAssuming you went with a WD Red or Ultrastar?

[@Cobalt985]

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.

[@jayzn1931]

@@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.

[@intertan]

30 exos drives been used for years. Zero issue so far.

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@TrueEssencePhotography]

Knock on wood 😆

[@surewhynot6259]

​@@juschuWD is the brand of the single most reliable HDD in enterprise, based on data center statistics.

[@jalhusky]

@@surewhynot6259did they receive a JD Power award for that? 😂

[@KurushimiVrishraka]

How many years to be exact? Why not ironwolf? Please let me know if it's okay?

[@dougchittum6074]

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! :)

[@highks496]

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.

[@nicospanatos6605]

As I was working in storage-virtualization industry I must say, You nailed this one here :) Big shout out to You.

[@sometechguy]

Really appreciate that, especially from someone in the field. ☺️

[@praetorxyn]

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]

Never really understood the 'upsell'/value-added of the 'data recovery' option; what sort of moron only stores important data on a single drive? :)

[@praetorxyn]

@@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.

[@therobpratt]

Thanks for this. Was noticing the price difference with Exos being cheaper so was curious about the differences.

[@sometechguy]

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!

[@KurushimiVrishraka]

@@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?

[@sometechguy]

@@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.

[@KurushimiVrishraka]

@@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!

[@numberyellow]

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]

do u use them for photo or video edit? thx

[@numberyellow]

@@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).

[@vono360]

@@manosalexakisI use mine for photo editing. Work fine in a nas and cheap.

[@robertleem5643]

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

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@highks496]

@@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%

[@SentinelBorg]

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. ^^

[@sometechguy]

And Exos x22 out now, so it will only keep moving in that direction!

[@k.b.tidwell]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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. 😀

[@gmsipe]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@highks496]

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.

[@serdar-ors]

are they noiser than wd

[@koma-k]

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)

[@pizzlesshorts]

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 KZbin channel

[@qazwsx000xswzaq]

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.

[@highks496]

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.

[@mdd1963]

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! :)

[@testbesthostingtestbesthos557]

There was a lot of bad reviews in forums about WD Red, so we still using or WD Purple, or Seagate Exos.

[@ralph4370]

Thank you for the video I was thinking of upgrading hdd and had the same questions

[@nighthawkvc25a]

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.

[@scottmcdonald7577]

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

[@lafemmedevastation]

This is what I was looking to know was the noise relative to other offerings, since they're enterprise drives. Thanks!

[@Frostbolter_FPL]

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. 🙂

[@keldonn2]

Hi! What about the noice between Exos and Iron Wolfs? Is it a significant dfference there?

[@scottmcdonald7577]

@@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.

[@rabarber9610]

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"

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@antik06]

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 😕

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@highks496]

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.

[@antik06]

@@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.

[@bigpoppa1234]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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!

[@emanuel12345678901]

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.

[@johnnygreene4658]

The Toshiba drives used to run really hot. Do they still run warm?

[@WSS_the_OG]

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.

[@BrianGarside]

Not been my experience with Exos drives.

[@WSS_the_OG]

@@BrianGarside What sample size have you worked with?

[@BrianGarside]

@@WSS_the_OG 14TB X16 model ST14000NM001G. I have 8 in a NAS and 2 on standby.

[@WSS_the_OG]

@@BrianGarside That's actually quite encouraging. Thanks for the info! We're in the market for HDDs again as it's "upgrade" time again.

[@t8polestarcyan22]

@@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.

[@Bluelagoonstudios]

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.

[@waltherstolzing9719]

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.

[@kenwilliams3279]

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

[@EJSmith-dk3yg]

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 !

[@EJSmith-dk3yg]

@@HendriuGaming Sorry I missed it ! I have seen those drives at over 600 dollars!

[@laurentmarandet4850]

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.

[@c054095]

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.

[@souljunkee]

The exos drives also do not include the data recovery service.

[@Davethreshold]

Seagate IronWolf Pro was my last one with 24TB. LOVE IT!

[@louiewashere3]

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?

[@sometechguy]

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. 😂

[@petera.morrison2095]

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]

So what do you recommend us doing?

