I’m looking for help deciding, or maybe with info I haven’t found on my own and or experience you have with these drives.
I’m finally pulling the trigger on a drive (more in the future, for now I still have a few smaller ones on my desktop for backup) specifically for use on my home server, so far I’ve been doing fine with my 2.5’ hdd but besides running tight on space, I want a more reliable drive.
I’ve been researching and looking up options within my budget, payment methods and such and ended up with two options, both WD (the options I’ve found on seagate are a bit more expensive):
- WD80EFPX WD red plus 8TB (in three different stores at similar enough prices, not sure if that’s relevant here)
- WD120EFGX WD red plus 12 TB, not too much more expensive Note that I’ve skipped 10 TB reds because I’ve read those have a couple problems like being abnormally noisy and unreliable
As far as I could find out, it seems this 12 TB option is a bit louder (I’m not sure if 30 vs 24 dB is too much, but idk really) and a bit slower data throughput (despite spinning the platters faster, or at least saying so in the specs), but I couldn’t find anything about them being particularly unreliable (though I’m new to buying drives for reliability, unfortunately, timing-wise). I do want more storage (who doesn’t?), but I’d rather focusing on reliability between these options.
While I don’t exactly intend to run RAID, I ended up choosing nas drives for the 24/7 intended usage, I don’t think it’ll make much difference but I rather the peace of mind, my use is immich for photos (hence the reliability), jellyfin for a small selection of stuff (which doesn’t require that much performance as far as I can tell) and a few small services that will mostly live on the ssd (and general NAS usage too, no need for much performance). Similarly big drives for regular use aren’t that much cheaper anyways (between the options I have available and accounting for the reliability thing) but will still value your input on the topic, I’m still open to just looking for regular drives if it turns out I’m wrong about that.
Quick note on the topic of noise: I have my home server in the same space as my desktop and the noise of my desktop is already a bit much, It’s fine but it’s not far from being annoying, Can’t hear anything from the server and hope it won’t change much after the new drives (I’ll focus on making my desktop quieter in the future).
Only other similarly dense (and priced) drives I’ve found are Seagate IronWolf ST8000VN004 8TB, Seagate Barracuda 8TB ST8000DM004 and then a bunch of surveilance drives which I’ve read again and again aren’t worth getting for NAS or homelab usage.
Hope this is not too far from the topic of selfhosting since it’s mostly about storage (for use in a home server).
As you can see, being succinct is not my specialty, sorry for the long post.
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2.5’ hdd but besides running tight on space
No wonder - that’s huge! (sorry - couldn’t resist)
While I don’t exactly intend to run RAID
At these sizes you may want to consider it - at least a mirror (RAID1). That’s a lot of data to lose and/or have to fetch from backups. Being able to limp along until you get a replacement is an enormous time-saver.
It’s important to note that RAID is not a backup solution.
I know you touched on it, but I just wanted to state it plainly.
What’s more important is redundancy, as all drives fail.
What’s your replication/redundancy/backup plan look like? That’s more important than “which drive” (other than SMR/CMR), as even enterprise drives fail.
I’ve had consumer drives running 24/7 for 10 years.
Drives are a lot more robust than most people think, but they still fail at seemingly random times, so having backup is crucial.
I have an (old) NAS that frankly I don’t trust to not die. Then again, anything can die, so it’s just one component of my local data replication.
I also have my server which is authoritative for all data, which is then duplicated (on schedules) to the NAS and 2 external drives, so I have 3 local copies.
All of these drives are 5+ years old except the primary data drive which is 2.
CMR!
Do not buy SMR drives!
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
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I have been using recertified, or used enterprise class drives which have a crystal disk info good health report. These have waaaayyy higher MTBFs than consumer grade, as in 10x more, so a drive with 40.000 hr. on it, may have 10x *theoretical *the life left. do remeber that the M in MTBF means mean, it doesn’t mean guaranteed time between failure. Enterprise drives tend to be noisier.
Noise is not really a specification for this kind of drive. I would recommend just putting the server somewhere it won’t matter, if possible.
Most drives are mostly reliable. Backblaze publishes data on reliability if you’re curious, but I would just say to always be prepared to replace a drive. That means RAID and/or backups (but RAID itself is not a backup).
The only really important thing is to avoid SMR drives. Performance is terrible because any write involves a bunch of additional writes.
