Tong Family

I thought that I had a bad Seagate EXOS X20 drive for my new Synology RS2423+. It’s not the end of the world and it has happened before. And Seagate has a nice user interface for generating RMAs and registering your drives. Note that their five-year warranty is from the date of manufacture (not the date that you bought it), so you want to use a fresh drive source. In my case, I bought this drive in October and it was made in June, so it’s not too bad. As an aside, these are not verified by Synology, but I’ve been using this brand for years without issue, we will see how they do. Note that Synology wants to sell you their own drives, so it is a more expensive way to go.

What was happening was that I got five of the six drives worked fine. I just slapped them into the holders and it worked, but not the last one. When I tried the drive in my Rackstor system the drive worked fine.

So I learned something, you need to get the little hard drive screws, and underneath the drive are places for four screws. The five others worked because in terms of manufacturing tolerance, they just made it into the SATA connector, but the last one didn’t, it was about 2mm off. I put the four screws in and it worked. Technically these are called #6-32 thread size with a total length of 5mm.

SSD Cache

One of the things with 12 drives is that you can use some of them for an SSD cache, this apparently will help small files, so you could imagine a scheme where you use 10 disks for data, and then one is a hot spare and one is an SSD. But I think that I’ll wait for their SSD Advisor to tell me what to do. Note that if you have many writes, you can rapidly chew up the write endurance of your SSDs. Although Synology will try to track the wear on them. In my case, most of the things I have stored there are “cold” or are for reading only.