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:

  1. Buy two pricey Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red HDDs and put them in RAID1
  2. 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!

  • glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    3·
    23 hours ago

    Consumer is fine then, cheapest you can. Edit: I did see people mention SMR drives, get cheapest CMR drives. SMR is not worth the money saved for usual use cases.

    You can def wait, but do the over-under with what you can pay. External drives, even if shucked, seem to be the lowest quality drives and die earliest. May be better to get real drives now, even with inflated costs.

    Make sure you get a drive for backup. Extra layout up front but worth it. I’d recc 1 data drive + 1 backup drive over just 2 raid1 data drives any day.

    • theorangeninja@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      2·
      19 hours ago

      Yes I will definitely get a CMR drive, I read enough comments warning me about SMR lol

      Yeah I should probably get a little bit extra money in hand but buy something good instead of some garbage.

      Would you consider that better even if the backup drive is in the same house as the data drive, just powered off?

      • glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        3·
        18 hours ago

        Backup drive doesn’t need to be anything more than holding your (ideally daily) backup of your main drive(s). It doesn’t need to be powered up and spinning all the time, it can be in the same computer. Spinning up and down causes major wear on hard drives, but I think spinning up once a day for backups is fine and won’t stress it.

        For example, have 3 used enterprise drives in my computer case: 2 in BTRFS RAID1 (mirror) as a data drive and 1 with BTRFS as a backup drive. I use snapshotting to mirror the data drive to the backup drive. I then use restic to copy essential data from the backup drive to a remote cloud location (friend’s house with a 4th smaller hard drive - if I did not have a friend with a hard drive I would use hetzner most likely). My Linux ISO’s don’t go remote, but my photos do.

        Thus I have immediate redundancy (and bit rot protection) from the BTRFS RAID1 data drives, I have a local full backup with the BTRFS backup drive, and I have my essential stuff far away if the computer explodes or something.

        Edit: again, if I was going to save cash I would drop the RAID1 from the data drives and just get 1 data drive and 1 backup drive. RAID1 is never as good as an independent copy.

        • theorangeninja@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          1·
          4 hours ago

          Thanks a lot, again! I think I will focus on active and backup drive (+remote for the few essentials) and only use RAID if it is easy (and cheap) to implement.

          Do you have any tips how to implement the powering on and off automatically? And would it be possible to have both in the same case or is it necessary to separate them physically?