More Hard Drives or BIGGER Hard Drives - Which is Better?

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Should You Use Fewer Larger HDDs or More Smaller HDDs? nascompares.com/guide/big-hard-drives-vs-more-hard-drives-which-should-you-choose/
How to Choose the BEST Value Hard Drive and Best Price per TB - Get it Right, FIRST TIME! - nascompares.com/2022/12/28/how-to-choose-the-best-value-hard-drive-and-best-price-per-tb-get-it-right-first-time/
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Direct Link to the Price Per Terabyte Calculator - nascompares.com/answer/hdd-price-per-tb/
The technology behind hard drives has evolved RAPIDLY! In just the last few years we have seen HDDs hit over 20 terabytes, seen the number of platters being squeezed into a single hard drive casing reach more than 10 and the performance and durability of these drives somehow continue to improve too! Still, one area that we have seen very little change in over the years is the price per terabyte of most HDDs. Despite the range of capacities available from most HDD brands (Seagate, WD, Toshiba, etc), the cost of the latest and largest HDDs still maintains a hefty price tag, whilst the smaller capacity drives (still broadly keeping their lower price point) are more readily available, occasionally on offer and this leads alot of data storage buyers to ask themselves - Is it better to buy a small number of MASSIVE hard drives or a larger number of SMALLER HDDs? Thanks to modern development and efficient evolution of RAID (redundant array of independent disk) management in NAS and DAS systems*, alongside storage enclosures now ranging from as little as 2 Bay desktop case scale all the way upto 24-60 Bay rackmounts, it is actually quite easy to achieve the same amount of capacity of a handful of 'max capacity' drives with a smaller cluster of more affordable smaller drives. So, today I want to look into the benefits/downfalls of either setup and hopefully help you decide whether you need to opt for bigger or smaller hard drives in your data storage setup in 2023 onwards.
Video Chapters
00:00 - Disclaimer!
00:55 - More HDDs Can Be Cheaper than BIG Drives in the right RAID
05:25 - BIG DRIVES mean you CAN use smaller NAS and save money
08:03 - Big HDDs in Small #s mean 'all eggs in one basket'
09:39 - More HDDs mean More Points of Failure
12:02 - Smaller HDDs tend to be on offer/sale more
13:10 - More HDDs mean Higher Power Use in drives and bigger NAS with higher power use
14:45 - More HDDs in a RAID often means higher performance. Big drive have more access and spin noise
16:52 - More HDDs larger Noise in vibration and humming
20:08 - Larger HDDs can often be restricted to PRO and Enterprise classes
22:45 - BIGGER Drive often benefit from new storage technology and R&D
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*Vulnerabilities And Exploits On Synology & QNAP NAS* - Stay Updated! - nascompares.com/2021/05/26/vulnerabilities-and-exploits-on-synology-qnap-nas-stay-updated/
*NAS Buyers Guide - Get It RIGHT First Time* - nascompares.com/guide/nas-buyers-guide-2022-2023-synology-qnap-asustor-terramaster-wd-buffalo-zyxel-netgear/
*Best 2-Bay NAS of 2022/2023* - kzbin.info/www/bejne/f3ranaycbqiNhcU
*Best 4-Bay NAS of 2022/2023* - kzbin.info/www/bejne/ooLKmKWYfMqVebM
*Best 6-Bay NAS of 2022/2023* - kzbin.info/www/bejne/oWakYY2ld81jrbc
*Best 8 Bay NAS of 2022/2023* - kzbin.info/www/bejne/eWiahplsoN13j80
*Best Photography NAS of 2022/2023* - kzbin.info/www/bejne/sGHZhKGkrd6WZq8
*Mesh Routers VS Powerline Adapters And Wi-Fi Extenders, A Buyers Guide* - nascompares.com/2021/03/08/mesh-routers-vs-powerline-adapters-and-wi-fi-extenders-buyers-guide-2021/
*WD Colours Hard Drive Buyers Guide 2022* - kzbin.info/www/bejne/mKKVq55nh6qcpLs
*An Idiots Guide to WD SSDs - A Buyers Guide WD Colours SSDs* - kzbin.info/www/bejne/gWK4oqqNhstreqM

[@montanamike53]

The time to rebuild an array with 1 of several smaller failed drives verses the time it takes to rebuild an array with 1 of two large drives is important to me as a home user.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

I think it really depends where you are and what you can get. In some countries, it's cheaper to get bigger drives and a two bay NAS, where other places, smaller hard drives and a four bay NAS ended up being the better option. I've always tackled it as a your-mileage-may-vary scenario. Although if you want maximum capacity, a bigger NAS is the way to go.

[@nascompares]

"I think it really depends" could easily be the sub title of this video tbh. All of the points I touch on here are general and "more often than not" categories. I guess the main thrust of it is that there is no definitive answer to Big drive v Many drives, but there are enough smaller points to make one argument more compelling than the other for different users. Personally...I carry 87 USBs in a carrier bag and I shan't have it any other way....

[@Tech-geeky]

Add price to this whole inflation, cost of living everything going up, it basically limits people .. "You'd like to get a large drive, if you could only afford it"

[@noth606]

@@Tech-geeky Well, prices being what they are now, you'll really need to have some abnormally large amount of data for some reason, to get to where you're economically limited realistically. Second hand HDD's cost very little, have enough of them on hot-spare and cold-spare and you can run your array on a potato PC from 10yrs ago, that you have a pair of mirroring each other. Boom, Bob's your uncle - nearly nukeproof. Heck, if you want to be nukeproof, get a cheap laser printer and print the data out into a fire proof bin. Most things can be done on very limited budgets with time and effort, which you ought to have if your budget is severely limited. In most cases people have at least a lot of either time or money, both can solve these sorts of things, just different ways.

