Comment on Help choosing a good HDD for my home server?
MuttMutt@lemmy.world 3 days agoIf 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.
FierroG@lemmy.world 3 days ago
So instead I should aim for a barracuda or a wd black or blue?
MuttMutt@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
FierroG@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
MuttMutt@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.