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Comment by rkuykendall-com | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend Synology. QNAP and FreeNAS seem really great in a lot of ways, but Synology is the solution for people who want something solid that takes up as little of their time as possible. Avoid Drobo and Seagate.

I would make your first / boot drive a SSD, and put WD Reds in the rest, 2 drive redundancy if you want to be super safe.

In addition, I recommend using the built-in cloud backup software to backup high-value data to Blackblaze B2.

Happy to answer any other questions.

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I recently was comparing. Both QNAP and Synology have demo web UIs to try. That was enough for me to stop considering QNAP. It was almost like a joke of the worst most annoying UX possible with all kinds of alerts popping up and everything inconsistent and terrible.

What makes you recommend WD Red?

Given the history of the WD Red series they should be avoided by anyone who cares about data integrity in a NAS.

After the SMR scandal, WD did a rebrand and now any drive with any form of promise for NAS use are called WD Red Plus.

I'd go with Toshiba or Seagate Ironwolf.

Honestly, exhaustion makes me recommend them. I am exhausted trying to find the best drives. They are hard to find, constantly discontinued, or internals replaced without notification. WD Reds are freely available and cheap. I just switched from single to double redundancy to account for trusting them less.

Not a fan of the WD reds, they have 10x the error rate (according to their spec) of the normal enterprise drives. I believe they takes it from one bit error per 120TB read to one bit error per 12TB. Not something I want to worry about during a RAID rebuild.

Thanks, that's helpful! What would you recommend for actually running the backup? Can I mount a Synology NAS over SSH or something? I'd ideally just run my normal backup scripts without thinking too deeply about the end point.

SSH, NFS, SMB, rsync, pretty much anything. It also has built in applications to backup to another synology or S3/glacier.

Avoid plain WD Reds (SMR), for storage use only WD Red Plus (CMR) or WD Red Pro (CMR).

I 2nd the Synology recommendation.

A solid product with zero regrets (thus far).

i'd say wd red pluses, not just wd reds.

Seagate Ironwolf is cmr on the lower end line making it cheaper than the analogous WD Red Plus line. Given the price and that Seagate hasn’t recently fucked consumers I would recommend those drives instead.

Yeah, anything non-SMR and with RAID-focused firmware should be fine. For WD specifically that means Red Plus not Red, because Red has SMR. Seagate Ironwolves should be just fine, but I haven't bought any since the WD version was cheaper at the time I was purchasing.

I've got one of each (wd red/ironwolf) in my Nas at the moment both still going strong 4 years later.

If it's 4 years old, that WD Red is from before WD pulled the SMR shenanigans.

The TLDR is they switched the WD Red drives from CMR to SMR technology without announcing it or noting it on drive specifications, and then when they got caught they announced the WD Red Plus line which became their cheapest CMR drives with NAS -focused firmware.

So before this, WD Red was just fine, but for new purchases, we have to specify WD Red Plus, not just WD Red.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/311182-red-alert-wd-su...

That's good to know, I've still got 2 spare bays to fill!

Another good option according to published Backblaze data[0] is HGST.

[0] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

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