[@mytravellinfo]

You know what, I have been researching to having a solution for iCloud and Google One Drive because I am really struggling saving my image RAW files and videos. Then all on a sudden a photographer Tony Northrup brought the light of a NAS! I did not know what NAS is until couple of weeks ago! Then I started to do my own research and found you. I know you dont have smooth voice and attraction catching vocal gestures, but I find myself in you, I would want to express my research so that people can decide what's best for them. I have found the same agony in you. You are like a tech big brother who wants to advice whats best for us instead biased brand marketing. I like your videos. Just wanted to pay my gratitude because I know, a small wish can boost up the moral energy a lot cause you have done so much research, night and day sleepless time. I know for the video but I know it's for the people whom you want to help so desperately. Thank you so so much.

[@berndkemmereit8252]

I've deceided to get a NAS for home use as a media server. I'm checking out a lot of your videos to make up my mind what I actualy want and need, your videos are great, very detailed and very good explanations of the usage and for whom that particular NAS would be of interest. Kepp it up....

[@subliminaliceberg]

Very informative videos. You give info that is very relevant without beating around the bush. You make a good point about balancing out between the cost of NAS system and the actual storage. One option for anyone starting out could be to go for a smaller storage and then buy more/bigger HDD as the data grows and HDDs become more affordable in future, while investing in a NAS with more bays for future-proofing if really necessary. That also means hopefully sticking with the NAS with more bays for a longer time, given the initial cost.

[@chrisbennett5796]

Great information and I love the presentation. You are definitely not boring, even if some would say the subject isn't the height of glamour. I bet you could be a stand up comedian too. A lot of the useful stuff I have learned about NAS technology is from your videos. Nice one, thanks!

[@tonyfphotography]

This is absolutely through and incredible information. You just saved me HOURS of research

[@superbee1970]

Gr9 vid man! Appreciate you going thru all of the various different perspectives and angles of all of this info! My plan is 6 drives, raid 6, at least 2 systems, 1 system as backup, 1 system live, large format drives, not going to be cheap, but want the redundancy of raid and mirror, allowing up to 2 drive failures at one time. Most likely just Truenas scale at this point. Subbed and liked! Keep up the great work!

[@grahamf695]

Really interesting video, thanks. Here are a couple of ideas on presentation of the numbers: 1. Produce a line graph of price against drive size. That would make it clear that the price per terabyte drops a lot from 1TB to 20TB drives - $35 from to $21 per TB on pros. 2. Compare prices for some sample configurations with the same amount of usable storage.

[@noth606]

A drop from $35/TB to $21/TB is tiny, so tiny it doesn't usually need to even be factored in. Differences in orders of magnitude are a different deal, and they do exist from one solution type to another. Compare a 256Gb SSD or even a thumb drive, to a full on NAS with a RAID 5 array with hot spares etc. That difference is a "lot".

[@hpi3571]

There´s a interesting point to consider the multiple disk use. The SATA saturation (or other conector). If you are using the 10 Gb connector and/or VMs and docker applications.You can saturate the data bus with to much IO, exceding the SATA read/write capacity, and depending of biggest caches in SSD. And surprise, more probability of failure via hard/soft or energy. With multiple smaller disks more data can be read and write. The trick is what is the size of storage that you need and what size of NAS (slots) you have (including the extenders).

[@dennisvanmierlo]

I enjoyed this video very much! Very informative!!! What I would have like to see is a graph that shows where the flipping point is to decide on more or larger drives, including the NAS itself.

[@IIGrayfoxII]

When I first got a NAS for mass storage I got a 4 bay NAS and filled it with 4TB drives, it was nearly full after 4 years and I upgraded the drives inside it with 4 10TB drives. I back up the most important data off on the NAS over the movies.

[@smstnitc]

Factoring in that I had a stack of unused drives already, my first Synology was a 12 bay. I filled it with 1tb-6tb drives and was golden since that meant I didn't need to buy drives until I needed more space(which happened, again and again 😄)

[@littlefootfeet]

Did it complain about them not being “synology compatible” drives?

[@smstnitc]

@@littlefootfeet I have a DS2419+ and a DS1821+. Both point out I use unsupported drives when I add or replace a disk, but everything works just as it did on DSM 6, before the push by them for supported drives.

[@butterbagboy]

Great video. One tip from lil ol me. First nas I ever used I bought 4 identical drives same make, model, style type. Unintended consequence was……. Same mtf. All the drives started failing close to each other. Next nas I made sure had a mix of different brands, different styles, mix of new and used. That should spread out the failures to different times

[@zeroibis]

It is important to also consider rebuild and restore performance. With a larger number of drives running RAID 5 or 6 there is a significant difference in rebuild time compared to rebuilding a mirrored array. Also there is a difference yet again when you compare something like a RAID 10 to a pool of mirrors instead. In the case of RAID 5, 50, 6, 60 and 10 your backup will be of the entire array. In the event that data loss actually occurs and you must restore from backup you are talking about restoring the entire size of the array that was lost. However, when using pools instead you can elect to restore only the data from the underline RAID 1, 5 or 6 that you lost. These are all important factors to consider when selecting how you want to build out your storage array. Also I should mention that if you are going with a lot of drives it is also possible to hybrid nest the arrays in such a way as to maximize performance while also minimizing your restore from backup time and risk of inaccessible data. For example you could take two drives and place them in a RAID 0 then take two more drives and place them in a different RAID 0. Then you take those two RAID 0 arrays and Mirror them together. You create sets of 4 drives in this method that you then pool together. The obvious con to this is that you would ideally add sets of 4 drives at a time to your pool.

