The Sundarban
Published Feb 26, 2026, 7:Forty five AM EST
Arol is a tech journalist who for the time being works as a contributor at How-To Geek since 2022. He first started writing online for the short-lived portal of Spanish-language gaming forum Emudesc in 2013. Years later, in 2017, he received his ravishing beginning in tech journalism working for a minute Google-targeted location called Pixel Space. He transitioned to a news and characteristic author role at XDA Developers that identical year, the put he labored till 2021 before making the soar to different websites.
Arol brings in relation to a decade of writing abilities, and the occasional sizzling take, to his writings. While he’s a abilities lover at heart, he holds computer hardware and smartphones significantly shut to heart. You can usually derive him preserving news, even supposing he has also written the occasional deal, buyer’s handbook, how-to publish, and round-up. He is also written for Android Police and MakeUseOf. He is also a Political Science pupil. When he’s now not any longer writing, you’ll presumably derive him hitting the gymnasium, looking out to ace a new passion, finding out his textbooks, or touring. You may perchance perchance presumably reach him at me@arolwright.com.
There are loads of dos and don’ts when it involves NASes. And a key “don’t” comes on the time of browsing for the laborious drives you may perchance maybe presumably furthermore very successfully be going to position in there—be optimistic that, over every little thing else, that the speeds between every drive match.
Here’s the reason why.
How have NASes work?
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
Let’s traipse support to fundamentals to understand the reason why that is a injurious thought. Now not like used external laborious drives that need to be physically tethered to a single computer by the spend of a USB connection, a NAS lets in approved network users and reasonably just a few client devices to retailer, arrange, and retrieve recordsdata from a shared central space simultaneously. At its hardware core, a NAS is basically a basically expert, stripped-down computer. It incorporates its dangle processor, random access reminiscence, and a personalised operating machine designed explicitly for routing, storing, and securing recordsdata over standard network protocols fancy SMB or NFS. The ravishing energy of a NAS, nonetheless, lies in how it manages the physical storage media housed within its drive bays.
Most NAS programs utilize a foundational storage abilities called Redundant Array of Self sustaining Disks, or RAID. RAID takes more than one physical laborious disk drives and nearly binds them collectively into a single logical storage unit presented to the network. Reckoning on the negate RAID level chosen by the administrator, the NAS controller will distribute recordsdata all over these drives the spend of tactics identified as striping, mirroring, or parity checking. Striping breaks files into smaller recordsdata blocks and spreads all of them over more than one disks to dramatically amplify aggregate read and write speeds. Mirroring creates identical, right-time copies of recordsdata on two or more drives to be optimistic that nothing is misplaced if a single drive suffers a mechanical failure. Parity combines these ideas, calculating and writing basically expert mathematical restoration recordsdata alongside striped files so as that a failed drive can even be fully rebuilt.
RAID arrays are what derive this problematic.
Why mustn’t you match different flee HDDs?
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
Mixing laborious disk drives of different speeds, equivalent to pairing a 5400 RPM drive with a 7200 RPM drive within the identical RAID array, introduces valuable performance bottlenecks and mechanical dangers to your storage structure. When drives are sure collectively in a used RAID configuration, significantly in setups that heavily depend on recordsdata striping fancy RAID 0, RAID 5, or RAID 10, the storage controller dictates that recordsdata blocks needs to be written to or read from all taking share drives simultaneously. For this reason required synchronous operation, your complete storage array is mathematically and physically constrained by the performance of its slowest facet.
You would deem this may perchance translate into the faster laborious drive spinning slower to withhold up, but or no longer it’s in actuality worse. When an operation requires access all over the array, the faster 7200 RPM drives will complete their share of the workload immediate, but they’re then forced into an slothful wait state till the slower 5400 RPM drive finishes its respective assignment. So which may perchance maybe presumably furthermore very successfully present you with a worse performance penalty than what you’ll derive from factual spinning up two 5400 RPM laborious drives.
The different elephantine misfortune is vibrations. Onerous drives generate continuous micro-vibrations in conserving with the rotational velocity of their interior magnetic platters. NAS enclosures are tightly packed environments, and drives of the negate identical flee in general emit a uniform resonance that the chassis is designed to handle safely.
When drives rotating at entirely different frequencies are positioned adjoining to 1 one more, they’ll have advanced, asynchronous harmonic vibrations. These unpredictable physical oscillations can interfere with the soft, itsy-bitsy read/write heads of the neighboring drives, forcing them to work greatly more tough to have aligned on their recordsdata tracks.
Over an prolonged duration, this harmonic interference can lead to elevated look error rates and a shortened physical lifespan for the drives.
Is it acceptable in some cases?
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
You may perchance perchance presumably have it, as long as you may perchance maybe presumably furthermore very successfully be no longer striping anything else. As an illustration, configurations fancy Ethical a Bunch Of Disks, in general identified as JBOD, treat every laborious drive as a totally honest storage quantity or linearly span them with out advanced controller coordination. Because complete files are written sequentially to a single negate disk in desire to being fragmented all over several, a slower drive isn’t very any longer going to mathematically bottleneck a faster one.
In an identical intention, basically expert NAS operating programs fancy Unraid spend a recent unRAIDed file machine intention. In an Unraid setup, complete files are saved intact on individual recordsdata drives, while a dedicated, separate parity drive handles redundancy for your complete pool. While it’s highly suggested that the parity drive be the quickest and largest disk in the machine to forestall calculation bottlenecks for the duration of write operations, the standard recordsdata drives themselves can even be a complete mismatch of capacities and rotational speeds with out struggling the severe performance penalty considered in standard RAID.