As far as I could find, both of the drives I’m considering are CMR, I guess for my purposes it doesn’t matter that much since I’m not going to do too much writing beyond a regular drive, as I mentioned my main reasoning was reliability and always on operation.
I intellectually understand the thing about drives dying every few years and have accepted that fact, but I can’t shake the feeling of that being wrong because I have other three regular hard drives with more than a decade of working fine.
Drives don’t die every few years. Some will, just out of pure statistics, but generally once they’re broken in, they’ll run for years and years. I buy mine used with up to 40k hours on them (~4.5 years) and they keep running for years more. Usually I end up upgrading them before they actually have issues.
Be careful with WD reds and CMR/SMR. Even though every WD Red Plus should be CMR, WD is known for selling SMR drives marketed as CMR. The whole Red Plus line exists because, before that, the WD Reds were supposed to be CMR, but they started mixing them with SMR drives. People found out and lawsuits were filed, so WD’s answer was to say that the WD Red line didn’t guarantee CMR, and people needed to pay extra for the WD Red Plus line.
WD is forever off my list of trustworthy manufacturers. But there aren’t many options, and I understand that in these times it may be difficult to pass on a good offer. Read customer reviews and, upon arrival, make sure they’re CMR.
While I don’t exactly intend to run RAID, I ended up choosing nas drives for the 24/7 intended usage,
The purpose of a NAS drive is to be LESS reliable than a regular drive, not more reliable. Explanation: if a regular drive gets a read error on a block, it will retry for quite a while before giving up. The host, meanwhile, has to wait for the data to be retrieved if the retries work. That’s all it can really do, wait and hope. Meanwhile, the waiting slows the application down.
A NAS drive instead will fail once or twice, then give up immediately, since it knows that it’s in a RAID system and that the data is also present on other disks. The RAID then puts the data together from the other drives and gets it to the host, logging the error. It will also hopefully mark the bad block on the drive with the read failure, and rewrite the recovered data to a spare sector. So this is faster than all the retries even though the drive that had the bad block gives up on it rather than attempting recovery by repeated reads.
So if you buy NAS drives, put them in a RAID.
Drives are currently around 2x as expensive as a year or so ago but they are available if you can afford them. I guess that’s better than shortages where they’re hard to find even if you can pay. We’ve had that before too.
I like to think the current situation will settle out. Who knows though. Drive space is still way less expensive than in 2010 or anything like that.
Interesting, Hadn’t really read anything like that before, since nas drives have extra features and functions that seems like a thing they would set as an extra flag or something (if it’s running on raid, then give up sooner).
What I meant by reliability was more about running the drive 24/7, as far as I could see they’re the only ones intended to be used that way (besides surveilance drives). They are intended to run at all times, spin more frequently and sustain more vibrations from nearby drives as well as heat, I feel like there’s more to it than that but can’t say myself.
Do you mean that the drive will say it’s dead if there are errors?
If 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.
Don’t think about drives in terms of reliability. Consider them a consumable in your storage system. The storage system should insulate you from the exact drives. Run a ZFS mirror or RAIDz2. Swap drives when they fail. The exact brand and model shouldn’t matter.
One note,
I used a raid with WD 8 TB drives, and when a drive failed we bought a Seagate Ironwolf Pro 8 TB to replace it.
The NAS wouldn’t accept it into the raid, because it had fewer bytes!
We found a workaround by tweaking partition sizes for that particular raid, but it caught me by surprise.
this was mdadm, not sure if zfs has some awareness to slightly differences in sizes between hdd models
Yes, unfortunately 8tb on one drive is not necessarily the exact same as 8tb on any other model drive, even from the same manufacturer. Where possible, you should replace with as close a model as you can get.
If you’re expecting to mix and match, it’s a good idea to leave a little slack space at the end to account for this. Else you may have to fiddle with the partitions as you found, or at worst start a whole new array with the smaller drive and migrate the others.
This, make a partition thats a few gigs smaller than the drive, add the partitions to the storage pool instead of the raw drives.
I have 4x 8TB WD Red Plus drives in my NAS. I started with 2 and added 2 later. 1 of the original 2 failed a little under the 4 year mark. I replaced it with another 8TB WD Red Plus drive. I’m happy with them. I wouldn’t say they get particularly loud unless I’m writing a bunch of data to them.