[@tedwalford7615]

Another specific advantage, related to the advantage of simultaneous reads & writes on multiple disks, is that you can tune a RDBMS so it purposely spreads data across multiple drives and even platters to optimize access, especially for searches.

[@Macho_Man_Randy_Savage]

I'm just in the processes of putting together a NAS...SOOOOOO many questions and this was one of them 😅

[@billygilbert7911]

Great video dude.

[@wertigon]

I have adopted this rule now; Any HDD capacity less than 1.5x what you can get for $200 on the SSD side, is to be considered obsolete. Currently you can get 4TB SSDs for just north of $200, that means 6TB (1.5 x 4) drives are now the smallest HDD that is worth getting. 6TB HDDs are now $90, while 4TB HDDs are $60. Up to each and everyone to put their cutoffs though!

[@foamysking]

I always tend towards the higher end of drive sizes but normally stay a step or 2 below largest capacity so I can have a better price per TB and just know that I can get bigger for cheaper in the future I prefer having expansion bays in my system open as my storage needs grow as that always have and will continue to

[@dangingerich2559]

I've had 7X 4TB Hitachi Ultrastar drives for my NAS since 2015, and still haven't had one go bad on me. I've run it in both a RAID 6 and RAID 10 with a hot spare, and in both hardware and software (WSS) RAID modes, and recently bought another drive to make it 8 and did away with the hot spare, making it the storage for my backups. Still pretty reliable, but I wanted to replace it with SSDs. I'm a believer in minimum 6 drive arrays for NAS, for both performance and redundancy.

[@perikliskagialaris1445]

Great video!

[@leadiususa7394]

It depends on what you need... More I/O - IOPS vs. need for more space. You can't really get both... Great video! I have done a lot of videos on this very topic...

[@BRBearUSA]

Nice video. Thanks. R.

[@JeanSeb1957]

Thanks mate for the great info. I have a 5 yr. old TS-653A with 5 WD60EFRX and I'm stuck with 1gbps connectivity. I'd like to get at least 2.5gbps upgrade so I'm going to get another NAS with faster networking and use it as a staging NAS. I'll add a 6th drive to my 653A and move it to my in-laws house and work out syncing between the 2 NAS.

[@briankenney4244]

"I hate seagulls!" While pointing up was too funny

[@sctexan5392]

As a novice, this makes my head spin. I'm thinking about a NAS to put all my video, music, and photos in one place, with backup, and if I can afford it, allow it to be cloud storage for my kids. I have 25TB of external drives, and while it's good for storage (I'm afraid of disk failure and data loss). I'm totally lost as what to do.

[@LeParadisDuGeek]

shr1 and 1 external hdd backup

[@jacob1000]

depending on how many disks you have for that 25tb look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels for a reference of what raid level you are comfortable with when it comes to disk failure

[@210Artemka]

I got myself a few almost dead HDDs from a Chia mining farm with 30k+ hours on them. I can literally hear them dying, but they hold for 3 months now. I am running TrueNAS in RAID-Z2 setup (2 parity drives, as in RAID 6) with 6 drives total. It might not work for you as it calculates total volume based on the smallest drive size, so running different size drives may result in significant volume losses.

[@adriandeala5285]

😮😮😮😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😮😮😮😮😢😮😮😮😮😮😮😢

[@Eihrister]

​@@210ArtemkaI have 5 drives with roughly 70k hours each that were new when I bought them. Seagate Archive HDD 8TB's, they were throwing SMART errors out of the box, and they are still doing just fine... I thought they were gonna be dead within 3 months of purchase... :)

[@rodfer5406]

Excellent question

[@thethirdman225]

I had a slightly different experience from what is expressed here, though I’m not casting any doubt on the validity of the information. I have a Nimbustor 4, populated with 4x8TB, for 24TB of storage. I went for 8TB because, at the time, it represented the best bang-for-buck and gave me a total capacity (24TB in RAID 5) that I was unlikely to exceed for quite a while. The NAS itself represented the best box I could justify. Being four bay, it also gave me the opportunity to spread my expenses over a longer period. When I originally set it up, it had two drives in it. It was kind of noisy but no more than I expected. When I added a third drive, the noise and amount of disc access was much greater than it had been. Recently I upgraded to 8GB of RAM and added a fourth drive. The first thing I noticed was that the overall noise is far less than it was with three drives and almost certainly lower than it was with two drives. In fact, it’s got to the point where I rarely hear it. This probably won’t be most people’s experience but it seems to me that either by luck or design, I ended up in a sweet spot. I can’t explain it but I can hazard a guess that this is the kind of setup the designers envisioned…?

[@jesus.moreno]

muchas gracias hermano!

[@flyingjeff1956]

I just received two new WD Red drives from Amazon. Each had ENTIRELY different packaging and different stock numbers. Same size drives.

