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[BlueBomber]

Hey everybody. I'm just wondering what everyone considers the best drives to throw into these things.

I have some WD 1TB Caviar Blacks, but I've been reading that while those have the highest performance of the Caviar model line, they also require the most energy, which in turn means more heat. And as I stated in my other thread, those things were incredibly hot after they were only in the NAS for an hour.

It looks like the WD Caviar Green line is perfect for something like the DNS-321, as it doesn't require too much power and doesn't produce a ton of heat.

Admittedly, I've always been a little biased towards Western Digital, as I have never had a drive from them die on me (like, ever - even the Raptors).

While good performance is a plus, the most important thing to me is ultimately how long the drive will last.

Suggestions?

[nickOfTime]

Hey everybody. I'm just wondering what everyone considers the best drives to throw into these things.

The cheapest, largest capacity "eco" drive you can get.  Consumes less power, costs you less money, and gives the same performance as a much faster drive, because the bottleneck is the DNS-321, not the drive you put in it or the network you stick in on.  Even switching from 100Mb to 1Gb network doesn't change things much.

[BlueBomber]

Yeah, that's what I'm starting to think now. I think the WD Caviar Blacks are a little overkill for a NAS. Too bad, I wouldn't have purchased them and saved about ~$170  .

I think I'm going to go out and purchase three low-cost drives now...one for backup.

Any drive out there known to run fairly cool? Or any specific suggestions?

[nickOfTime]

Yeah, that's what I'm starting to think now. I think the WD Caviar Blacks are a little overkill for a NAS. Too bad, I wouldn't have purchased them and saved about ~$170  .

I think I'm going to go out and purchase three low-cost drives now...one for backup.

Any drive out there known to run fairly cool? Or any specific suggestions?

Roughly speaking, more power in = more heat out.  The green drives should be lowest power, and therefore less heat.  For example, look at power dissipation of WD black vs green:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=488
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=336

Black: Read/Write 8.4W, idle 7.8W, standby 1W, sleep 1W
Green: R/W 5.4W, idle 2.8W, standby 0.4W, sleep 0.4W

For this application, green is better than black because it generates less heat, costs less to buy, and gives the same performance.

It also costs less to operate, but that's really not a big deal at the power dissipation we are talking about. Back-of-envelope figure... 1W continuous = $1/year.  I'm very happy I replaced my dual CPU Sun server (360W when idle) with a generic 4-core x86 box (60W).  Pays for the cheap box in under 2 years, with better performance too.