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.
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.