[@kevinintheusa8984]

I just built my own NAS after going through a 2-bay NAS and then added a 4-bay NAS. I built one with 18 HDs and it is much more expandable. I am using UNRAID and it has been great so far. It is much faster and I have so much more capacity. When I need more, I will replace some of my 6 TB drives for 12 TB drives.

[@scampilover00]

Fantastic comparison!

[@nascompares]

Cheers bud. Appreciated

[@bbrixon]

I've been toying with getting an expansion unit for my 1019+ to get more drives or upgrading the current ones I have. 2 - 8 TB, 3 - 4 TB, 2 - 500 GB cache.

[@pyromethious]

At this point, I've settled on the EXOS drives going forward for the capacity, cache, price, and warranty.

[@jamesmeader6539]

I've been playing with that RAID calculator while I listened to your analysis, and boy, now I do have a headache.

[@terrybarker2660]

I use 8 x 8tb as standard in my 8 bay nas's, JBOD. Reason is, I use a 2nd and 3rd nas as backups, and if a drive fails I just copy the data onto its replacement, that way I just keep 1 nas running, otherwise 2 would be on all the time, I do a backup using goodsync once or twice a month, I tried synolgys drive sync, too automatic. I like the control of goodsync.

[@pjohnson21211]

Appreciate the mention that if you buy a number of the same drive from the same vendor you are likely to get drives from the same lot which if that lot has a problem means your risk for trouble is increased.

[@nascompares]

A MASSIVELY overlooked (if slightly rare) factor, yeah. Glad you spotted that! Cheers for watching bud

[@fretbuzzly]

Select drives based on workload and never mix workloads. If you're recording surveillance 24/7 don't mix that with other data. The surveillance activity is going to wear out drives faster. Putting other data into that mix is putting that data a risk. So you might need bigger drives for surveillance and maybe smaller drives for your other stuff. Create separate arrays to separate the workloads and buy drives that make sense for each workload.

[@boostedmaniac]

I’d always lean towards getting a bigger NAS and smaller drives rather than bigger drives and smaller NAS. There’s more options in terms of backup and space options.

[@makatron]

After an almost critical incident, hot spare makes more sense to me. If not go for dual drive fail safety in synology to stay safe. Avoid buying drives from the same batch, I went as far as buying drives from different stores and different months.

[@Cookie82772]

I always had this instinct but it's not discussed a lot online. I tend to buy from different batches too. What's your opinion on using different brands in a RAID 1 array for further diversification? assuming same capacity, etc..

[@shadow-wulf]

Of course I didn't see this info until after I bought my six 6TB drives from my local shop, so that's guaranteed that mine are all from the same box, sigh. On the good side they've been spinning for 5 months now with no issues whatsoever 😊

[@makatron]

@@shadow-wulf it's not like it'll make them go kaput at once but after dealing with mission critical databases, you just become paranoid about even an error in a batch. I'm sure you're fine! *knocks on wood*

[@fretbuzzly]

Hot spare means if you don't have a failure for a long while by the time you do your hot spare is out of warranty.

[@fretbuzzly]

Something to consider is drive usage. You might have an 8 bay box to be used for various things. It's best to separate workloads. If you are recording surveillance cameras 24/7, a very high write, and possibly read, situation, don't mix in other data. Not only will it slow down reads and writes of non surveillance data, but the surveillance drives are going to fail sooner and put your other data at risk. It's better to create separate arrays for each. This will also allow you to mix up drive sizes. You might need bigger drives for a bunch of camera recording for 30 days or whatever, but maybe you only need smaller drives for your other data.

[@wallenstein-dk9468]

It would be really interesting to me if you could make videos at regular intervals for things like When will the price of hard drive come down and when will we see bigger capacities in the small classes.

[@nascompares]

That's a good idea, but would be quite a lot of videos with quite short shelf lives. That said, I really, REALLY recommend the Price per TB tool that Eddie built (nascompares.com/2022/12/28/how-to-choose-the-best-value-hard-drive-and-best-price-per-tb-get-it-right-first-time/) This will allow you to enter the parameters of drives, capacity, brand, RAID and more - then it spits out drives (priced as of 'now') on amazon. Its updated daily and if you are looking for the best way to track how much TBs your money can buy you in 2023, its the best there is tbh. Hope this helps!

[@mikescott4008]

Recently got an 8 bay QNAP, but getting disk combo nail is more challenging. Current stack of drives don’t give me what I’m ideal after 3 x 3TB 4 x 4TB 2 x 12TB Will prob get rid of the 3 and 12TB drives for more 4TB The 12TB are HGST ultra star drives, as you say noisy too, but that’s not an issue. Got 2 X 32Gb for cache

[@ronnyrandertjes]

Thank you these great video's, I highly appreciate them! If I may ask a request on a video. using QNAP NAS and running Qumagie. How do you backup meta data from Qumagie as they are stored in an Qumagie database and not in the photo or on a separate file. Ronny

[@whya2ndaccount]

I have an 8 bay DS1821 with 4x 8TB. The rationalisation was that as my data needs grew I could either add more 8TB or on the basis that over time costs would come down start adding say 12TBs and through SHR move to an all 12TB RAID. So far so good.

[@nascompares]

I often recommend this very thing for those who have their heart set on a 4 bay but have a little more budget left (or have over specced their day 1 storage needs significantly - slice a TB or 2 off each drive, pump that money into more bays). There are arguments on both sides (i.e drive availability down the line), but if you are running on an SHR, then that's less pertinent.

