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!
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
Been using Toshiba enterprise disks, specifically the ‘cloud scale’ product lines such as Toshiba MG09
Decent priced, good quality.
None of them have failed me yet.
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/
I use whatever is cheapest at the time of buying. I just make sure they’re not SMR.
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.
WD Reds
1x3Tb WD Red atm its been on for 6.5 years accordning to the smart tool.
Still running a pair of HGST DeskStar NAS 7200 drives.
They’ve been solid. It’s a shame you can’t get them anymore.
8x 4TB WD Reds and the 26x Dell 1TB drives that came with my Google Search Appliance.
I’ve got 3 WD reds with 91,500 hours on them each - that’s over 10 years.
A good reminder I should update my backups this weekend.
wd ultrastar helium
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/
+1 for Seagate Exos. Same or better than ironwolf and sometimes cheaper. 20TB for $280 is pretty darn good from newegg for data density.