Synology has a detailed blog post that discusses the various options for hard drives for use in their NAS devices. While some of the information is Synology specific, the post answers some questions that should apply to all hard drives. For example, as to the question of whether a 5400 RPM drive vs a 7200 RPM drive makes a big difference in performance:
Often asked is whether different spindle speeds affect transfer speeds, to which the answer is not appreciably. This is because spindle speeds mainly affects how fast the hard drive will find given a sector. Once the sector has been found, the reading/writing speed of the data will remain consistent, at least for the sake of this discussion.
- To satisfy my curiosity about the performance difference between energy-conscious HDDs versus the standard performance HDDs – a while ago, I conducted a performance test between the WD10EACS and the WD1002FBYS. The results of the performance test resulted in a less than 3% difference while using the two drives, and for handling throughput performance testing, less than a 3MB/Sec difference. While it’s a measureable performance difference, it’s not much in everyday environments as fully saturating a DiskStation’s bandwidth capabilities seldom occurs on a daily basis.
Another analysis is done for energy savings drives vs. so-called green drives. The calculation shows that per drive the savings amount to less than $1 per year. Of course, direct energy savings are only part of the story:
Besides the direct energy savings by the drives, there are also secondary energy savings when cooling systems are considered. Energy-conscious hard drives produce less heat – and therefore, require less cooling, which ultimately lowers operating costs in the long-term.
Other points in the discussion include the physical differences between "enterprise" and consumer class hard drives, reliability of drives, and tips for selecting drives for use in a Synology NAS.
Head on over to the Synology Blog for more information.
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