[@mph8759]

@@nascompares “87 USBs in a carrier bag…” - I loled!

[@frankwong9486]

Quality content ,love it Currently got 8 PCS mg05 8TB which is super noisy when using in regular plastic Nas Moved into a node 804 they are way less noisy on ticking . Red 4TB non SMR is just fine, they are way silent compare to the mg05

[@grahamf695]

The required amount of redundancy depends on how you plan to use the storage. If the NAS is the primary storage, then redundancy is very important. If the NAS is backing up primary storage on other computers, then RAID might be less critical for some people. The other consideration is point in time, or off-line, copies. If you have a fire, flood, theft or a ransomware attack, it might take out the whole NAS. Therefore, you need protected offline copies. That means maybe double or even more storage. How should we provide that? Does that remove the need for redundancy in the NAS?

[@tweedeldee8122]

I'm back to simpler is better. Always did Synology Hybrid raid with 4 (Usually 4TB) drives. With my new 4 bay I decided on two Toshiba MG08 Series 16TB. I like it better.

[@bikerchrisukk]

Wow, you really went into this one eh. I actually like the seagulls!

[@kenwilliams3279]

I think its worth including hot and cold spares into the discussion too

[@notsimar]

some of the bigger nas have addtional features as well that should come into determining the value proposition

[@jaxwylde2139]

Another excellent, and informative video! I actually looked to see if "Graham Malcolm...or whatever his name is", entered a comment yet. He probably loves seagulls.

[@nascompares]

YOU REMEMBERED THE NAME(S)!!!!

[@krystynahaywood1968]

Thanks

[@nascompares]

Thanks for the support Krystyna! Massively appreciated. Have a fantastic week.

[@tombouie]

Thks Mr HD ;)

[@nascompares]

Cheers man

[@KelvinKMS]

I just bought WD Gold 20TB. Crazy fast Built-in NAND and transfer speed up to 500MB/s !!! and much less noise !! I always love larger drive than small one. Because you will save money to throw away small HDD.

[@derekv6479]

I choose both!

[@marcus268]

More bays: allows expansion, means you can postphone an upgrade. Clarifying your data increase is also important. Duplicate finder is alao a good way to save money here.

[@kasper8509]

Binging your content!

[@SwissPGO]

Things are even more interesting when looking at CEPH instead of a single NAS. Off course you need at least 3 servers and fast and dedicated network

[@InspectorGadget2014]

Nice video! I always calculate the price per TB. ;-) As that way there is often a HD-size (and above) that the price per TB is higher than the smaller/previous-size one. (price per TB) We often opt for a wee bit smaller but more drives. As we always have 2x cold standby HD's (thus unused!) near the NAS. But more drives also means more power-use as you already indicated and also more heat. (more cooling might be needed) Business-wide you should replace your HD's every 3 years (5 years, max) but for the average user at home, you replace when really needed. (or after 10 years?) To reduce risks, we also opt for multiple NAS. As a NAS may fail (power-supply, firmware-upgrade, bricking) With larger drives the rebuilding of the RAID also may take longer., when something does go wrong. BTW, also worth noting, the weight of the NAS might become significantly higher when you are using more drives (noticeable after 8x drives IMHO) Generally speaking, the 6TB and lower are robusts as rocks (longevity), 8TB to 10TB are often the sweet-spot for pricing in my experiences. Word of advice: buy as many drives as can fit in your NAS as down the line by the time you want to buy additional drives, the manufacturer may have moved-on to newer models..

[@InspectorGadget2014]

There are indeed so many arguments and I do not want to use the words pro's and con's but rather benefits and caveats. Your video is quite clear there is no definite answer. Plus, I would say, personal preferences. But excellent to line-out some of things one can think about when making such choices. As a famous Dutch soccer player once said: every disadvantage has its advantages ...

[@nascompares]

As always, wonderful observations man. This video was largely born of an issue I faced with a user in the advice section that was buying a 24 bay and wanted to partially populate. I did highlight (as you did) that all too often smaller or more niche drives can go 'end of life' or changed (ANYONE WHO BOUGHT FIRST GEN WD GOLD HDDS - YOU KNOW!), but it wasn't especially heeded. 15 mins into composing my email to the chap and I realized it was effectively an entire video script. The same is true of a UPS video that should go out in the next week or so (though that is even more niche and the pros and cons even more ambiguous). Also, I know this vid is only like 2 hours old, but I'm surprised my points about HDD noise are not getting highlighted more. Sometimes I genuinely feel like I am the only sod who is talking about how bloody noisy ent/pro drives are! Too, TOO many phone/video editors are buying 4 bays with 10GbE, stuffing it with 20TBs and then getting a shock that it sounds like R2D2 having a panic attack! I'm quite looking forward to seeing your thoughts on my video coming soon (genuinely called) '10 Dumb Questions about NAS that are not actually dumb' (part 1 in possibly a 3 part series). Have a great weekend bud.

[@InspectorGadget2014]

​@@nascompares You most certainly have a very valid point about the noise, that's also why I have not all of our NASses turned-on all the time. (and some experiences with WOL & 10GBe haha) And even then, when I do a full shutdown (once so often), the true silence can be deafening! Although modern-day high throughput switch's fans can, especially when coming of age, become a much larger nuisance in my experience. That's also why I have the truly sound-dampened 19 inch racks (Ucoustic Edge) in use. I always look forward to your videos, as they make me think, consider and sometimes even reconsider. And think outside the (padded) box, being more creative, flexible, and sometimes be amazed. (in the positive sense, of course!) To me personally the dumbest question is the question not being asked, if you pardon the pun. Thank you again for this gem of a video! You too have a great weekend!

