NAS recommendation for Mac & PC household

I've had a bit of luck of late - everything I have on HDD has kept going without issue. However, I did have a 2 year period when I had a total of 5 HDD failures. One was a Western Digital enterprise level drive that lasted a total of 12 days - warranted for 5 years! It would only have had about 10 continuous hours in use.

Why is this relevant to you?

HDDs are so cheap these day that you'd be NUTS not to buy a Synology DS that can do RAID 1 and run two drives in that configuration. If you have a single drive and the drive fails, you'd better have everything backed up. At least with RAID 1 (mirrored redundant array) you can have one of the two drives fail and lose nothing immediately, although that's no excuse not to have a full backup. These days drives are huge things - think of the pictures/video/music/whatever you store on one. 1Tb is a HUGE pile of stuff to lose if you lose it.

ALL HDDs can fail. None of them are guaranteed not to fail. They are all cheap and have to be made to a price, so failures are just part of ownership. Just my thoughts...

rar110 - one more hint... when you buy the hdd to put in your NAS - try and get different brands. This will ensure you don't have a batch-related failure - if both hdd are from the same manufacturer and fail at the same time, you've also lost your data.

(Note there are really only two hdd manufacturers left in the world! :eek: )

Cheers,
Rob

Thanks Macman, for the detailed replies.

While I'm tempted by the bells and whistles of the single bay option (and speed of down & upload) I can see benefit of 2 HDDs. The NAS was only going to be the back up to both of our current laptops so a HDD failure would be low risk as all stored on the laptops.

However, centralised storage of stuff would be really good as with two laptops there is a lot of the same stuff on both and some different stuff on both. Backing up both means 4 copies of the same stuff which is a waste.

Also, with a 2 bay NAS I will be comfortable with later installing a 256G SSD (which will extend their life) and using the NAS as the main storage/backup location with a copy on the 2nd HDD (if RAID works that way).

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Originally Posted by jonesy63

rar110 - one more hint... when you buy the hdd to put in your NAS - try and get different brands. This will ensure you don't have a batch-related failure - if both hdd are from the same manufacturer and fail at the same time, you've also lost your data.

(Note there are really only two hdd manufacturers left in the world! :eek: )

Cheers,
Rob

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thanks Rob, makes sense.

I wont buy the 2nd HDD right away. I am pushing the friendship by spending $360 on a NAS and single 2TB HDD. So this will probably avoid a batch failure. In the mean time I will keep older stuff backup to a portable hard drive. Email is one thing I want to centralise. I would like to set up a rule so that everything in the inbox moves to a personal folder on the NAS.

WD market themselves as the only specialist maker of NAS HDDs. Is this true? I could easily take a punt and buy a cheaper slower SATA2 HDD.

The different brands philosophy is a good one. I had two Seagate 7200.11 drives, one was the bricked one and the other was bound to do it. Off they went to be RMA'd. The irony here was that the one that bricked still had pretty much all the data. The "good" one was the one the Readynas started to erase but at the time I had no way of knowing what the outcome would be so I had to attempt to recover what I could before sending the drives overseas.

I've since started doing that very thing. The N40L contains a WD drive and a Seagate drive (both drives warranty replacements!) - once bitten and all that.

Backups are like insurance. You never know if you're really covered until you test it. My advice? Forgo something that costs $140 for a while and buy another drive, and even then you're playing with fire if you store ALL copies under the one roof. Not many people intentionally have a house fire! :D

(You can see where I'm headed with this.)

Certain drives are warranted for "enterprise" storage and as you say WD are now marketing affordable NAS-centric drives with their "Red" range. But remember my long MTBF, 5 year warranted RE3 workhorse drive did 12 days!

I thought I was being smart by buying the two 7200.11 Seagates and at the time of release they were well regarded. Then the firmware issue popped up. You know that saying about early adopters being beta testers.

After my first three failures I thought surely I couldn't have clubbed that many baby seals in my former life but then it happened again... and again.

I can't give you any better advice than to never, ever trust a single hard drive for anything. Ever. Murphy lurks in dark corners, under the carpet and in your Weeties packet... :twisted:

I had my PC boot HDD fail last week. Fortunately, I'd just bought a 1TB external drive and had made an image backup of the C: drive.

I wonder what the warranty period is? I can't remember when I bought it from Incisor.... :p

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I had my PC boot HDD fail last week. Fortunately, I'd just bought a 1TB external drive and had made an image backup of the C: drive.

I wonder what the warranty period is? I can't remember when I bought it from Incisor....

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how is this related to the discussion?

Thanks again Macman.

I currently have no backup on the macbook. So one drive would be a step up. I know a seagate barracuda 2tb sata3 drive is only another $100. However, the message is pretty clear. I am already going overboard.

It will only be for a month or two. After the NAS demonstrates its value (not apparent at the moment to swmbo) I will be able to buy another HDD.

MSY has Seagate 3tb for $154- and WD Red for $209-.