It seems that one or even both of my 3TB Seagate Barracuda HHDs in my NAS have failed, outside of the warranty period, naturally. I did think at the time that buying 2 identical drives was asking for trouble...but can different HDDs (of same nominal capacity) work OK in an NAS?

They've failed after a little over 2 years of not much use, about half full.

So anyway, wishing to avoid Seagate, I see some Toshiba drives, but with mixed reviews and many people saying WD Red are good. So I check them out and again mixed reviews, with people recommending Seagate, and so it goes on.

I read somewhere that all HDDs are destined to fail eventually, so am I just wasting time/money replacing the HDDs? It seems that any type of RAID setup can still fail if one of more HDDs fail.

I still want to have my own "personal cloud" (if I have to use that daft word) so what should I do?

I'm not what you would call an expert on computers or the hardware but Jake's HD has just fail and he's changed to solid state with no moving parts, it's the best I can offer on this subject Dave

That has just happened to me. One failed in the drive and I Hot Swapped in another quickly and it would not back it up. I called up QNAP and they logged on and got it going after 30 mins.
I must be on my 3rd Seagate failed drive.
The best way is to check out with the manufacturer of your NAS, if the HDD are compatible with their system. I have just bought Hitachi (HGST) HDD. Fast and dedicated for NAS drives. They cost a bit more. Check out peoples reviews on Google about the HDD before you buy to see what the failure rate is. HDD are mechanical and they will fail at some point. If you have two bays in your NAS you need three HDD of the same type and size incase one fails, which it will. Bought mine from PC Buy It, excellent company.
http://www.pcbuyit.co.uk

I have 2 D-Link DNS-323 dual NAS Enclosures. I got the first one nine years ago in 2006 and another in 2008. I never use them in Raid 0, only Raid 1 (Mirrored) which means I always have a backup or access to my docs and photos if one drive fails. I have only had one drive fail when using these, and the only other times I have replaced drives is when upgrading to larger drives. Drives are Identical pairs in each NAS. I got the failed drive(seagate) and other problems when using non-identical Hard Drives.

One NAS has 2x 1TB Western Digital HDs which have been in at least 4 years.

The other has 2x200GB HDs and have been in 6 years. Not sure what drives it has as it is switched off at moment and is in the outhouse.

My main gaming PC has 2x1TB Wester Digital Caviar Black drives in stripe mode (Raid 0) and they are are 5 Years old.
Other PC's(and there are many) around the house have a mix of drives.

Sold Hard Drives and repaired PCs for 16 years and I've seen all brands fail before they should. I'm not going to tempt fate and recommend any, but maybe Western Digital were more reliable. Maybe Seagate and Fujitsu weren't
All the Hard Drive Manufacturers can produce bad models at times.

Did you see that.........


.......flew straight over my head?


Said I don't know about these things so you're more knowledgeable then me Colin

If they are failing that fast I would check what temperature they are running at. These little home NAS often dont have the best ventilation especially if running a 7200rpm disk, and heat really isnt good for disks.

I have 4 2TB IBM/Hitachi drives which are coming up to 6 years old with no issues. Also have 4 WD green disks and 3 WD Red disks which all seem fine.

Some types of RAID can cope with more that one disk failure but they are expensive and not provided by most comsumer NAS equipement.

I moved away from a 4 disk Synology to an UNRAID system which will partially cope with multiple disk failures in that you would only lose data from the failed drives not the whole array. It also uses standard hardware so no issues should anything hardware related go bad. It also doesnt need disks of equal size which is nice when your upgrading.

They all fail and there is no substitute for having backups. However from significant personal experience I am of the opinion Seagate rank among the worst for reliability. Anyone slating WD has either been unlucky, formed their opinion after 1 failure or has received badly handled / transported goods.

Agreed, and any RAID system is not by default a backup, its protection against disk failure which is NOT the same thing.

I don't have my array backed up as its not really that practical to do so but then I don't put anything on it that isn't backed up elsewhere or that I cant replace from other places/don't mind losing.

I now have Office 365 so back my NAS to the OneDrive cloud once a month. This is a massive safety net, it lessens the impact of dodgy drives.

I have numerous HDs, last failure was in 2008. (that's just tempted fate)

The two HDDs are set up as RAID 1, the first problem I saw was a red light for one drive, and the console saying "degraded" but precious little info on what to do, a "fix" option seemed to do nothing and straight away the other drive came up with a red light and now I'm struggling to get the NAS to do anything. It starts up but drive 1 looks "dead" as far as NAS is concerned, drive 2 OK but intermittent.

Plan A is to shove a new 3 TB drive in and hope it will recreate a mirror of the other one.

Plan B is to shove the hopefully still OK drive 2 into a caddy and copy contents to a PC and/or external HDD.