[@Mr.SharkTooth-zc8rm]

Wow man! 🤯

[@g.s.3389]

I would have divided the presentation between Consumer needs/suggestions and business needs/suggestions: in case of business you need IOPs and you do not care about noise because you have a datacenter (for small that it can be), so smaller disks in higher number give you better performance anche noise means Enterprse disks which have higher number of TB/year. at the same time as enterprise, for small that you can be, you should implement the 3-2-1 backup rules or at least having a backup site. the additional point is having a redundant power supply on your NAS. for the remaining part, what you said is perfect for a consumer site.

[@nascompares]

The issue/barrier I will always have with tackling any subject with separate Consumer/business POVs, is that it immediately overcomplicates the subject. That's why I make separate videos for home/business. I recommend you watch my Pro Vs Ent drive series

[@mogenshansen7210]

If a drive in a RAID configuration fails, it takes longer to restore a large driver than a smallere. Thus it takes longer time before the redundancy is restored. We are talking time in the order of days. During that period another disk failure leads to full data loss

[@nascompares]

THAT is a bloody good point!!! Cheers for spotting the omission. Have a great weekend man

[@thethirdman225]

To what extent can you mix and match drives in something like a Synology, QNAP or Asustor system? I have only WD Reds because my original NAS was a WD. I was wondering whether I can use Seagates if one fails. I was also wondering a switch to a bigger drive would work. Say I have four 8TB drives and I replace one with a 12 or a 14. Does that work? What impact is it likely to have on performance?

[@blcjck8121]

I've mentioned this before, but if you are shopping for Pro drives, the only way to go is enterprise (Exos, Ultrastar). Depending on region they are much cheaper and also better.

[@nascompares]

I (mostly) agree! Just to check, did you watch my video on Pro vs Ent HDDs last year (he said, arrogantly)? If not, I would love to hear your thoughts on it - kzbin.info/www/bejne/gZukYoaCgNt1kK8

[@blcjck8121]

@@nascompares I do indeed watch most of your content (including the one you mention), it is much appreciated btw. I can of course only judge based upon my own experiences and region (Scandinavia). But for the last few years at least, prices on enterprise have been consistently lower vs. pro, which means that at least in my case pro doesn't make sense. Let me be clear, I only look for largest sizes available, save the most recently released, for the same reasons you have highlighted. Example, at time of writing and what I see pretty much consistently: Red Pro 20 TB - ≈ 563€ Ironwolf Pro 20 TB - ≈ 508€ Ultrastar 20 TB - ≈ 397€ Exos 20 TB - ≈ 377€

[@the_bogeyman.]

Are WD gold as good as Ultrastar?

[@blcjck8121]

@@the_bogeyman. Presumably they are the "civilian" version of Ultrastar, so yes. I've never found them at less than ludicrous prices though, so it's never been relevant to me.

[@the_bogeyman.]

@@blcjck8121 for some reason, wd gold 16tb are 100€ more expensive than wd ultrastar 16tb here. I am filling my ds920+ with ultrastars.

[@jimthvac100]

currently my Media collection is currently under 3TB so I do not need a very big set up yet. Currently using 3 2TB reds in a raid 5. About to upgrade to 3 3TB drives in a raid 5 Then have a single 10TB HDD as a Back up.

[@adoteq_]

Toshiba 16TB drives have been cheap for some time. Now the weet spot seems 18TB, but ymmv

[@LiLBitsDK]

yeah $/GB is best around 16-18TB but also need to consider the amount of drives vs. total storage... 2x 16TB is less storage than 4x8TB then $/GB is through the roof when you only get 16TB vs 24TB on the other setup 2 vs 4 drives that is important too

[@beardedgaming3741]

i went with 24 14tb refurbished drives for my nas

[@LEGOCAMARO]

16tb drives is my sweet spot for storage to drive failure ratio

[@gwood19841]

You were two weeks too late with this video, I just brought 5 16tb drives. I refuse to do the maths to see whether I made the right choice!

[@sisko212]

It depends. If your nas it is just for fileserver and a few clients go foe bigger disk. If youf nas contains db's and lot of clients, better more disk..

[@dawnmitchell8213]

In 2004 I had 9 Seagate hard drives fail in a 2 week period and they were sequential serial numbers. When I contacted them about a possible issue with that batch they spewed out the corporate boiler plate response saying that wasn’t the case and that their hard drives were of very high quality blah blah blah. I asked for new replacements rather than refurbished ones but they wouldn’t do that either. I’ve never sold another Seagate drive since. I doubt the few thousand drives I’ve sold over the years that weren’t Seagate are missed by them but I also never recommend Seagate because of their piss poor customer service.

[@SoftMotion-Black]

would be nice to compare RADIx vs throughput comparison to see in which case yo can utilize 1/2.5/5/10 Gbps....

[@davidlean8674]

I think the bit you didn't really focus on when comparing two 18TB drives vs 5 smaller drives was you dropped from a RAID Mirror to a RAID Array. That is often a big performance drop. Also replacing & rebuilding a RAID 1 mirror is faster. And if you lose both, and want to pay someone to do disk plater recovery, the probability of retrieving usage data, drops significantly when they need to reconstruct the data off multiple drives. When might you lose both RAID 1 drives simultaneously? Domestic: Voltage spike/lightning. Commercial: Some idiot unscrews the wrong thing & drops all disks on the floor.