SMART Power_On_Hours (converted to years):
sda = 5.42 sdb = 1.58 sdc = 3.85 sdd = 3.85If you don’t have backups, consider multiple drives in a RAID configuration.
instead of the 12T, consider 3 8T drives in a Raid-5 array. That way if one fails, you’ve not lost everything, and have time to repalce it and rebuild it - with ZFS (most NAS systems use ZFS) the rebuild is simple and online.
RAID isn’t an alternative to a backup. If a second drive fails while rebuilding the RAID-5 array, all of the data will be lost.
RAID is for continuous of operations, backup is for restoration after a failure.
I have both, but run Raid-6 on my array due to the size of the drives. As has been observed here, if one drive fails and then another drive fails during the rebuild, you’ve lost everything.
Then to add to that I’ve got backups of everything I can’t replace. Plex library will come back automatically (though it will take a while). But my documents, digital filing cabinet, pictures, videos of my kids, those are all protected by raid, backup, AND off-site replication.
its usually for redudancy but prople tend to use the wrong term for it.
unless the data is off site, its not truely a backup
unless the data is off site, its not truely a backup
Two is one and one is none. No matter if it’s offsite or on top of your main server. Also 3-2-1 is an industry standard for a reason. Plus unless you test that you can actually restore your backups they don’t really exist (also known as Schrödinger Backups).
people* 🤓 👆
one thing to consider with a raid is the drive resonance. if you don’t have proper hardware to ensure the drives are properly isolated you could shave months or years off their lifespan.
always use the same make/model and data density when building a raid. you should also buy them either all new or used that were pulled from another raid.
also more is better. raids are designed to fail. buy extra drives to replace active drives. my personal rule is to buy 50-75% more than required. so if the raid will have four drives, I buy six or seven.
also, when one drive fails others will inevitably follow due to manufacturing defects or resonance changes. replace your backup stock when affordable.
I do agree though. of you’re selfhosting, a raid array is the best place to start. though, I’m personally partial to a raid-10 over a 5.
Same make and model is fine, but you do want to make sure they are from different batches if you can. Reduces the chances of multiple drive failure occurring at the same time.
Yeah, a good enclosure will have accoustically isolated drives (rubber bumpers at the drive mount points)
I run rack-mount servers, so drive noise is the least of my issues (fans are always the loudest part of any server) but I used to run in a Nanoxia DeepSilence 6 tower, and it was amazing. 1mm thick superstructure, insulation, accustically isolated drive mounts, etc. Couldn’t hear that even when the fans were running at full steam.
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data
I generally run HGST drives, now part of WD. The *star series is generally great. I get Ultrastar drives, haven’t had a single failure in 20 years.
Workloads are office servers and office NAS applications, 15 to 50 employees.
Super highly recommend new or refurbished Seagate exos
I’m not sure if 30 vs 24 dB is too much, but idk really
FYI decibels are a logarithmic scale so for example 18-24dB is a smaller difference than 24-30dB. That said, some HDD noise is noticeable to some people and not to others. All you can really say is that enterprise drives are loudest followed by NAS drives then regular consumer ones.
I’ve had good experiences with both WD and Seagate. According to industry, most HDDs will last at least 3-5 years if they are used regularly, but you can also monitor their health via a number of tools for better lifespan estimation, e.g.
smartctlandsmartdon Linux. Risk management and a good hardware failure mitigation strategy will ultimately help protect your data for the long run though.3-5 years? I’m not sure about that… I got 4 Industry Red HDDs from my job… They have over 10 years of full load and they don’t have a single reallocated sector count, reported uncorrectable errors or current pending sector count.
I guess consumer grade HDD have some kind of programmed obsolescence ?
I bought a Red Plus NAS 8TB a couple of weeks ago, because I didn’t know better. My mini PC is sitting a meter behind the monitors of my desktop PC and the noise is unbearable. So at the moment I just use the HDD as a backup, but it will be impossible for me to place it somewhere near where I live. Unfortunately I have no Ethernet in the kitchen.
I could have known this before but I didn’t know better. I had no idea those things run 24/7. You seem to be better informed than me, just wanted to warn you!
Thanks! I’ve been trying to read on people’s experiences and discussions on the topic, I don’t consider my knowledge to be extremely reliable so I wanted to hear opinions and discussions on the matter. The models I’ve been looking into say they’re 24dB and 30 dB, but I’ve read some wd red models are crazy noisy too. From reviews I could find they validated these being quiet and generally more pleasant noises but, again, I couldn’t say for certain.
I am having second thoughts on my plan, so I’ll keep listening for discussions here.
