A Lesson

Friend of mine bought a WD 4100 NAS without HDDs. Deciding to save some money he bought 4 x Seagate 8tb expansion drives and proceeded to crack open the caddies to extract the hard drives for his NAS to save money. They contain Barracuda drives not NAS drives thus only have a 2 year warranty unlike NAS 3 year.

Story short after 2 years one has failed and the warranty expired in September this year. Its just 68 uncorrectable sectors but the NAS refuses it.

He's still too tight to buy a new NAS (£199) so is going down to 2 Barracudas in mirror and will put the spare one in his PC. Beggars belief!

Should last longer than 2 years, may be able to claims on the not fit for purpose, I realise he used normal drives in a Nas, but for home use I doubt it would make much difference, unless he has it being used 24/7

I am still happy with my Terramaster and Toshiba drives, not that they are left on much these days, energy use and all that, which is why I built a Pi Nas for documents and that sort of thing.

He probably voided the warranty the moment he opened up the caddies to get the drives out...

These days - right drive for each application.

I use Seagate Skyhawk for surveillance - continuous opearation recording from several cameras and currently sitting at 24760+ hours with no bad sectors.

A friend with extensive data centre experience has just changed out some old drives from his NAS - I belive he said 8 and 12 years (or similar) as errors strated to appear. Again, right drives for the application.

And your frined may find out, that once one from a batch starts to fail, the others may not be far behind.

Correct, thats why you do a 30 plus hour test of the drives before you crack them out.

the problem with with units like WD 4100 is that the drives can be too close together, with no dampening, with non nas drives not designed to accept external vibration from other drives.

Heat from the drive bays can also play a factor. Also vertical vs horizontal placement can place issues and vibration that can affect other drives. I personally would not multiple drives vertically. I do have one placed vertically in my meshify xl case, i would not place a second one there.

Synolgy type cases i personally would avoide because of vibration and heat issues. I'm sure i'm gonna get a reply of "My synolgy has had x8 drives and lasted 204893 hours and no bad blocks"

That gives some reassurance, but there's still nothing to stop a drive failing ten minutes after it's installed in its new home (Sod's Law rules ). Better, as MHC says, to use the right drive for the application and keep the warranty intact!

I ran a couple of 19” rackmount Synology units with 12 drives for about 8 years. Only replaced one drive. They were in daily use as a quick backup store for a 10 user test lab. (First level, second level went to tape).

At home I’m a dual drive RAID 1 user, all I need, but friends have 4 bay Synology and QNAP and haven’t had the problems others report with other brands. I also like that I can run containers, e.g. a local free speedtest website, or the open source jellyfin.

I see all enterprise type NAS kits are now mostly 2.5” drives; my home mirror does seem to have rubber gromits to hold the drives, so some dampening. I used NAS drives (Seagate I think, its been a while).

Synology have started saying you have to use drives they’ve certified or the OS won’t accept them - its giving bad vibes to many but you can guess they’ve had too many support calls! I expect QNAP to follow in 18 months.

Edited by jchamier (Sat 27-Dec-25 11:37:35)

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Should last longer than 2 years, may be able to claims on the not fit for purpose, I realise he used normal drives in a Nas, but for home use I doubt it would make much difference, unless he has it being used 24/7

I am still happy with my Terramaster and Toshiba drives, not that they are left on much these days, energy use and all that, which is why I built a Pi Nas for documents and that sort of thing.

I think as Bill says the warranty might be void once he opened the case. I recently had a 500GB Baracuda fail but that was from 2011. Just disappeared from the system. I do think he has been unlucky.