Hard Drives for Synology NAS

[dsopfe]

I'm building my first NAS and having a hard time deciding what hard drives to put in it. I'm looking at the Synology DS211j and want to to get a couple of 2TB drives.

Does it matter if I get a 5,400rpm or 7,200rpm drive? It seems like the limiting factor is going to be the network or nas anyway.

Would the Western Digital Caviar Green (older SATA II because that NAS doesn't have SATA III) be sufficient?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514

 

[photonboy]

The slowest hard drive is far faster than even the ETHERNET can handle and wi-fi is slower.

Ethernet is about 10MB/second. hard drives only drop below this for small file sizes like pictures.

Basically it's best to get the slower drives for noise and heat.

I'd probably recommend the 2TB WD Green drives as you mentioned, and no SATA600 is basically no big deal since a NAS won't go above 10MB/second let alone 300MB/second.

 

[deerhound]

If you are considering using RAID you should think about this quote from WD.

Critical: WD Caviar Black, Caviar Green, and Caviar Blue hard drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD’s Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing.

If not setting up raid your choice should be fine.

 

[dsopfe]

If you are considering using RAID you should think about this quote from WD.

Critical: WD Caviar Black, Caviar Green, and Caviar Blue hard drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD’s Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing.

If not setting up raid your choice should be fine.

Does that matter for a small personal NAS though? I'm not an enterprise or business user and won't be taxing it as heavily. Or are they saying it won't work at all in RAID?

 

[FireWire2]

I have use over a year 2TB WD green in my clients 40TB Home server
Over a year without a problem, of course from time to time, we do need to clean up the dirty bit in the raid volume
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/265641-32-40tb-server-performance-issue

PS: it close to two years old now

 

[dsopfe]

Best answer selected by dsopfe.