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Disks for Synology DS220+


Stellarat
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Stellarat

Hi,

I'm considering picking up a Synology DS 220+ if I can find a Black Friday bargain

This will just be used for media really so I will run it as Raid 0, and I'm not too concerned about using disks designed NAS' as it isn't going to get heavy 24/7 use and I can live with a failure.

I appreciate that probably means I can use ANY disk, but wondered if there were any recommendations? 

Also SDD vs HDD? I can position the  NAS outside of the living room so I am not bothered by HDD sounds.

Thanks

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FrostByte

I've only used Seagate NAS pro drives in my Synology.  Been working very well for me as far as reliability which is important to me

However, desktop drives will be a little cheaper and the SSDs of course quicker and quieter.

You might put Emby server on a SSD and your media on desktop drives I suppose if you want to create two volumes.

If you haven't seen it, Carlo did a writeup on how to convert the m2 slots to drives you can force your server files.

Can't say I have any experience using desktop drives, but probably can

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rbjtech

I can't comment on the specific drives that @FrostByte mentions above - but in my 30+ years of hardware experience, Seagate are almost exclusively the worst drives from a reliability perspective.

Of the drives spinning 24x7 in my servers for the last 5-6 years (in very well controlled /cooled environments) - all failures/smart errors have been with Seagate drives ...

Zero issues with Samsung, WD and Toshiba drives - some now approaching 8-9 years of 24x7 usage.

My 2p

 

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heffeque
On 11/6/2022 at 1:49 PM, Stellarat said:

Hi,

I'm considering picking up a Synology DS 220+ if I can find a Black Friday bargain

This will just be used for media really so I will run it as Raid 0, and I'm not too concerned about using disks designed NAS' as it isn't going to get heavy 24/7 use and I can live with a failure.

I appreciate that probably means I can use ANY disk, but wondered if there were any recommendations? 

Also SDD vs HDD? I can position the  NAS outside of the living room so I am not bothered by HDD sounds.

Thanks

 

I'd recommend grabbing the DS920+ and setting up SHR (improved RAID 5) on Btrfs.

You don't need to fill it up with drives, you can buy a couple of fairly big drives (as big as economically possible), and put more in whenever you save money and/or start filling them up.

Additionally, the DS920+ has a couple of m.2 NVMe SSD ports that do wonders with R/W caching (great for Emby snappiness) that you can also add in the future (dirty cheap NVMe drives will do a great job, no need to spend money on faster ones, as the difference will be negligible).

The major thing as for what drives to put in, each person has their own brand recommendation (mine is WD, which are a bit more expensive than Seagate, but are more reliable), but one thing is universal to all brands: don't get an SMR drive, always go for CMR, even if the price is higher. Performance of SMR drives on NAS environments is awful.

Edited by heffeque
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Stellarat
18 minutes ago, heffeque said:

 

I'd recommend grabbing the DS920+ and setting up SHR (improved RAID 5) on Btrfs.

You don't need to fill it up with drives, you can buy a couple of fairly big drives (as big as economically possible), and put more in whenever you save money and/or start filling them up.

Additionally, the DS920+ has a couple of m.2 NVMe SSD ports that do wonders with R/W caching (great for Emby snappiness) that you can also add in the future (dirty cheap NVMe drives will do a great job, no need to spend money on faster ones, as the difference will be negligible).

The major thing as for what drives to put in, each person has their own brand recommendation (mine is WD, which are a bit more expensive than Seagate, but are more reliable), but one thing is universal to all brands: don't get an SMR drive, always go for CMR, even if the price is higher. Performance of SMR drives on NAS environments is awful.

Thanks for this @heffeque, can you tell me why you would recommend the extra spend? I can see the SSD cache making Emby more responsive, but is there any reason the DS220+ wouldn't be up to the job?

Thanks for the tip on CMR vs SMR, I wasn't aware of that!  

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heffeque

It's not the speed of the DS220+, as it's the same as the DS920+ (same GPU). It's about HDD random R/W speeds are very slow compared to SSD, so anything related to data bases and small files (such as the numerous images that Emby fetches to show on the different menus) are going to be noticeably slower on HDD. SSD catching helps the interface be a lot snappier.

The other option is FrostByte's recommendation, but it requires to use an external USB SSD (and never extract it), or to occupy one of the two slots you have with a SATA SSD. (The DS220+ does NOT have m.2 slots); and it's also trickier to configure.

If you don't need/want a snappy interface, then no need for SSD drives whatsoever.

Transcoding and general video serving will be exactly the same on the DS220+ and the DS920+.

Edited by heffeque
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