The title says basically everything but let me elaborate.
Given the recent news about the sold out of harddrives for the current year and possibly also the next years (tomshardware article) I try to buy the HDDs I want to use for the next few years earlier than expected.
I am on a really tight budget so I really don’t want to overspend. I have an old tower PC laying around which I would like to turn into a DIY NAS probably with TrueNAS Scale.
I don’t expect high loads, it will only be 1-2 users with medium writing and reading.
In this article from howtogeek the author talks about the differences and I get it, but a lot of the people commenting seem to be in a similar position as I am. Not really a lot of read-write load, only a few users, and many argue computing HDDs are fine for this use case.
Possibilites I came up with until now:
- Buy two pricey Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red HDDs and put them in RAID1
- Buy three cheaper Seagate Barracuda or WD Blue and put two in RAID1 and keep one as a backup if (or should I say when?) one of the used drives fails.
I am thankful for every comment or experience you might have with this topic!
Backups and backups and backups, and then and only then can you trust your data is safe. I run all consumer disks, have 2x2tb ssd’s in a raid1 for user facing storage which are always powered up and mounted. I only have 2 users in total, so relatively light load. Then I have 2x8tb hdd’s which only power on once a day at most, for as long as it takes rsync to complete it’s nightly backups, then they dismount and power off. Been running this for 18 months and not had any issues. My hdd’s will last years with their current load and usage, with only probably a few hundred mb written every night. But if your data is managed and backed up sensibly, and you use raid effectively, cheap discs aren’t a worry.