[@llothar68]

Only mirrors are in my opinion safe. Too many stories about crashs during RAID array builds.

[@FC-eo9tn]

What's the best HardDrive for HomeUsers (for Data, Video, and Surveilance)? ...maby a Seagate Exos x16 (with 14TB) in a QNAP Turbo Station TS-464 8GB .......what do you think?

[@daeejon3100]

can we mix different sizes of HD, like 12tb and add a few 4tbs? thank you

[@josephbell3289]

Would it be a good idea to have the redundancy drive twice as big as the primary drive so that when the primary drive fills up, the redundancy drive can become the primary drive and then get another redundancy drive twice as big as the new primarry drive and the original primary drive can be put in another location for storage?

[@incandescentwithrage]

Or, Dell T630 LFF server £350. Used 2GB cache RAID controller £110 6x used 8TB HC520 drives, £70 each. Needed a server as well as a lot of storage, so leaving out CPU & SSD upgrades.

[@REGameFly]

Is it possible to set up my NAS to copy over from a HDD to SSD and paste back on shutdown? Or just work in parallel with the SSD as a main refference and buffer stack any writes that the HDD can’t keep up. I preordered myself a 6bay + 2 m.2 Ugreen NAS. I worry that the biggest size SSDs are 8TB, but I could add two and have 16TB, somehow copy that to a HDD. And any less important data on normal HDDS

[@DavidM2002]

Having just replaced or added HDD's to both my 4 bay Synology and my 4 bay QNAP, my next NAS purchase to replace one of these will be an 8 bay. And I'll install 3 larger HDD's in RAID 5 or Synology Hybrid RAID and add new and larger drives as the need arises and prices fall. The worst thing about smaller NAS is the cost of pulling out perfect good, decent sized HDD's because you need to replace them with larger drives. This is especially problematic with QNAP as you need to have all drives be the same size. With Synology's SHR, drive sizes can be mixed ( although even that is not perfect). The extra cost of an 8 bay vs a 4 bay is easily saved by the ability to continue to use my older, smaller HDD's. Don't be deterred by up front costs; look at longer term use and future purchases and redundancies.

[@brandon_wallace]

RAID 10 with 4 hard drives seems like a good idea.

[@Hotrob_J]

Why not RAID5? You lose a little performance, but you'll get 50% more capacity.

[@brandon_wallace]

@@Hotrob_J RAID5 has problems. Do research.

[@michaelmanus7765]

@@brandon_wallace RAID 10 has some advantages over RAID 5/6 including likely rebuild time in case of drive failure for similar/same size drives. I have used RAID 5 for many many years and know that not only are the rebuilds likely to be slow with drive failure but worse is a failed rebuild which is a real issue that does occur. With the price of larger drives going down, a nice 4 drive RAID 10 is very practical.

[@lapprentice]

Here is how I do it: get the price divided by total capacity to get $/TB. That is the true cost of your storage. Then you can compare apple to apple on all of your drive options and pick the cheapest one. Just note that there is a trade off. The more drives you have, the more power it is going to draw and the more points of failures there are in your system.

[@llothar68]

I wait for special CPU with lots of PCIe lanes and very little CPU power consumption. They would need a verys special design, so i guess i will have to wait forever before i can get a Raspberry Pie like system with 128 PCIe lanes (remember, they don't need to be active all at once, but you can't reconnect them dynamically as they are point to point, not a bus).

[@SirReptitious]

More. That was easy. ;-)

[@nickrobertsN7]

Agree head spinning. (5400?) My current problem is ripped blu rays will not stream via Plex over my network to fire TV. Having to convert down hard. Is it my network speed? (How do I test) is it my internet speed? (Max 33mbs).

[@charliebrown1947]

huge enterprise drives can go 300mb/s sequential while a 4 or 6tb drive usually cant even hit 200mb/s especially if they're 5400rpm so fewer disks can be as fast depending on the size difference. Also, the power use is substantial when using more disks. disk power usage can be more than the rest of the entire system combined when talking about 10+ disks

[@Nick_Lavigne]

Nice Dreamcast sticker.

[@nascompares]

Cheers mate. It's seen better days though. New PC arrived and debating making it a 'Genesis', 'Mega Drive', 'Master System ' or a 'Saturn'

[@stephensears7483]

Thank you for the thorough video! Perhaps one other aspect to consider is the best way to increase space with a 4-bay NAS that has expansion capability. I have a 918+ with 4x4TB. Shall I replace the drives with 4x8TB drives, or shall I daisy-chain a second 4-bay NAS with another array of 4x4TB?

[@EuroPC4711]

I think I’d go for replacing the 4x4 TB with 4x8 TB because, well otherwise you need to buy an expansion unit and additional drives. You then can do that again. But at last you have to replace all 9 drives.

[@nascompares]

*what he said* - Yeah, buy the new larger drives (8TBs are regularly on offer too). Plus, if you can stretch to it, buy a really low end 4 Bay and then set it up as a remote backup device. A proper value one with a Realtek CPU. Then have it on the network or remotely at a friend/colleague/family member's home. Sync them... boom... BACKUP CITY!

[@stephensears7483]

@@nascompares Thanks! that was exactly my next step!

