I’m looking for help deciding, or maybe with info I haven’t found on my own and or experience you have with these drives.
I’m finally pulling the trigger on a drive (more in the future, for now I still have a few smaller ones on my desktop for backup) specifically for use on my home server, so far I’ve been doing fine with my 2.5’ hdd but besides running tight on space, I want a more reliable drive.
I’ve been researching and looking up options within my budget, payment methods and such and ended up with two options, both WD (the options I’ve found on seagate are a bit more expensive):
- WD80EFPX WD red plus 8TB (in three different stores at similar enough prices, not sure if that’s relevant here)
- WD120EFGX WD red plus 12 TB, not too much more expensive Note that I’ve skipped 10 TB reds because I’ve read those have a couple problems like being abnormally noisy and unreliable
As far as I could find out, it seems this 12 TB option is a bit louder (I’m not sure if 30 vs 24 dB is too much, but idk really) and a bit slower data throughput (despite spinning the platters faster, or at least saying so in the specs), but I couldn’t find anything about them being particularly unreliable (though I’m new to buying drives for reliability, unfortunately, timing-wise). I do want more storage (who doesn’t?), but I’d rather focusing on reliability between these options.
While I don’t exactly intend to run RAID, I ended up choosing nas drives for the 24/7 intended usage, I don’t think it’ll make much difference but I rather the peace of mind, my use is immich for photos (hence the reliability), jellyfin for a small selection of stuff (which doesn’t require that much performance as far as I can tell) and a few small services that will mostly live on the ssd (and general NAS usage too, no need for much performance). Similarly big drives for regular use aren’t that much cheaper anyways (between the options I have available and accounting for the reliability thing) but will still value your input on the topic, I’m still open to just looking for regular drives if it turns out I’m wrong about that.
Quick note on the topic of noise: I have my home server in the same space as my desktop and the noise of my desktop is already a bit much, It’s fine but it’s not far from being annoying, Can’t hear anything from the server and hope it won’t change much after the new drives (I’ll focus on making my desktop quieter in the future).
Only other similarly dense (and priced) drives I’ve found are Seagate IronWolf ST8000VN004 8TB, Seagate Barracuda 8TB ST8000DM004 and then a bunch of surveilance drives which I’ve read again and again aren’t worth getting for NAS or homelab usage.
Hope this is not too far from the topic of selfhosting since it’s mostly about storage (for use in a home server).
As you can see, being succinct is not my specialty, sorry for the long post.
The purpose of a NAS drive is to be LESS reliable than a regular drive, not more reliable. Explanation: if a regular drive gets a read error on a block, it will retry for quite a while before giving up. The host, meanwhile, has to wait for the data to be retrieved if the retries work. That’s all it can really do, wait and hope. Meanwhile, the waiting slows the application down.
A NAS drive instead will fail once or twice, then give up immediately, since it knows that it’s in a RAID system and that the data is also present on other disks. The RAID then puts the data together from the other drives and gets it to the host, logging the error. It will also hopefully mark the bad block on the drive with the read failure, and rewrite the recovered data to a spare sector. So this is faster than all the retries even though the drive that had the bad block gives up on it rather than attempting recovery by repeated reads.
So if you buy NAS drives, put them in a RAID.
Drives are currently around 2x as expensive as a year or so ago but they are available if you can afford them. I guess that’s better than shortages where they’re hard to find even if you can pay. We’ve had that before too.
I like to think the current situation will settle out. Who knows though. Drive space is still way less expensive than in 2010 or anything like that.
Interesting, Hadn’t really read anything like that before, since nas drives have extra features and functions that seems like a thing they would set as an extra flag or something (if it’s running on raid, then give up sooner).
What I meant by reliability was more about running the drive 24/7, as far as I could see they’re the only ones intended to be used that way (besides surveilance drives). They are intended to run at all times, spin more frequently and sustain more vibrations from nearby drives as well as heat, I feel like there’s more to it than that but can’t say myself.
Do you mean that the drive will say it’s dead if there are errors?
IDK really. I’m repeating what I saw someplace years ago. I would say do a real RAID if you manage it. Maybe RAID 5 on 3 drives.
If a NAS or Enterprise drive has an error it sends the information to the host to be logged so that the end user can have the information available.
So like an Unrecoverable Read Error (URE) pops up on a sector. A drive that is built for RAID use will just say, “Couldn’t read it” and moves on. A Consumer drive meant for a desktop will try and try and try and try to read that bad sector. In a NAS situation where another drive will be able to fill in the data the controller (hardware or software) will just deal with it by pulling the data from another drive and keep moving.
The drive may not be bad as a whole but it does mean that over time it is more likely that drive will have more errors.
NAS drives are not inherently more reliable, yes they can deal with a bit more vibration and such but it’s the firmware inside that is different. Enterprise drives are another step up again from NAS drives.
So instead I should aim for a barracuda or a wd black or blue?
I’m not saying that.
What you need to do is decide now if the drive you will buy will be used for a RAID array. If it is a desktop drive won’t be in a RAID array on a NAS system. Many NAS’ will have random writes to the pool. Desktop drives aggressively park the heads, the load and unload of the heads wears them. In a NAS system they can actually wear out.
Over the last 15 years drives have become a bit more specialized. You already found out about surveillance drives not being a good fit for much other than surveillance/DVR. Desktop drives are fine for desktop loads and usage but outside of that or single drive usage they are not useful. NAS drives are meant for NAS usage in RAID arrays. Back when the WD green drives were available years ago you could convert them from a desktop drive to a NAS drive using a tool called wdidle (WD Idle) but that isn’t the case any more.
Using a NAS drive on its own will work in a pinch but if it has an error it won’t try to recover it like a Desktop drive would because it’s made with the idea that it will be in an array that will deal with the issue. Plus once you start loading it up you will have to wipe it to put it into an array unless you go for ZFS mirrors or RAID 1. If the NAS Appliances have some sort of special trickery that allows you to expand one disk at a time and add redundancy I’m completely unaware as I’ve never put much stock in them. I’ve been running FreeNAS/TrueNAS for over 10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
Oh, ok, thanks… Too bad I can’t 4x my budget to buy a second drive and build another pc or get a prebuilt nas, I laid out my options to avoid these “choose the option you don’t have” scenarios, but I did want to see general discussion too so I’ll take it as that.
I understand. If you buy a used server then add some drives later you can have a great NAS IMHO. I upgraded from an X8DT6-F with 384GB of RAM and a pair of Xeon X5690’s right before things went sideways. The MoBo has the SAS controller already flashed to IT mode so it’s ready for ZFS. But it’s not exactly light on power and with a 2U chassis and a handful of used 8TB SAS drives you are looking at around 1200.
My current server is a X10DRH-C with dual Xeon E5-2683 v3’s with 128GB of RAM in a 4U chassis with 11 X 8TB SAS drives in a RaidZ3 configuration. Just the MoBo, chassis, cpu’s and 64GB of ram is running about 1150. The drives used are 110 each and before you think you should just get those, SAS drives require a SAS controller and you only get those in enterprise equipment.
But if you can pick up a little here and a little there you can have a nice system. But right now isn’t a great time to get in the game.