Do I need NAS drives?

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rkd29980

Limp Gawd
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Oct 19, 2015
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I have several media servers I am setting up and am deciding on if i should have them running all the time or just when I need them. They are going to be used to storing music, videos, misc files, porn. I assume the drives will spin down when not in use which will be most of the time.

The big concern I have is vibrations from so many drives. I have two 36 bay servers and one 24 bay server. I would like to have HGST or NAS drives for there vibration protection and high quality and longer life but they are significantly more per drive than the 5TB Toshiba desktop drives I plan to buy. Backblaze uses desktop drives so idk.

This is confusing. Do I need to spend the extra money on NAS drives or can I make do with desktop drives? What do you guys use in your servers?
 
This is a pretty good explanation of what you get by buying a NAS drive.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Western-Digital-Green-vs-Red-Hard-Drives-602/

I have Green Drives at home because that's all that was available when I bought them. They are due to being replaced. The main feature is TLER support which is helpful using RAID Controllers to prevent rebuilds or drives marked as failed.

What software do you plan to run on the media servers?
 
No you do not have to use NAS drives. Be warned the Toshiba drives may not have the reliability you are looking for. There is a reason they are so cheap.
 
I don't trust WD and although I haven't yet had an issue with Seagate, because of their high failure rate, I would rather not buy more.

I don't know what software I will be using, maybe ZFS Guru.
 
I've been using the same 2 TB WD Green drives for three years now in my buffalo linkstation. Never had an issue.
 
In large arrays that are cooled well I use 7200RPM 64MB enterprise drives. Good power usage, decent seek times (for a spinner anyways) and decent throughput. Enterprise SATA drives usually have some kind of vibration mitigation also. My drive of choice is HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 series drives. I've had good luck with them.

Small arrays or limited cooling (noise issues) I use NAS drives. Low power & heat.
 
rkd29980 said:
I have several media servers I am setting up and am deciding on if i should have them running all the time or just when I need them. They are going to be used to storing music, videos, misc files, porn. I assume the drives will spin down when not in use which will be most of the time.

The big concern I have is vibrations from so many drives. I have two 36 bay servers and one 24 bay server. I would like to have HGST or NAS drives for there vibration protection and high quality and longer life but they are significantly more per drive than the 5TB Toshiba desktop drives I plan to buy. Backblaze uses desktop drives so idk.

This is confusing. Do I need to spend the extra money on NAS drives or can I make do with desktop drives? What do you guys use in your servers?
Click to expand...

If you are smart, you will not use any type of RAID. At most one drive will spin up for each media stream. So there will be no vibration.

I use WD 4TB green drives. They seem to last a long time with the light loads that media cause.
 
I plan on using ZFS or raidz, I don't know why someone wouldn't use ZFS. My servers are rarely going to be used for media streaming aside from music just storage. If I want to watch a movie or something I will copy it to my PC.

If I could afford it, I would love to buy all HGST drives but the price difference between a highend drive of reasonable size and a consumer drive is massive like a almost twice the cost of the desktop drives.
 
I've got a total of 6x3TB drives in a drive pool with FlexRAID that I use for my NAS. Two of the drives are WD Green drives that I'd had for a couple years now while the other drives are the WD NAS Red drives that I'd had for about 8 months now sans one that I've had a little over a year now.

They've been great. The two green drives were in my HTPC for a while where I stored media. I eventually ran out of room and needed a new solution so I built a NAS and populated it with a bunch of drives.

My only issue with using them was downloading large torrents to the Drive Pool directly would cause uTorrent to mess up the torrent and not complete the download. So I got another 3TB WD NAS Red drive as a "cache" drive that I download everything to from uTorrent. Once the download completes I just move it over to the Drive Pool and change the destination in uTorrent to the Drive Pool location.
 
my array has 16 drives. started with 2 drives and it grew from there. a mixture of the cheapest desktop seagate, wd and hitachi drives i could find. out of 8 wd green drives, 2 failed, out of 4 seagate drives, 1 failed. those have been replaced with hitachi drives. 4 new wd green drives have been added as well.

bottom line i i buy the cheapest drives available and plan for failure. 2 of my failed drives were still under warranty and the 3rd one was replaced for about 50% of what i paid for it originally.

also using flexraid. haven't lost any data.... yet.
 
wirerogue said:
my array has 16 drives. started with 2 drives and it grew from there. a mixture of the cheapest desktop seagate, wd and hitachi drives i could find. out of 8 wd green drives, 2 failed, out of 4 seagate drives, 1 failed. those have been replaced with hitachi drives. 4 new wd green drives have been added as well.

bottom line i i buy the cheapest drives available and plan for failure. 2 of my failed drives were still under warranty and the 3rd one was replaced for about 50% of what i paid for it originally.

also using flexraid. haven't lost any data.... yet.
Click to expand...

Damn! 16 drives?! Are they all in a single drive pool and if so how many of them are you using as PPUs?