[@stephensears7483]

@@nascompares I was looking at the DS418 for that purpose

[@InspectorGadget2014]

I'm no Synology expert and these types of questions can be best placed upon NASCompares forum. For what it is worth; we own a lot of NAS and never ever expand a NAS, we either replace the NAS (or HDD's) or place another NAS into the network. The problem with expanding your NAS is that there is often a catch; either you lose (some?) redundancy, or lose speed & performance. Plus the risks when something happens between either of them, how will it cope with the problem, will it not destroy/crash the volume? And the tipping point is often more the costs; what is the budget/how much are your plans going to cost. Expansion-units are quite expensive, and with the (technical) drawbacks, often the better choice is looking into alternative paths to increasing the capacity..

[@Dan-in-Virginia]

Get more drives, put it in your utility room, connected to your core switch, on a UPS.

[@chrishalle1982]

If your Data is very very very important than use a 4 bay or larger, with larger Harddrives in Raid 1. in a 4 bay for example you have 3 Discs of failure.

[@Elrevisor2k]

Cheaper more drives but what about power consumption? More watts consumed or is the same? Let’s say will last 6 years and had to pay more electricity ⚡️ during those 6 years that also impact

[@trustedsource1273]

Still not clear which is best 🤔🤔, so I bought a QNAP TS-1232PXU-RP-4G 12bay ($1475) and put in 12 x 20TB drives (Ironwolf Pro $329 each). After RAID 6 have 185TB available 😉😉2 x 10gbe, 2 x 2.5gbe network connection. Bought 13 drives to have a spare. Total cost before tax: $5752.

[@dr.robertjohnson6953]

More drives is always better. If you have one disk drive, failure of that one drive and you could loose everything. With more drives, you can run a raid array. With options for mirrors drives. Options to strip across drives for incredible speed. Or data protection using a drive for bit checking to ensure data stays intact. Just swap out the bad drive. And then the ultimate, use them all together. Speed, reliability. So many options. More is always better.

[@FlyingFun.]

hdd hum is something that drives me mad, I can stand the ticking etc but the hum goes right through me and i can hear it from one end of the house to the other. So for now I'm just doing manual backups and using local storage, no networking.( I really dont trust networking much when it comes to viruses etc ).

[@brokenicelight]

It takes less time to rebuild the Raid with a smaller HDD. This would be an Argument for more smaller than fewer larger drives.

[@artificial_S]

More bigger hard drives

[@blahorgaslisk7763]

OK Typed up a long post and then lost it all... So here is a short version. Check the manufacturers HCL (hardware compatibility list) before buying drives. And if you don't find a drive of the capacity you want then consider if it's worth the risk. RAID controllers can be real finicky about drives. You may feel SATA and SAS is mature tech and there should be no compatibility problems, but there are and there will be more. I've worked with (from memory) Adaptec, Areca, Raidcore, 3Ware and LSI. Sometimes the compatibility problems are blatantly obvious, but sometimes they are a creeping problem that takes time to develop, and they don't get better with time. Sometimes a firmware upgrade of the drives or the controller can help, but there's no guarantee that either is coming if you start out with incompatible hardware. Also stress test the arrays before your start using them. Run every storage test you can think of on them, and then try some more. Check the RAID logs and take note of any warnings. You don't want warnings! Not even the non critical kind. Make sure there's as little vibrations as possible. Vibrations can play havoc with RAID arrays even if they are not strong enough to cause a head crash. Also don't use Shingled magnetic hard drives. They are a pain when used for RAID. Temperature! A interesting paper published by a storage company probably a decade ago showed that the ideal running temp for HDD's seems to be between 35 and 45 °C. Higher or lower temperatures showed increased failure rate. But don't take this as gospel. However we do know that high temperatures are bad in general, and 40°C is a quite easy target for HDD's.

[@922tommyhihidiu]

Actually, I think in most case It depends on how many IO is on your motherboard such as, if you have 4 SATA ports and you used 2, then you will soon realize if you buy too many low-volume hard disks, you will soon be out of IO to let you upgrade in the future

[@922tommyhihidiu]

also, why get an array of Smaller HDDs instead of getting an SSD, SSD is using fewer SATA ports, and still getting the speed

[@SamGib]

I dont think we should only look at size vs number but also failure rate. I would rather go with a disk that doesn't fail on me that often then the one i need to buy a new disk every few years and rebuild the RAID.

[@RobCoops]

Having not watched the video... both have their benefits and drawbacks. Benefits: More means higher throughput can be achieved and higher levels of redundancy can be gained making the setup more resilient when it comes to disk failure. Bigger means less power draw, less vibrations and less potential heat, less physical space used and more capacity. Drawbacks: More disks is more power draw, more vibrations more heat production and more physical space used. With the added redundancy comes less capacity as the redundancy means disks are there just to cover the situation where one or potentially more disks fail protecting you from data loss in those cases. Bigger disks means less options for redundancy as you have less individual disks, less theoretical throughput and often higher cost because even though the cost per GB drops the amount of GB's per disk is significantly higher. In the end it does not matter much which one you pick as long as you first take some time and think about what your goal is with the setup maximum redundancy and not to concerned about max capacity well more disks is better. Maximum capacity and not to concerned about the data's longevity less big disks is the best option. If your chosen NAS enclosure allows for more disks than you are currently using then less but bigger might also be a good option as it will allow you to grow the storage capacity over time.