Legit Reviews

I've had a Synology NAS DS209 for a few years now. I originally had two Seagate 1.5TB drives (RAID 1) in but every few months it kept telling me a drive failed and after checking it out, I would have to rebuild the RAID volume. All would be fine and then it would happen again a few months later.

I never found issues with either disk (still using one as storage) but I decided to switch to a pair of 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 drive in RAID 1. I still have the same issue (NAS says a drive failed) although now it seems I go 6 months or so without an error. Happened again today. Drives test out just fine and I have it back up and running.

I'm thinking the NAS is causing it...maybe some bad RAM or something? Anyone have issues like this before?

Quick thoughts...
I'm sure you have, but have you checked for an updated firmware? I also think that you're on the right track with the RAM. Any way you can put it in a laptop to run Memtest?

Looks like the latest firmware was released on 10-2-12.
Release Notes: http://www.synology.com/releaseNote_enu ... hp?lang=us

I'm also guessing you checked the drive compatibility list for your model? Personally I have never had luck with Sammy drives in a NAS.

http://www.synology.com/support/hd.php? ... duct_id=29

Yep on both accounts. I may end up investing in some WD Red drives that are intended for server/NAS applications.

Running some 1.5TB WD Green EARS drives in my 5 bay Thecus. Outside of a couple that was bad out of the gate, never have had a hiccup with them.

Contemplating converting to a set of WD Reds... but will be around tax time if I do, only 9 weeks to Christmas and I haven't even come close to being able to start shopping

I am going to avoid being too technical here to avoid writing a wall of text.

Desktop SATA drives in RAID typically have issues as you describe. The reason has to do with recovering bad sectors and timeouts. Basically the desktop sata drive will almost hang when trying to recover from a bad sector and will not respond to the raid controllers inquiries about status. Once this happens, most raid software/controllers will mark the drive as bad which seems to be what you are seeing (though without a ton more info I cant be sure).

Basically, if you are running RAID, use Enterprise SATA drives (or SAS though synology units dont support them ) as they support TLER. I have a DS1512+ at home and probably 100+ units at customer sites in the same size ballpark as this (varying vendors, synology, drobo, netgear, etc) all using Enterprise SATA drives and only really have this issue when the drive in fact fails. At one point we had a few units that they tried to use standard sata drives and we had a drive marked bad about once a month or so that we could verify the drive was still working properly. Replaced those with ent-sata drives and the issue magically disappeared.

Yes, synology and others try to work around this limitation in desktop sata drives.However it is a workaround and is not going to be 100%. Spend the extra money and buy the proper drives and the headache will go away.

Be aware that enterprise sata drives still suffer from low iops though. I have had customers refuse to go SAS then complain about this before even though we warned them.

Edit: From WD's site on the 'RED' drives (this is exactly what I explained above): Intelligent error recovery-
With built in intelligent error recovery controls, NASware also prevents hard drives from being dropped off the RAID due to extended error recovery. This provides more availability and less down time rebuilding the RAID.

Be aware though that the RED drives are varying RPM and have been estimated to be 5400 and at times even lower. This may be acceptable for your use, but I personally would check the price difference against the WD 'RE' line http://wd.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=30

Makes sense...I suspected something like that which is why I was looking at the WD Red drives. I'll check the other ones out too, thanks.