It’s not likely this difference will emerge during the course of this series, or even in my remaining lifetime. The IronWolf Pro has an MTBF rating of 1,200,000 hours against the Exos 2,500,000 hours. One noticeable difference in the specifications is the MTBF (mean time between failures). Physically they’re very similar: the same robust construction designed for an uneventful life of hard work for at least five years, the same sealed case filled with helium gas instead of air, offering near frictionless flight as the read-write heads skim over the surface of the closely packed nine platters. If that sounds a touch grander than the IronWolf Pro, yes, in a sense it is. The new parity drive is an Exos Enterprise NAS drive. Seagate has donated a pair of IronWolf Pros to our project but we’re reserving the second one for data, as we’ll be discussing in the next part of our story. Unlike the IronWolf Pros, the Exos comes with a caveat that Seagate might want this one back.ĪLTHOUGH IT HAS THE SAME 18TB capacity as the data drive, this parity drive isn’t an IronWolf Pro. And, hardware allowing, that parity drive would also be able to watch over any further drive expansion.īut now let’s unwrap that new drive and discuss what’s going on. As we add two more drives to the system (the TS-451 maxes out at four drives in total), all three of those drives can be covered by that one parity drive. This single parity drive won’t just be ensuring the integrity of the one data drive we currently have running. So we’re doubling the cost of storage just to make sure that a well-warrantied IronWolf Pro drive, a drive that Seagate promises to recover data from at no cost should it fail in the first three years of use, doesn’t let us down? Belt and braces, or what?Īlthough it’s perfectly possible to run an UnRAID NAS as “just a bunch of drives” (JBOD), UnRAID’s unique selling proposition is the additional integrity offered by the inclusion of a parity drive. The new drive is going to be a parity drive, only there to help maintain the integrity of the first drive, our data drive. Our 18TB UnRAID NAS will remain an 18TB UnRAID NAS. So, with a second 18TB drive we’re doubling the capacity, right? No. That Web interface, by the way, is a huge selling point for UnRAID. We’re about to turn that into an array of two devices. The very comprehensive, no-nonsense UnRAID Web interface that displays in my browser when I visit the NAS’s URL describes the current set-up as “an array of one device”. I t’s now time to add that second 18TB drive to the single drive UnRAID system now housed, cuckoo-wise, in the QNAP TS-451.
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