[@petera.morrison2095]

@@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."

[@Eleriam]

@@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.

[@highks496]

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.

[@petera.morrison2095]

@@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.

[@meibing4912]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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]

@@sometechguy nobody can convince me moving parts beat chips for reliability in an active NAS.

[@iggswanna1248]

@@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

[@rastanz]

I've been using 4x 16TB Seagate Exos drives in my NAS since 2019, awesome performance. Used mainly for media storage movies etc.

[@HappyBuddhaBoyd]

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.

[@iankester-haney3315]

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.

[@KarlRock]

Thanks 🙏

[@annix493]

Holy shit, this was fantastic. Smashed subscribe harder than the core of a neutron star.

[@sometechguy]

🥳

[@catalystguitarguy]

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]

That's a good variety of drives, what are the anecdotal observations on reliability between the vendors and drives?

[@catalystguitarguy]

@@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.

[@catalystguitarguy]

@@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.

[@serdar-ors]

what about exos x16 sound comparing to others you tried having 7200rpm. are exos x16 noisy ?

[@c0p0n]

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?

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@c0p0n]

@@sometechguy how very peculiar. Cheers.

[@ColinDyckes]

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.

[@-MrDontCare-]

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.

[@mongini1]

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...

[@steveyg777]

Awesome Video! Concise and to the point! Well thought through and covered. Thank you!

[@sometechguy]

Thank you Sir, appreciated.

[@McKevittS]

You must have been watching a different video than I. He rambles for 6 mins on a personal story about WD, mentions that EXOS and Pro are similar but EXOS is a little cheaper, finishes with general NAS drive buying info..... where is the comparison? Where is the point?

[@carlos_mann]

So from what I took from this is, basically just go for the Exos version. Correct?

[@hello_user2685]

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

[@sanadanosa]

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.

[@sometechguy]

Yes, you would think they would learn…. Wouldn’t you? 🙄

[@sanadanosa]

@@sometechguy don't think they'll give a damn unfortunately. Not without some backlash from the tech community like the Adata controller swapping fiasco.

[@barryobrien1890]

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

[@sometechguy]

I have a detailed video looking at that data actually, and yes, that seems to be the case.

[@kdw75]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@jonmayer]

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.

[@timc3600]

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.

[@KDarkmoon1]

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]

are 10tb exos noisy ?

[@KDarkmoon1]

@@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.

[@kaede15]

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.

[@highks496]

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.

[@remyazharyyosef1811]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@LewisMoten]

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.

[@grege9862]

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.

[@KeinNiemand]

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.

[@JamieStuff]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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!

[@JamieStuff]

@@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.

[@sometechguy]

@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.

[@EJSmith-dk3yg]

Remember that on a Refurb drive they can set the hours in-use clock back to 0 !

[@highks496]

@@EJSmith-dk3yg I am pretty sure they *always* set back the counter to zero in refurbs!

[@FrenziedManbeast]

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.

[@little_fluffy_clouds]

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.

[@highks496]

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.

[@little_fluffy_clouds]

@@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.

[@highks496]

@@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.

[@nrnoble]

Thanks. I recently decided to go with 12TB Exos disks for my unraid server.

[@Frostbolter_FPL]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@LumpiDeluxe]

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.

[@jakewynn]

what a great video. very well presented and very complete 👍

[@sometechguy]

Appreciated. 🙌

[@JohnUllrey]

Good info, thank you for putting this together.

[@sometechguy]

Thanks for watching also. Glad you find it useful!

[@technicallyme]

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

[@mpdavis731]

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.

[@bluegizmo1983]

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.

[@manofwar556]

Been using in my server a few 14TB exos drives and 10TB Ironwolf, just jbod with my plex library.

[@sometechguy]

People ask about how loud those drives are. Did you notice them being any louder than the normal desktop disks?

[@manofwar556]

@@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.

[@serdar-ors]

@@manofwar556 which one is nosier, exos x16 or ironwolf

[@manofwar556]

@@serdar-ors the exox is louder, a bit louder than ironwolf pro.

