Failed drive in a NAS

[timbo343]

Ive come into work this morning to find one of our NAS boxes, the oldest one (from 2009) has had its first drive failure.

 

Its a HITACHI 1TB HDT721010SLA360 and the NAS has 4 of them in a RAID 5 configuration. Can i replace it with a Western Digital Drive (WD Black 1TB 3.5" SATA Desktop Hard Drive - Ebuyer I get a bit confused about replacing them and what to replace them with.

 

Thanks

[newpersn]

Ive come into work this morning to find one of our NAS boxes, the oldest one (from 2009) has had its first drive failure.

 

Its a HITACHI 1TB HDT721010SLA360 and the NAS has 4 of them in a RAID 5 configuration. Can i replace it with a Western Digital Drive (WD Black 1TB 3.5" SATA Desktop Hard Drive - Ebuyer I get a bit confused about replacing them and what to replace them with.

 

Thanks

 

Cant see it being a problem if you got spare,

 

Whats the model of the NAS?

[SHimmer45]

unless the NAS is THAT fussy over the drives it uses, it should be ok i would try and match the spare as closely as possibly (ie size spindle speed & cache size)

[timbo343]

Cant see it being a problem if you got spare,

 

Whats the model of the NAS?

 

Its the Buffalo TS-H4.0TGL/R5. Like i say, its the first failure on this nas since 2009 when we bought it.

 

unless the NAS is THAT fussy over the drives it uses, it should be ok i would try and match the spare as closely as possibly (ie size spindle speed & cache size)

 

We have 3 other buffalo NAS devices. One of them has had 3 drives replaced so far. It used to have the seagate drives in but buffalo swapped them out for the WD Green 2tb version which is why im thinking the WD Black will be ok.

[newpersn]

Its the Buffalo TS-H4.0TGL/R5. Like i say, its the first failure on this nas since 2009 when we bought it.

 

We have 3 other buffalo NAS devices. One of them has had 3 drives replaced so far. It used to have the seagate drives in but buffalo swapped them out for the WD Green 2tb version which is why im thinking the WD Black will be ok.

 

Could you not get the WD Reds?

[timbo343]

Could you not get the WD Reds?

 

Might have to go red for red in this one, though we do see once one drive fails the others have a nasty habbit of following.

 

Im not sure why they sent out green though. Maybe they thought the desktop NASs arent intended for the Reds.

[timbo343]

I found this on another forum...

 

I've used all varieties of WD drive now so I thought I'd give some of my experience, as this topic comes up in quite a few searches on this subject.

 

WD Blue

These are your baseline drives; typical power consumption, solid performance, good price. If none of the specific features of the other types stand out then these are the ones you want, they're ideal as capacity drives for a desktop for example.

 

WD Green

These are all about saving energy; they're not actually all that slow in practice for things like streaming, but for more random read/write they lag behind a bit, again not by all that much. The main benefit is that they save power and wear by spinning down when they can, this means they're basically best for things like backup drives which are only in use periodically (e.g - once an hour), if they're made to spin up too often then you obliterate any potential savings you could make, at which point you've got a slightly slower Blue.

 

WD Black

These are pure performance drives, all about speed. Their top speed for streaming isn't that much further ahead than a blue drive, but the main difference comes from it being generally more responsive. Basically if all you want is speed, but you can't afford an SSD with the capacity you need, then WD Blacks are for you. A good value gaming system can do well with an affordable SSD for OS and a few other bits and pieces you can fit, with a WD Black as your main drive for your games, for example by moving your Steam folder onto it, giving you good all round performance and capacity.

They also now have generous warranties (5 years), they're basically WD Red+, if you can take advantage of the extra performance that is.

 

WD Red

I think of these as a hybrid between Greens and Blacks; their power consumption is really good, but unlike the Green which is designed to save power between uses, the Reds are designed to just spin constantly for continual use/availability. They're quiet, responsive, and have good speeds, but most importantly they have an extended (3 year) warranty.

You could use them as system drives and they'd perform just fine, but you probably wouldn't be getting the most of their cost; they're ideal for often used NAS devices, I also like them for RAID setups, particular RAID-5 and RAID-6 since a bunch of them doesn't use tons of power, but they're responsive enough to handle the distributed blocks of data, parity writes etc.

 

 

So to summarise:

WD Black = Speed/high end use, extended warranty.

WD Blue = General use.

WD Green = Energy saving for backups or other less frequent use.

WD Red = Some energy saving, continual use, extended warranty, ideal for RAID.

 

Not to say that you can't use them for different things, ultimately they're still all HDDs with good streaming speed etc. and they're close enough that for general use I doubt you'd notice the difference. But basically if you don't need the extra features of the Red and Black then you're wasting money, and you're probably wasting a Green if you don't let it spin down. The prices can vary rapidly though, so sometimes it's worth waiting a while to see if you can a Black or Red at a reduced price (I got some a little while ago for a NAS at only about £5 extra per drive over Greens!).

[SHimmer45]

i personally use reds at home and have been pleased with them so far.

[sted]

just make sure a hitachi tb drive isnt bigger than a wd tb drive (as now tb is 1000 gb and so on down rather than 1024 and that can make a big difference in the actual size of the drive)

[timbo343]

The WD 1tb REd drive arrived today, stuck it in and its rebuilding now. It should be ready for tomorrow.