Hello, I’m relatively new to self-hosting and recently started using Unraid, which I find fantastic! I’m now considering upgrading my storage capacity by purchasing either an 8TB or 10TB hard drive. I’m exploring both new and used options to find the best deal. However, I’ve noticed that prices vary based on the specific category of hard drive (e.g., Seagate’s IronWolf for NAS or Firecuda for gaming). I’m unsure about the significance of these different categories. Would using a gaming or surveillance hard drive impact the performance of my NAS setup?
Thanks for any tips and clarifications! 🌻
Yes, it will. Will it make any difference for you, depends of what are you doing. I would not use surveillance drive in to server, they are way too specific. Outside of that prices is pretty much same per TB/(Warranty Year) accross the board.
I done some excessive research couple of years back on the topic. you can find it here https://blog.holms.place/2022/05/01/hdd-storage-cost-comparation-may-2022.html. I do not think situation have changed match since than. Price per TB/Year is nearly constant past 8GB size.
Also consider looking to re-certified drives, or even refurbished drives. you may save hips on them. But it depends on how much you value your data, how much redundancy in you storage pool and how good your backup strategy.
Other people have suggested good info to gain nuisanced knowledge. I recommend starting with a simple fact. With enough time and/or the right conditions all storage will fail. Design your setup with redundancy. I personally had to replace 2x 12tb drives this year. I have raidz3 (3 parity drives) and a hot spare. So I just bought cheap replacements from a reputable seller on eBay and consider it part of the cost of self hosting.
It depends what your parameters are. For spinning hard disks, you want to look at total power cycles, and mean time between failures. More enterprise drives have very long mean time between failures
In fact for spinnig hard disks, turning on can be on a likely failure mode, so there’s machines out there if you power off there’s a good chance they won’t come back on in the enterprise data centers
Your solid state hard disks, you want to look at meantime between failures, but also total write volume. Enterprise discs tend to have much much much much much much greater write capacity
So all of these trade-offs cost money, if you’re looking at archival, where you write the data only once, then you can go with a disk that has a low total write volume
I highly recommend watching this guys videos on his analysis of the backblaze data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgJ6YolLxYE&t=1
And a comparison of the difference WD drive colours, which might not be what you expect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDyqNry_mDo&t=2
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=IgJ6YolLxYE&t=1
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=QDyqNry_mDo&t=2
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Read about the specific features of the “WD RED” drives. There are some pretty good articles out there, and you are going to learn a whole lot reagarding your question.
I got a bunch of them in my private server. I didn’t know all these details when I bought them LOL, but they do a good job, reliable, silent, for 6 years and counting.
