With black Friday sales coming up, I'm hoping to start building a NAS for my home. I have the server and stuff, but wondering which drives to get for storage.
From everything I've looked at, seems like Seagate Ironwolf and WD Red seem to be highly recommended. I'm leaning towards the Ironwolf 8TB drives right now. These are retailing for $160+tax right now, which I feel is a pretty good price to get these
However, I'm wondering if any of you experienced folks have any other suggestions for me.
I have 4x 10 TB WD reds white label I shucked from WD nas boxes.
I also just picked up 2x 20 TB Seagate EXOS drives new for $200 ish on eBay sold by Newegg because I need to very rapidly find a solution for my 18TB unlimited Google drive that is going away in December.
Sweet! I was wondering the same thing recently! I have two WD Reds that I bought pre-Covid, but the NAS (2 bay net gear) was an end-of-life super cheap discount and I want a way to keep them running….like, can I wipe net gear and reformat the whole thing? Something I keep meaning to tinker with - but the weekend (for example) I’m likely bed ridden. My body is getting destroyed at my day iob -meh.
I've had great experiences with HGST, WD, and Seagate. It's less about the brand, and more about the "production run" and models. Backblaze always has an interesting blog yearly about HD failure stats:
If you're gonna build for redundancy, avoid WD Red. They use SMR platters and it doesn't play nice with RAID configs. You'd have to get a WD red plus or red pro to get a CMR drive which actually works in a RAID array. You don't have to worry about accidentally getting an SMR drive with ironwolf though since that whole section is Seagate's branding only uses CMR.
Mostly it depends on the size of your pool and the type.
My TL;DR is that enterprise drives are likely overkill and aren't worth the extra cost (yes I can construct a cornercase where they prevent data loss but you'd need it to happen on multiple disks simultaneously, if you're that worried spend the money on extra backup!). Anything marked RAID or NAS is fine. Don't put anything designed to save energy into a NAS (eg: WD greens).
You are looking in the wrong place if you pay more for enterprise drives. I used to shuck drives, but you can find enteprise drives for less $/TB and not deal with the possible loss of warranty.
I've got 10 12tb Seagate EXOS drives in operation right now and have also run small capacity (2-4tb) WD Red and blue and Seagate Barracuda drives. For ssds I run Samsung 870 evos.
Remember that any storage media can fail at any time, for any reason, with or without notice. You can consider Seagate IronWolf Series, WD Red Series or Toshiba N300.
WD Reds are great. I have an IronWolf Pro NAS that's amazing, and it has a 5 year warranty which is nice. It's good to look for something with a large cache if you can find it.
Exos, red pro, or any similarly classes drive. Stay away from Toshiba NAS rated drives. Had 3/7 outright fail and two other had indicators of imminent failure all with ~9tb combined writes. Toshiba refused to replace the ones that were imminent. Thankfully we sent nightlies to Azure.
Edit: replaced them all with Exos drives and 1 year later, zero issues.
WR Red Plus for me, it's a medium size NAS that runs in my bedroom, so they are quite quiet and easy to cool down with a low RPM quiet fan. Decent performance too.
In 2013, I bought 12 4TB HGST. I just got my first drive failure last month and I'm going through the process of replacing them all with Seagate Exos X16 16TB just because I got a good deal.
I, typically, just buy whatever has the best price/performance ratio.
The spinny kind. Until they stop go go spinny and then I get new bigger and sometimes better spinny drives.
I have such a smorgasbord of drives. Bunch of 2.5" firecudas 1-2tb, old 1tb drives, thrift store external, shucked 8tb baracudas, new bare disk 8tb barracuda, 4tb HGST NAS, 8tb Ironwolf and more I'm sure.
FWIW, the Ironwolf is really nice and I wish all my drives were them. File transfer speeds are respectable for spinning rust.
Currently using WD red plus drives, once I get some financial freedom to expand probably going to switch to ultra stars or seagates unless I can get a good deal on red pros
I've got some 4Tb SAS drives and a 6tb Seagate ironwolf, need to fill out the 6tb pool but new drives aren't cheap here at the moment. 6tb ironwolfs are $250-300 where I am and not sure I want to risk data with old SAS drives from eBay etc.
And then I’m using a single 8TB barracuda for movies and media. It’s surprisingly more space than you think, and I’m just in the habit of deleting stuff after I’m done with it.
Went with the barracuda cuz I didn’t plan on using raid and figured it’d be quieter than the ironwolf.
Working Network Accessible Storage is done by a Virtualized TrueNAS Instance on my ProxMox Host with all Services attached to it through internal networking arrangements or direct access through MountPoints in LXC
The TrueNAS currently has 4TB SSD Storage
Then there's the backup NAS with 12TB HDD Storage for slow Media Storage and Backup of working NAS files.
My Media Streaming is attached to the 12TB NAS while Nextcloud is attached to both, for example.
I bought 20+ Recertified Class Western Digital WDC H530 14tb's for 126.99$ each from serverpartsdeals.com over the last six months. Comes with a 2 year warranty, which is about what you would expect a drive to have anyways.
I also have a dozen Ironwolf 12tb's (no pro) which have 3yr warranty, but still, if I had new about the recertified drives then I would've been all over those.
Really its about how much space do you need, how many SATA slots can you fill, and your use for them.
The best bit of advice I could give is know what your purpose is.
I needed a storage device, I could have gotten away with 2 external drives and manual labour but instead I got swayed by a QNAP that was a hybrid entertainment centre, virtualisation, docker etc.
I tinker so the amount of times I had to rebuild that NAS means I couldn't reliably use it for storage.
I bought a WD cloud device which I always kept online. That has the drawback of always being available to tinker with.
I've got 9 of the 8TB IronWolfs in my server, and they've been great. The 3 oldest are 4 years old now, and I've grown the size of my array as I could over time, and switched from RAID 5 to RAID 6 for the dual redundancy. Speed is not important in my environment, so I can't speak to that vs WD or Hitachi, but they've been fine for me.