The NAS sits on a shelf in the corner of a small room, I'm not aware of it running hot (it only has occasional use) but should I consider 5400 rpm instead of 7200?

What is your NAS - do you know what disk format it uses?

I would pull both and test them individually using software to look at the SMART information. Also give you a chance to see what data you can recover.

I doubt you get much if any benefit from 7200 disks in a NAS as there are so many other variables which will impact read/write/access speeds. Cant say I have bothered benchmarking it on my system. Certainly 7200 disks can run a bit hotter so it may help.

to add speedfan http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php will ready your smart data and give you feeback on drive health compared with others of the same type which may help.

I have a QNAP TS-251, a Synology DS215J and a WD Mycloud.

In NAS drives the common opinion is avoid WD Green drives, as they are a power saving drive and being used in a NAS is likely to lead to sudden failure.

WD Red drives are highly regarded for NAS applications, however even better regarded are Hitachi Desk Star drives.

I tended to avoid Seagate drives after a number failed on me, but last year picked up a couple of 4TB drives from them and was quite happy with them until one failed suddenly last week with no SMART indication of failure.

While the Synology and QNAP are great drives, they can demand quite a bit of technical know how and can be overkill, with my daughter going off to Uni I wanted a drive she could backup to remotely from her Macbook air and discovered the WDMycloud is ideal for that, I have plugged in a 2TB USB3 drive to back that up with a weekly "Snapshot". Time Machine etc.

If you have RAID 1 then its "mirrored " so your data is safe, plug in another drive and it will rebuild the array. RAID one writes the same data to each drive at the same time.

Many people think a RAID is for backup but thats (apparently) not the correct usage, they are to ensure data is still available should a disk fail, (redundancy not backup).

I think the opinion on WD green drives may be old info.

There were issues with WD green EARS drives having issues due to the intelipark feature trying to park the heads due to inactivity which linux based raid/nas didn't like and caused excessive load cycling denoted by the drive clicking a lot. Its can easily be fixed (I did several drives) with a simple bit of software and will make a green more like a red. Note then from what i have read there is no difference between greens ands except firmware and an extra years warranty.

I have 4 WD green disks (2x EARS and 2 EARX) that I bought in 2011/12 which are running just fine. I would agree with Hitachi being reliable as I have 4 old deskstars from 2009/10 which are also going still strong.

Assuming you don't have a separate backup and depending how the disks function in a caddy, I would consider attempting dd image of both before doing anything else.

I was about to get an external 3TB drive as a backup before the 2-disk Zyxel NSA325 decided the RAID was "degraded"

Not heard of "dd image" but any mention of linux throws me into confusion, I can boot in into a distribution copy but then struggle.

I'll get an external USB 3.0, something like this perhaps and see if I can coax the NAS to connect and backup direct using the NAS utilities.

If not then I'll get a caddy but would prefer to do the imaging within Windows if that's possible/recommended?

I did wonder about the WD MyCloud, still not sure I understand it? One copy on the single HDD, another copy in "MyCloud" but how do you keep them in sync all the time if you have a internet problem for example? It's not really RAID 1 is it?

Apparently there is a "DD for Windows" but I've never tried it.
Obvious tip: Software that supports compression would be necessary to create a 3TB disk image on another 3TB device.
R-Studio is a useful data recovery program for Windows and is able to create raw images but isn't free.

Yep I have used R-Studio previously to get some data back.

I am not sure, but as always, its your choice, you may want to read this though. http://wiki.nas4free.org/doku.php?id=faq:0148

Why? it says basically what I said. The intellipark feature in green drives can cause issues but is easily fixed by changing the idle3 setting to 300 (which is the default setting in a red drive). Its a very easy process to change and once done there is no issue (well no more than any other disk).

OK for the average user who may not know, they may miss this or can't be bothered but there is nothing fundamentally wrong with green drive especially for those on a budget.

Personally I would advise against the Green Drives in a NAS/RAID environment, however if you are happy to continue using them, then I wish you luck. I personally would strongly advise against their use for this purpose.

Based on what Charlie? You put forward the "issue" which I have already covered and even in the link you provided, the cause and solution are fully documented. A simple firmware fix and you done, so unless you have anything else to add I fail to see your justification.

Backblaze had hundreds of green drives in there data arrays as part of their 34,000 disk inventory and WD greens have a lower annual failure rate than the red disks. My understanding is they have now been replaced as they were typically lower capacity disks but not due to excessive failures.

Getting back to Daves original question, if you take backblazes data the only disk which should be recommend is Hitachi as across the board have the best failure rates (1.4% at worst vs. 3.8% for WD Greens, 8.8% for Reds and seagate drives which range from 3% to a whooping 25%) so anything else is a compromise but then again HSGT disks are also amongst the most expensive.