[@serdar-ors]

@@manofwar556 ok thanks, i want to use only one hdd in my pc for bacup purpose but noise is an important factor.

[@sparkyenergia]

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.

[@thewelder3538]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@castform57]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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!

[@mdd1963]

WHen you have 8x drives, I consider RAIDZ2 the perfect choice...

[@simmo1024]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@simmo1024]

@@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.

[@georgeemanson]

Great work - As Synolpgy NAS prefer their own drives is thre a deep dive on them?

[@sometechguy]

They are Toshiba drives, rebadged and with some ‘firmware updates’. On principle, I would not buy them and the more Synology push me towards them, the less likely I am to continue to use their NAS. As you might tell, this irritates me. So I am not planning to look at them myself any time soon. :-) I would just encourage no one to buy them. A small uplift on price might be reasonable, but it’s an outrageous inflation in price in my book. 😞

[@jesus.moreno]

wouuuuuuuu the best explanation of this topic

[@lahmyaj]

Great video mate. Subscribed 👍🏻

[@sometechguy]

Appreciate it, thank you. 👌

[@markcruise]

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.

[@bigpoppa1234]

That was my experience as well.

[@serdar-ors]

what capacity do u use. x16 or x18 version ?

[@andrewervin2679]

I got a new 8TB Exos for my AM5 build. Was best price per gigabyte within my budget and rocked a 5 yr warranty.

[@tdome3000]

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.

[@C4H6As]

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.

[@troyBORG]

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)

[@LaurenceBlunt]

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.

[@ShangDiAboveGodhood]

Hello SomeTechGuy, I have a Seagate 16 TB Exos™ X18, but the PSU I use seems unreliable as it can occasionally cause the drive to suddenly shutdown then restart immediately. My 16TB HDD says 　+5VDC 1.00 A 　+12VDC 0.72 A My FLYPOWER™ PSU says 　INPUT : 50-60 Hz 1 A 　AUSGANG : 12.0 V 𝌂 2000 mA 　OUTPUT : 5.0 V 𝌂 2000 mA Which brand of PSU did you purchase, that I may buy the same one or with similar stats ? Thank you!

[@sometechguy]

If you are talking about a computer power supply, then it’s not likely to be the problem unless the PSU totally fails to meet the basic specs. HDDs really only draw a few watts, so the PSU should not have any problems proving that power. But if you are talking about an external drive dock and this PSU is for that, then just use the PSU that came with the dock. But what you describe seems a bit odd to me, maybe it’s the disk itself that has an issue if it’s spinning down and the straight up again.

[@ShangDiAboveGodhood]

@@sometechguy Thank you for your reply, truly. I think my situation really is odd, because I bought things separately. The Seagate 16 TB Exos™ X18 that I purchased came on its own, with no other cables nor a PSU. However, it turns out that long before then I had purchased a kit that comprises of PSU+SATA. I dug it up from where I had stocked it, and I reasoned 'why not?'. Basically, it sometimes works - even for long streaks of time - and then there will be periods will the disk seems to run (I hear spinning) but then the spinning slows down and it's accompanied with a stereotypical sound suggesting struggle. Then it gains power again. Virtually, it results in the drive showing up, then disappearing, then showing up, etc. Of course, this is during those times when it isn't functioning well. Sometimes it will work for hours on end. The symptoms that were exhibited made it seem as though the HDD sometimes struggles to draw sufficient power, hence the spinning slowdowns+speedups+··· I don't have a rack or anything - the drive is perhaps more often installed internally, but I'm treating it as though it were an external drive just lying about on desk.

[@sometechguy]

There are usually two ways to fit a drive. One is internally, usually using a SATA power cable that comes with a computer Power supply unit (PSU), this is the same PSU that will power the motherboard and CPU socket, graphics card etc. It looks something like this: www.corsair.com/eu/en/p/psu/cp-9020213-eu/hx850-fully-modular-ultra-low-noise-atx-power-supply-eu-cp-9020213-eu The other is to fit the drive into an external dock, like the Sabrent dock etc. This also comes with its own power supply, and its usually connected to the PC using USB. This looks something like this: sabrent.com/collections/docking-station/products/ec-dflt I am not sure you have either of these, and though its possible to use other methods such as ESATA and you could jerry-rig some power, but if you don't know exactly what you are doing there, I wouldn't touch that. So I can't work out what your setup is here, but its entirely normal for an internal drive like the Exos to come with no cables and the expectation is you already have what you need to connect it. If you are unsure, it might be best to get some help from someone who can look at your setup.

