I am planning to upgrade my 4 Tb 5400 rpm WD Red drives (in SHR) to either 10 Tb 7200 rpm WD Red Pros or Golds.
I’d love some advice whether it’s better to go with the Red or Gold. The red has twice the cache, but other than that not sure what the differences are. I’m running a Synology DS718+.
@ChuckPa or anyone else’s feedback would be much appreciated! Thanks!
WD Gold (7200 RPM) has a 5 year (maybe longer) warranty
WD Red Pro (7200 RPM) has a 5 year warranty.
WD Red (5400 RPM) has a 3 year warranty.
I personally do not see any benefit going Gold drives because Synology NAS units are not Enterprise grade nor do they have the horsepower to push the drives that hard.
I have gone to Red Pro for the performance (Plex Database) improvements.
Rotational latency is decreased 33% by upgrading to Pro drives. This is noticeable with database operations. You won’t see it when actually streaming.
@trumpy81 and @ChuckPa thanks so much for the advice!
Pulling the trigger on some Red Pros.
throws up in mouth at cost of new hard drives lol
are you selling your 4tb drives?
@marcjt
There you go, A new home for your well-maintained older drives.
Everyone benefits.
I may or may not be selling them… If I do (and I’ll know soon) I’ll definitely let you know @thekobk!
Also, one other question for you Chuck… is there any issue/downside of using a 5400 rpm and a 7200 rpm drive together in one NAS?
There are no issues whatsoever as long as the drive itself is on the approved list published by Synology.
https://www.synology.com/en-global/compatibility?search_by=category&category=hdds&p=1
Thank you both for your excellent help and advice! I always appreciate it, and am always impressed! =)
Hey, I decided to keep the drives and alter my setup a bit… sorry.
The speed of read and writes of the array will be limited by the performance of the 5400RPM drive if you plan on using RAID and not JBOD. As the old saying goes, “A chain is only as strong as the weakest link.”
no problem. thanks for heads up.
@Achilles, how would I be able to use a 5400rpm and 7200rpm drive in a 718+ and take advantage of the faster drive for Plex database reading, DSM operations, etc?
Do you plan on using RAID 1?
Nope. I plan to have the 10Tb and the 4Tb as two separate volumes.
I did read that apparently DSM reserves a part of each drive and sets up their OS in Raid 1 in that hidden “partition”. Is that correct?
That is correct. @ChuckPa can confirm where the PMS data is stored. Ideally you want it on the drive with less latency for more IOPs—this would be the 7200RPM.
DSM takes an equal part of each drive for DSM (root and swap paritions) first. The remainder, which is partition 3, is available for user data. DSM’s portion is mirrored onto each drive. This means you can boot DSM from any single drive. The data volume will show as Crashed but DSM will be live
None of the partitions are hidden.
Your first volume (/volume1) will be those drives DSM defines first. It does a simple sequential assignment of volume ID. /volume1, /volume2, etc etc.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
