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.
Thanks!
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Redundancy and accessibility were my driving factors. I rip all my DVDs and Blu-Rays to my movie library and share them out to friends and family.
I’ve been using an array of WD Red 4TB drives for a few years, now. No complaints.
Get the largest NAS certified drives you can afford.
I bought a bunch of factory recertified WD 16TB drives for way less than new from serverpartdeals.com.
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:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/
A 42-drive (7x RAIDZ2) system consisting of:
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36x HGST 4TB NAS drives
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6x Toshiba N300 4TB drives
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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
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.
Appreciate the link! Will investigate.
I’m shocked there’s not more people here shucking external drives. https://shucks.top/
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.
Got 2 NASes (on site/off site). One has WD Red, the other has Seagate Ironwolf. I want to upgrade them to EXOS drives, but they’re running well.
WD Reds
Yep, WD Red CMR. I’ve been running with them exclusively and never had any issues.
A typical drive in my setup: 8 years continuous operation, 0 bad sectors. Rock solid:
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.
8x 4TB WD Reds and the 26x Dell 1TB drives that came with my Google Search Appliance.
WD blue drives I believe, got them a couple years ago on sale… Some were from enclosures etc