[@julianhj]

I got stung by WD with SMR, I won’t buy from them again.

[@vitvgo]

Thanks for your video.. very informative!! Saw some great deals on these drives on ebay.. some of them sold as new with 5y warranty but “Seagate recertified product”. Would you be concerned about this?

[@sometechguy]

I would personally be cautious and I wouldn’t buy here. The warranty is only supported by Seagate if sold via an authorised reseller, it’s likely they are not. So you could need to rely on the seller providing a return to base warranty. You could ask the seller to confirm if it’s direct or RTB and check they are a real business seller with good feedback. But it would come down to trusting them to provide that 5 year. If they say it’s direct, you can check the SN on the Seagate warranty page and if you can’t register, return it. In itself it’s no assurance though, there are reports of people shucking and successfully registering 5 year warranty’s, only for them to later be not covered because external drives come with 1-2 years. In short, the worst case is that the drive comes with only the eBay 30 day cover.

[@petrusiusmaximus]

Good Video ... In the past i build some NAS beginning with WD (2*4TB, 2*6TB) and as the amount of Data since 2018 the Resolution (4K) rised with the IronWolfPro-Series (4*10TB, 8*16TB and actual 12*20TB with 2*4TB NVME Cachedrives) for the final Archive 3 otherwise i used a Pair of "normal" IronWolf-Disks (18 TB) for my Streaming- and Video-Recording PC for the temporary Archive 2 and on each of the Gaming- and Recording-PCs a Pair of EXOS-Disks (20 TB) for the temporary Archive 1 The Streaming- and Video-Editing PC is a Threadripper 3. Generation with 256GB RAM, 4*2TB NVME and a Raidcard with 4*4TB NVME. The Gaming- and Recording-PCs are one I913900K and one AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D with each 128GB RAM and 4*4TB NVME.

[@sometechguy]

That is a nice kit list! Thank you for the comment and for watching also. 😊

[@C4H6As]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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. :-)

[@highks496]

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.

[@sometechguy]

It is possibly my Plus drive was just DOA. It happens.

[@RamBeuk]

Might be a noob question, but can you put EXOS disks in sleep mode and back on again without any problems? I've seen a lot of contradicting information about it on various forums. I want to build my own NAS project and want it to be as energy efficient as possible because energy prices are really high here in Europe. I haven't decided yet wether to use TrueNas, Unraid, or some other OS.

[@sometechguy]

Speaking from experience, I can give you some numbers from one of my NAS devices running Ironwolf Pro and Exos X18 18Tb disks. The stated limits are 600,000 load/unload cycles for both, which is when the heads are parked. My NAS has a disk hibernation time of 20 mins, and after 2.3 years the unload cycle count is ~6600. So around 1% of the budget. I don't see any evidence of any problems here. I have another NAS with the same idle settings, which has Exos in it also, but it runs Synology surveillance station with around 10 cameras so it has a very low unload count as its writing 24x7. So it will depend on the workload and your idle settings, but I don't see any problems with load/unloads personally. Would be interested in the points of contention. I suspect the biggest concern is physical wear to the head ramps, or to the head assembly itself during load/unloads, but given the spec is 600k cycles it doesn't seem like a major concern if the disk idle isn't set to a really aggressive number. In short, when trying to get efficiency, which is a great idea, balance the disk idle time so they are not parking constantly. What your NAS is doing will influence how you set this probably.