See here for backblazes latest reliability report - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015/

I would just add that my system is not quite the same as a "proper" raid in that disks can be spun up and down independently as, unlike raid 1 or 5, the data is not stripped across multiple disks but stored on one disk so only the disk with the data needs to be in use which is a benefit in a my 10+ disk array. Personally I would not recommend any consumer RAID NAS device anymore but thats another topic.

My sons old PC suffered no less than three Seagate HD failures, one was replaced under warranty but that failed too. A colleague recently brought in a laptop with a clicking drive – another Seagate!

I have always run Western digital drives and fortunately I have never had a failure. I have a Western digital black that I put in my original PS3. When the ps3 packed up I stuck it in an enclosure and have used it as a portable drive ever since. Despite the abuse it receives it always performs faultlessly.

Unbelievable!

Went to undertake a backup this morning - western digital My-Book has packed up!

Stripped it an discovered a clicking WD Green Power WD500AAVS. Went outside, found a drive that has been sat in a cupboard in the shed for two years and it worked.... it's a Seagate!

The controller seems ok so that will be a new HD then

Jinx!

Hope you've not lost anything.

Thankfully nothing lost. It was just a backup drive for pictures.

Replaced with one of THESE

Good idea and a very good price

The WD Mycloud is just a personal "Cloud device", it doesn't backup to any cloud. I have a 2TB one that my daughter (at Uni) uses to backup her work, I have plugged a spare 2TB USB 3 device into the back which takes a "Snapshot" of the data once every 24 hours. So with a copy on her Macbook's drive, a copy on the WD and a copy on the USB she should hopefully be safe.

In comparison to the QNAP/Synology drives they are less advanced but far easier to use, there is a Mac App, she clicks it and she has a connection back to our home network. I have stuck some movies on there (TY Torrents) and she says its easy to use.

I'm still not making much progress with my Zyxel NSA325 (mark 1) with 2 x Seagate Barracuda 3Tb HDDs all bought in Feb 2013 and seemingly failed 2½ years later

I bought a pair of new HGST Deskstar 4Tb HDDs, and I assume they would come unformatted. Also got a SATA caddy as well, plus a separate external HDD backup drive.

Plan A was to get a new pair of HDD's and pop one in to replace the failed "disk 1" and hope that the NAS would rebuild the mirror image from "disk 2". If the new disk has no filesystem installed, it should happen automatically, but it didn't. Anyway, with the new HDD in as disk 1 and the old Seagate 3Tb in as disk 2, from a "starter" screen I only seemed to have the option to set up the RAID from scratch, wiping both HDDs. I was unable to log properly into the NAS console to get it to do the "repair" on disk 1 which is what the manual says.

Plan B was to shove the hopefully still OK disk 2 into a caddy, but when I do this (from a Windows PS) it says the disk needs formatting, same as for disk 1. So I guess it's some unusual format (and of course they are 3 Tb HDDs so not your normal FAT I suppose).

I think the NAS is fubar'ed. When I swap the 2 original disks over, it still indicates a problem with disk 1 only. I cannot log in to the NAS console, although it does recognise an incorrect password (supplying the correct password just sends it off into neverland). The status button is constantly flashing and it won't switch off either unless I switch off the power. If I restart enough times, it sometimes seems to come out of the trance it is in, at which stage I could attempt to use the NAS "copy" button to copy the contents to the backup drive, expect whenever I do manage to get logged in to the console, it won't accept me changing the copy direction from USB->NAS to NAS->USB. But in this semi-working state, I could try a copy/paste operation, or even XCOPY from a CMD DOS prompt perhaps?

I've tried to flash new firmware but it's the same as what was installed before. I've tried the "reset" button too but it didn't seem to work, guess I could keep trying. I can start up the NAS OK with no drives installed, and check/update firmware etc.

I suppose I could try my luck with Zyxel/ebuyer and the Sale of Goods Act (or whatever it is called now) since I would expect the NAS to last maybe 5 years even if the HDDs don't.

But is there any way to get Plan B (read the old disks in a caddy) to work? What file system do I have on them, EXT2/EXT3 perhaps? Do I need to boot up into a linux distro and copy from there to the backup drive (which says it is 4Tb NTFS)? I have an old kubuntu on an ancient laptop, but I don't have any PC's with more than 1 x USB 3.0 socket so would be using USB 2 or I could do the transfer over the network.

And then even assuming I get back all my files, going forward I wonder if I really need a NAS, particularly if they are likely to be no more reliable than HDDs? If I just have a single shared internal/external drive with all the photos, music, video and files I want to share connected to an "always on" PC, and do regular backups to an external drive, that'll do the job just as well? Or is the ability to use the NAS as a server for the Logitech Squeezebox and video files that means only a NAS will do?

Once bitten and all that...