Synology were kind enough to send me a couple of their HAT5300 series Enterprise SATA drives to try out.
In their own words they describe these drives as offering class-leading performance especially when used in a Synology system due to the integration with DSM. They come with a 5 year warranty which is fantastic they have backed up their testing claims of over 300,000 hours and are confident these will be reliable and as such the warranty reflects this. As an added bonus - DSM can update the firmware on the drives as and when optimisations are made.
These drives have been designed to can consistent scaling read performance as you see in the chart below - although I wont be conducting this test it's worth pointing out.
Let's take a look at a couple of side-by side single drive performance tests I completed with directly against a new Seagate Enterprise drive.
Using the built in benchmark software within the Synology DSM i kicked off a couple of tests against each drive (Synology vs Seagate)
So, the first test of the Synology shows some pretty promising results, one you would expect from Enterprise class spinning disk.
Running another test to check the readings were consistent - they were and the benchmark tool will even show you what percentage change there was vs the last test.
As you can see pretty much an identical result - nice!
Now, let's perform the same two benchmarks against the Seagate Enterprise Drive.
Very similar in read performance but the writes IOPS on the Synology are very much higher and the latency is reduced.
And if we are being fair about the test let's run another test against the Seagate, you can see there was quite a variance between the two - unlike the Synology. But it was a welcome variance with all tests getting a bump in the right direction performance wise.
Here are some summary tables of the two drives/tests - ignore that first one on the Synology as i hit the wrong button!
Conclusion? These drives perform consistently and are able to easily keep up with other Enterprise drives. The fact they're backed with a 5 year warranty. It would be hard to not consider these drives especially when paired with a Synology NAS.