[@RamBeuk]

@@sometechguy It's going to be built in a Z440 workstation with a XEON E5-2650L v4 processor. I found it for less than 200 Euro's and it has 64GB ECC DDR4 2400 RAM in it. So it's not going to be that power efficient to begin with. I have a Synology DS with a WD Red Pro in it. But I wanted to build a more powerful NAS for main storage at location that will only be spun up once a day for syncronizing with the synology. With the latter syncing to my laptops using Synology Drive. I've been keeping my data since 1996 on consumer HDD's. Last week I pulled an old Maxtor IDE 640 GB from my basement which hadn't been touched since 2008 and it still had all the original data intact. I'm starting to wonder if all these NAS drives are really that much different. I have dozens of 2,5" drives lying around and almost all of them still are intact, bootable and contain all the data. Of course I can't check for bitrot as I don't have the original source files anymore. Except for the IDE drive. Which was EXT3. My point is that I want a future proof RAID 1 setup with means to check for data integrity. And then back it up to a cloud as well. I also chose the workstation as it has the power to run VM's and other CPU intensive stuff. Point is, it wil not be on 24/7, I want to be able to spin it up with WOL and it won't need to access the internet like the Synology does. Although perhaps in the future it will. I wanted to buy the DS923+ from Synology, but the hardware is just way too low end. I know people pay for DSM and for good reason. It's really well made. But until I have a bigger budget to buy a more power efficient NAS and even expand it to more bays, I want a solution that isn't bound to Synology's ecosystem. In other words. I want to able to take my mirrored HDD's out and place them in another machine in the future and be able to read all the data, without having to rely on third party software that's most likely expensive and pulls you back in another ecosystem. Is ZFS the right choice for this? I don't know. Future will tell. I might as well put consumer grade HDD's in there as well. HDD's in the early 2000's had much lower data density and that's probably why my old IDE drive survived after all those years. I don't know how long 20TB drives will last as there is no way to know that right now.

[@mapesdhs597]

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).

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@pavelperina7629]

​​@@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.

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@mapesdhs597]

@@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

[@tommyfox5461]

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.

[@Todestelzer]

I had multiple bad experiences with seagate in the past (about 15 years ago). Not sure I will ever use them again.

[@sometechguy]

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. 😒

[@paulwratt]

Often you are limited in drive size capacity by the controller chip. I have a 7 year old adapter for my RPi2, and it can handle 12TB 3.5" SATA3, however _all_ the newer versions designed for RPi3 & RPi4 have controllers that can only handle upto 10TB 3.5" SATA3 . as a side effect I have been watching Amazon EXOS pricing for 10 & 12 TB 3.5" drives for 7 years, and since the introduction of refurbished 10TB EXOS drives, the price for "renewed" and "new" EXOS 10 & 12 TB has remained around 200 dollars US

[@TopiasSalakka]

Do you think it'd be a dumb idea to buy just a single Exos disk for my home server, and then later get a second identical disk and convert it into a mirror setup? Also, what about factory recertified drives? There's a local PC part chain that sells recert 16TB Exos drives for 210€.

[@sometechguy]

I think it depends how important the data is. If your home server is a playground for testing out software and education, and you can afford to rebuild from scratch if you get a disk failure, then its probably fine. If you are going to be hosting data on it that's important, then a single disk doesn't provide a lot of protection from data loss. Maybe backups will be OK for you, but it depends on your data and use case. But technically, you can usually do that, depending on your server OS. And re-certified, that is a good question. I recently bought a re-certified IronWolf Pro 18tb, and it was dead on arrival. Hard to say how thorough the re-cert process is if disks can slip out that are not even recognized by the OS. I also just received 4 Ultrastar disks that were re-certified, I didn't get to test them yet but I plan to make a video on what I find with them when I do get to it. I would say, be prepared for failed disks, do full and thorough testing of the drives when you receive them and if anything doesn't look good, return them. And of course, be clear on the terms of the warranty and who is providing it. I think that once they have a reasonable use on them, of at least say 6 months, if they are clear of any SMART errors and seem to work fine and pass a full surface check, there isn't a reason to think they will fail earlier.

[@TopiasSalakka]

@@sometechguy Technically i could fit all of my truly important data into OneDrive's free tier. I'm in the process of migrating my main PC to Linux, and i want to back up my data somewhere, even though it's just hoarded data and some PS2 disc backups 🫠

[@paveldrumev2117]

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.

