Graphics Card and NAS Advice.

[Adam Glover]

The DS1513+ caught my eye too. I think its the one I will go with.

I also looked at the WD Red drives and would like to know the pro's and con's over normal HDD's. Will the slower Rpm be a problem when network rendering?

Also, is there any advice for and against using SSD's in Nas devices?

Synology does say they are compatable with this DiscStation.

Was contemplating having the one SSD just for my texture library, any thoughts?

[Ernest Burden III]

WD Red drives vs. Black? Red's features sound good but I'm a little worried about speed since I think they are 5400rpm drives.

 

You can still buy 5400 RPM drives?

[Dimitris Tolios]

I'm going to upgrade my server pretty soon and will probably either go with the Synology DS1513+ or DS412+. Right now I have 1TB RAID 1 on a Windows 7 Home OS, which I also use for rendering when I need to, so not exactly an ideal setup. I have a 2 bay Diskstation for all of our home media that's been really great so I'm looking forward to upgrading to the higher end Synology product. Any thoughts on using WD Red drives vs. Black? Red's features sound good but I'm a little worried about speed since I think they are 5400rpm drives.

 

Will a 5xxx drive be slower than a 7200 of similar capacity / platter density?

Of course.That doesn't make it slower in every occasion thought.

 

In most cases high capacity (2-3TB) 5400 & 5900 rpm drives meed or exceed the Gbit LAN throughoutput in typical scenarios, so there is little to worry about. Even if you would "feel" the difference with local drives, over the network things get muted down, and the quality of your NAS / network card / router etc backbone becomes the weak link, not the drives.

 

Not the best, but a decent read.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/western-digital-red-review-are-nasoptimized-hdds-worth-the-premium

[Tim Nelson]

You can still buy 5400 RPM drives?

Yes, apparently. In the WD Red line, they call it IntelliPower, great for energy and heat management. The WD green drives are 5400 as well I believe. I've used them for the past couple years for my server as RAID 1 and they've actually done fairly well, performance-wise. I noticed a couple of cautionary alerts on one of them recently when I did a scan, and I was also running out of room so I decided to switch everything over to another server I have that has more room and on RAID 5. This will be my short term solution until I spend the money for a Synology NAS, maybe within the next year or so. Red drives seem like a good option for a NAS setup, I'm just wondering if the Black lineup would give me better performance without any critical issues. I'm cheap, but maybe in this scenario it would be best to shell out the extra for the WD Enterprise drives. But to the next thought below...

 

In most cases high capacity (2-3TB) 5400 & 5900 rpm drives meed or exceed the Gbit LAN throughoutput in typical scenarios, so there is little to worry about. Even if you would "feel" the difference with local drives, over the network things get muted down, and the quality of your NAS / network card / router etc backbone becomes the weak link, not the drives.[/url]

That was my understanding as well. I am hardly an expert on IT/networking, so it's hard for me to find where bottlenecks are occurring. Generally I don't have a problem with network speed as it is, though faster is always better. One thing I never realized, that probably slows me up more than anything, is that I have 'compress on save' turned on. Good for saving space but annoying when you get hung up when working. One of these days we'll probably be on SSD NAS with networks that can support it, and then life will be good. Well there probably is something like that already, but my favorite part is when it finally becomes affordable to people like me.