Mix 'n Match Hard Drives?
I have owned a Synology DS212j for a while, and have been happily filling it with all the usual stuff.
When i purchased the NAS, i added a 2tb Seagate Barracuda, which at the time was £120, and so with the wife not understanding the need for 'another expensive box', i only purchased one hard drive.
So now i realise the importance of having two drives, for back-up etc, because we all have such large collections these days and would be heartbroken to lose it all.
As there are better drives around now (greener, quieter, etc), can i add another 2tb drive, even though it may be a different brand, have a different spin speed, or cache size?
I'm not wanting to buy the exact same one as it is still hovering around the £100 mark, and there are bargains to be had for £60 -£70.
In fact, even if you're buying a NAS with all the drives fitted, if you're intending to use RAID for redundancy and have a choice, I believe it's a good idea to get different brands as this increases the chances of not getting drives that may fail at approximately the same time, giving you time to replace a drive before a second one fails and therefore not lose data!
Thanks professor, that's most informative, (and more importantly, the answer i was looking for)!
Just get drives of the same capacity if you are going to raid/mirror.
The spindle and throughput speeds are irrelevant in consumer NAS, as the limiting factor is the network Interface, You wont get anywhere near the performance limit of the hard drive(
.
You might want to compare decibel levels and power consumption of the various HDs, but in a 2/4bay NAS I wouldnt worry about it.
You absolutely can use different brands as long as they're the same size (although if you're using Synology's Hybrid RAID, even this isn't a necessity), though I would try and get the same spin speed / throughput (i.e. for SATA, 3 Gbps or 6Gbps) as the drive will only run as the slowest available i.e. if you have 10,000 RPM drive and your second drive is a 7,200 RPM drive, then your existing drive will slow down to that speed, whereas if you buy a faster drive than the one you want, likely you're spending more than you need to for no performance gains.
In fact, even if you're buying a NAS with all the drives fitted, if you're intending to use RAID for redundancy and have a choice, I believe it's a good idea to get different brands as this increases the chances of not getting drives that may fail at approximately the same time, giving you time to replace a drive before a second one fails and therefore not lose data!