[@paveldrumev2117]

Wow 14TB IronWolf for 207 USD? Thats what 8TB IronWolf costs here, 14TB is for about 400+ USD

[@canalluzdivina2424]

in your opinion, whats the best sata single drive large capacity out there?

[@sometechguy]

Right now, I have been buying 18TB Exos, as it’s not just the cost per TB on the disk, but you have to factor in the cost of the drive bay, as they are limited. I am looking at the 20Tb at the moment, as the prices are getting into the same ball park per TB. But prices change all the time, so it’s a loving target.

[@canalluzdivina2424]

@@sometechguy thanks!

[@Mr.Goodkat]

I'm thinking of buying a new laptop, any clue how to make sure you can fit one of these into it?

[@JoãoPauloRicardo-w8d]

Eu posso usar o IronWolf Pro no Datacenter (Dell R750XS)? É Compatível?

[@allenhuffman]

Sadly, no 3rd party Enterprise Drives are listed as compatible with the DS1522+ Synology.

[@sometechguy]

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.

[@allenhuffman]

@@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.

[@ccanaves]

What about Toshiba (I'm a big fan) or HGST/Hitachi (now owned by WD) ?

[@sometechguy]

Good to hear feedback about Toshibai and it seems to be broadly positive. The Synology HAT drives are also white labelled Tosh drives. Though that is a whole other topic. HGST are owned by WD, but they appear to be an independent subsidiary. Though not sure how far the separation goes.

[@brainfreeze1925]

Is there any advantage of using the pro version in my PC? I don't use a NAS and I back up to externals. What I'm after is a drive that has longevity. I'm looking at an 8TB drive.

[@sometechguy]

Check out this video specifically, as its really relevant : kzbin.info/www/bejne/opC8opeMfMh2ZtE And I have some others that may be useful. But in short, here are what I would say about this 1) Some disk models and some manufactures are more reliable than others. Though few models are so much worse that its a serious concern. They can vary from 0.5 to 2% AFR (Annual Failure Rate) in most cases, but this means a 1/200 to a 1/50 chance of failure of any given drive in a given year. Other videos I have explain AFR and compare disks over their lifetimes. 2) Any disk, no matter its average failure rate can fail, and the most likely time for it to fail is usually in the first few weeks to months. Some of the best disks have AFR of 3-5% at the start, and this can be due to manufacturing/QA issues or poor handling in transit. 3) There does not seem to be a direct link between Enterprise, NAS or Desktop drives failing earlier in most cases. Though there are still drives with better rates than others. I have quite a bit of coverage on this in other videos, and I am working on more. 4) The main difference is warranty. A desktop drive may not be more likely to fail, but the longer warranty on NAS or Enterprise drives can allow you to get a replacement for longer. And you may pay a premium for that. 5) Some disks do offer a rescue service, where they will try and recover your data if there is a failure. They may not succeed, but they claim 95% success. The Ironwolf and Pro drives provide this but not in all countries. I have not used it, so I can't say how long it might take. I personally wouldn't want to depend on a recovery service. Other things to consider: some disks can be noisier than others, so if its in your desktop it may be a consideration. NAS and Enterprise may be noisier than desktop disks. Cost is a major consideration. A $300 disk that is has a 0.5% AFR may not be a better buy than a $250 disk with a 1% AFR. Personally, the reputation of a manufacturer always plays an important part. For example, Sony put malware on Audio CDs to try and prevent piracy of the container music in 2005. I have not bought a Sony product since. As you saw in this video, I also wasn't happy with WD after the SMR thing, though probably not to the same level as I was unhappy at Sony. 😜 I would look at the video I linked and form an opinion on either a manufacturer or disk model that seems to have a good AFR rate, and then consider how it is priced compared to the competition. Probably, price is going to be the most important consideration unless the disk model is a real lemon and has a terrible failure rate. And as you say, always work on the basis that the disk can, and will fail. And backup what you care about. Good luck!

[@brainfreeze1925]

@@sometechguy Thank you very much for your detailed reply. On to your suggested video . . . Cheers!

[@TheTechMonkey702]

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.

[@sometechguy]

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.