NAS Compares Synology HAT5300 Hard Drives for NAS – FULL Specifications Confirmed

The Synology HAT5300 Hard Drives for NAS Officially Launched​

Well, it’s official – Synology has launched themselves into the NAS storage media industry with the release of their HAT5300 range of HDDs. In a move that might not have surprised a huge number of people (given their progression into the server industry), arguably the biggest brand in NAS have unveiled their range of 3.5″ hard disk media for their systems.

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[atakacs]

Hmm, I muss confess I am somewhat surprised by this announcement.

Mostly certainly they are not actually gone into HDD manufacturing - this muss be an OEM deal with one the 3 remaining actual producer in a dying industry (aka Seagate, Toshiba or Western Digital).

The question is: who is producing those drives, what unique feature (if any) do they have and is there a reason to favour them over the originals… ?

 

[Rusty]

There are Toshiba MG drives by looking at the specs.

 

[atakacs]

Might very well be.
The only advantage I might see (so far) is that they are unlikley to silently change the specs (ie the SMR debacle we have witnssed over the past months). I guess all depends what markup they will put on them.

 

[Telos]

• Tested for 300K hours to ensure performance is maintained in stress testing conditions

Gotta wonder how they tested these drives for 34 years. Synology must have a secret time travel mode.

 

[Robbie]

It's Synology so probably:

"We sold 300k drives that all lasted for about an hour"

 

[jeyare]

Gotta wonder how they tested these drives for 34 years. Synology must have a secret time travel mode.

Statistics is a dangerous gun in PR story telling:
then Cumulative testing of 300k hours / 100 HDDs = 3000 hours / 24 = 125 days
or even with 1000 HDDs?

it’s same for a “virtual” value of MTBF for each disk (tested in bunch of disk, in laboratory conditions, unclear load, unclear Operation,...)

 

[jeyare]

a lot of hidden information there
no detailed documentation available from Syno.

what is available from Seagate who don’t need hide detailed specs (same for every single of their drive produced):

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/enterprise-hdd-fam/exos-x-16/en-us/docs/100845788g.pdf

and what is available from Syno:

Through testing and optimizations, HAT5300 series HDD has been tuned to deliver up to 23% higher sustained sequential read performance3 in demanding multi-user environments.

.... and note from Syno: Performance testing was conducted by Synology using 12 drives on an SA3600, configured using RAID 5, against similar class drives (Enterprise) with IOMeter (64KB blocks).

Some questions there:
Why they use for such comparison absolutely useless parameter as “sequential” read performance for the multiuser environment? ... the sequential read is possible only for an archive purposes, not for a primary (Prod) systems. And this HDD is defined for high workload environment (550TB/y) = 1507GB/day.
Why so unclear test background?
Why they hide the exact “brand x”models in such comparison?

Seems to be, they don’t care about trust.

 

[jeyare]

when there is really OEM base from Toshiba MG06ACAxxxE series = 512e (emulation) sectors only available
(still not officially confirmed)

https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/content/dam/toshiba-ss/asia-pacific/docs/product/storage/product-manual/eHDD-MG06ACA-Product-Manual.pdf

then there is comparable Seagate Exos 7E8 series only, but for capacity +10TB there is Exos X series only (helium filled due high capacity), then Thoshiba MG06ACAxxxE is out of real competition with these mentioned.

 

[UKgnome]

This may offer some explanation

Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

NAS spinner's drives are Toshiba tin with custom firmware

www.theregister.com

 

[Telos]

That article states...
...a new policy whereby only certain drives will be allowed into future Synology enterprise kit. And that list includes all the new HAT 5300 range, but just one disk apiece from market leaders Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. Those third-party disks also top out at 4TB.

Taking lessons from Apple?

 

[Robbie]

Not sure any Synology NAS can compete with a real enterprise server, especially with anaemic CPUs, limited networking and limited support. Nothing that would justify a vendor-locked HDD choice with anti-competitive motives.

Synology will just look stupid with this, even if they do think they can overcome the legal aspect.

 

[Coop777]

I don't see why taking away customer choice for drives is good for their business - I would hope they are not foolish enough to try locking down all of the NAS product lines.

 

[Rusty]

I don't see why taking away customer choice for drives is good for their business - I would hope they are not foolish enough to try locking down all of the NAS product lines.

They will not.

 

[Robbie]

I think the concern is that this is just the thin end of the wedge. We have already seen the 'silent' change to DSM that throws a warning if you have dared to use RAM without the magic Synology sticker whilst asking 3x the price of regular ECC RAM.

Synology used to champion the lack of vendor lock-in, even on their adverts at trade shows:

We don't know how far Synology is prepared to dig with this new policy. Even now this can impact those looking to trade-up as their business scales but find that that their existing rack of drives is suddenly persona non grata.

The fine words above from Synology above about the limits and lack of retrospection would have been more convincing if they hadn't repeatedly stated that they would never vendor-lock their products. Indeed, it was one of their USPs when they moved into the larger-scale devices.

Times change, they change their mind and they could change it again - words mean nothing.

 

[Coop777]

Nice find Rusty

Robbie - what model did you put RAM into that generated the response from DSM? I've put non-syno branded RAM into two models and did not see any "warning"

 

[Robbie]

@Coop777 It's a new thing so like you I have yet to see the warning.

However, I do now have a bright and shiny RS1221+ in my rack with its miserly 4GB of ECC onboard and regrettably it one of the new models that logs the memory used and can throw a warning to the user at boot when it detects non-Synology RAM.

From reading around the usual places you can tweak via SSH and, if you can find it, regular Samsung RAM does not trigger the warning either. There is also a vendor in the US who is providing regular ECC SODIMMs that have been fettled to display as Synology RAM so maybe that will become a thing in other countries.

Synology asks around £700 for a pair of their magic-sticker 16GB SODIMMs. Gulp.

 

[Coop777]

....and you know all they are doing is sourcing RAM from a vendor (like other manufacturers do) and putting their sticker on it.

 

[Robbie]

Quite literally in this case. They didn't get Samsung to use a different PCB colour, change the visual design or even stencil the Synology brand on the stick. Just slapped-on a Synology sticker on a generic Samsung SODIMM:

 

[atakacs]

Nice find Rusty

Robbie - what model did you put RAM into that generated the response from DSM? I've put non-syno branded RAM into two models and did not see any "warning"

I have that warning with a RS820+ (which is not high end in my book)