I want to add another 2x3TB drives to my drive pool, but I'm not sure how to easily add them. I didn't exactly think my original setup through very well so I don't know which physical drives are the PPU drives and which ones are the DRU drives. When I delete the configuration to add the 2 new drives I don't want to use a DRU drive as a PPU drive and lose the data on it.
 
You don't need anything crazy for your media files. I use WD Greens as my main store and I have WD REDS as my backup.
 
Skillz said:
Damn! 16 drives?! Are they all in a single drive pool and if so how many of them are you using as PPUs?

I want to add another 2x3TB drives to my drive pool, but I'm not sure how to easily add them. I didn't exactly think my original setup through very well so I don't know which physical drives are the PPU drives and which ones are the DRU drives. When I delete the configuration to add the 2 new drives I don't want to use a DRU drive as a PPU drive and lose the data on it.
Click to expand...

yes, single pool. 12-2tb and 4-4tb. i'm using 2 of the 4tb drives for ppu. the 12-2tb drives are combined into 6 drus.

once you delete the configuration, you should be able to view the drives contents normally. the ones with all the .flxr files are your ppu drives.

i also use hard disk sentinel for smart monitoring and disk info should i need the actual serial number off the drive when it comes time to replace.
 
wirerogue said:
yes, single pool. 12-2tb and 4-4tb. i'm using 2 of the 4tb drives for ppu. the 12-2tb drives are combined into 6 drus.

once you delete the configuration, you should be able to view the drives contents normally. the ones with all the .flxr files are your ppu drives.

i also use hard disk sentinel for smart monitoring and disk info should i need the actual serial number off the drive when it comes time to replace.
Click to expand...

Excellent information. Thanks. Now I need controller card as I am out of SATA ports and two more drives. :D
 
OP, I would buy the reds if I were you. price difference is not all that big, and it gives you extra functionality.

If you want to run them 24/7, they are certified for that. The TLER settings is also a must have if you work with LSI HBA's.

I would not assume that the disks will spin down when idle. I have not observed that with my ZFS pool.

I have 20 of the WD red 3Tb disks. (2 x 10 disk raidz2) I bought them when they were just released (years ago) and had only one of them fail after 2 years.

As with all drives, ventilation is the key to happiness, and use good quality cables. Your choice of case is more important in a way. A good case will also reduce vibrations.
 
$145 Toshiba X300 5TB
$210 Toshiba X300 6TB
$200 Seagate ST5000NM0024 5TB
$193 Seagate ST5000DM002 5TB
$210 WD Red Pro 5TB
$288 WD Red Pro 6TB
$235 HGST Deskstar NAS 5TB
$260 HGST Deskstar NAS 6TB
$149 HGST Deskstar 4TB
$170 HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB

Those prices vary so much. Clearly the Toshiba X300 5TB is the best value in terms of cost per TB. 60 X300 5TB drives will cost me $9000 already and adding another $60 or $85 per drive to get a 5TB HGST Deskstar NAS or 5TB WD Red Pro brings the total to ridiculous amounts and is more than I can afford or am willing to spend which means if I buy the better drives, I will have to buy fewer of them which will leave me with less space than I need.
 
You could go for a bunch of white label drives for $99 a piece. Here is the eBay link. There are plenty of users on servethehome that have them, including one that has a couple hundred. For the price you can't beat it. The seller is a reputable seller that honors their warranty and takes care of their customers.

For $99/drive you can afford to buy a few extras too.

If you need 60 order 70, methodically test them (as you should any drive), weed out the bad ones and warranty them. The seller pays for shipping so no big deal. You'll end up with 10 spares and spend $7000 total.
 
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I have missed the fact that you were buying 60 drives... Why are you buying 60 drives? For porn and videos?? Must be quite the collection.

Anyway, IMO the 24/7 certification is key for server drives.
 
So what are white label drives? Are those factory rejects because my data is to important to me to be stored on refurbished drives?

I just got two Supermicro 36 bay servers. Everytime I think about how many drives I need I come up with a different number. I know I at least need 36 drives plus 6 spars. I need 24 to make a backup of my current server and 12 for my 2nd supermicro server. I will be doing 12 drives vdevs.
 
Having been through 100s of hard drives for my business and my customer's needs I'd personally buy using price and warranty time as an indication of what the manufacturer themselves expect a user to get out of the drive as far as reliability goes.

The old adage you get what you pay for applies somewhat to hard drives (less so than with most products however). Just don't buy the cheapest hard drive, they're usually Toshiba or Seagate and in my experience only last just up to the warranty period (1 or 2 years).

NAS drives will sometimes have different mechanisms which are more robust but usually just contain different firmwares which cut down on power optimizations like head parking which wear out a drive if used 24/7.

WD Green's are good but you need to mess with TLER and their IDLE settings as per here.

Seagates in my experience have the worst reliability out of all the brands. They're cheaper but usually that's because of lower warranty periods and lower life spans. That includes the NAS versions too unfortunately - avoid.

WD Red's are pretty good I've found and generally what I go for when I don't want to mess with firmware settings on the Greens.

Otherwise I believe Hitachi are also reliable. I've certainly never had trouble with them.
 
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