Chevron
Serial breaker of phones
But then you're stuck with Seagate :spit:
A Seagate drive will never ever touch my pc again.
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How reliable are consumer harddrives?
- Thread starter Thor
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But then you're stuck with Seagate :spit:
A Seagate drive will never ever touch my pc again.
SauRoNZA
Honorary Master
You don't need it but it helps if you put one in as a cache drive.
Data sits on there and then gets distributed to the other drives in slow time boosting overall performance.
You shouldn't need it for the OS though.
SauRoNZA
Honorary Master
He he, I'm the exact opposite again.
WD have failed me so many times I just do Seagate now.
But in this case if WD offered a longer warranty (and willing to swop it based on S.M.A.R.T status) then I don't see why not.
Chevron
Serial breaker of phones
And where did you get that R8556 price from? 4*2075 = R8300
Then 4*1809 = R7236
Difference R1064
Not much for drives made for the purpose.
Chevron
Serial breaker of phones
Let me guess you had those cheap green drives?
I've only ever used BLACK drives and never had any issues. The first one I've bought like 7years ago still works in my PC.
Soul Assassin
Honorary Master
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When was the last time you did this, I've found that these days the external drives have some sort of proprietary connector inside the enclosure instead of the normal SATA connector.
SauRoNZA
Honorary Master
Nope Enterprise Drives in a RAID array.
But in personal capacity had a few externals give crap and over the years just generally WD not so hot.
But yes all the greens I've ever touched have failed.
Not to say Seagate has never failed, but much less so.
SauRoNZA
Honorary Master
LazyLion
King of de Jungle
One hard drive is as good as another. I've been through many in my lifetime and there is no particular winner. I'm running 96 Terabytes across my home network including all the family PC'S. One brand fails just as often as another. I try to replace them all every 3 years.
To double up as a media server.
I was thinking of popping window 10 on it and run headless with TeamViewer should I make changes like add new folders to the network etc
itareanlnotani
Executive Member
November 2015.
Always best to google the enclosure to make sure that they're not screwing you with some usb proprietary crap though.
Please adopt me
HavocXphere
Honorary Master
That was my first thought too.
I mean maybe OP plans to power the NAS up and down for sport...who am I to judged...
Necropolis
Executive Member
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Why?
Install a linux distro of some description - or windows server - but don't use a desktop operating system, that is just silly.
And if you don't know your way around linux some googling and time and you will learn quickly
CataclysmZA
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You have a couple of options here, OP.
Firstly, you can use four 4TB drives in a RAID 10 array; that's two drives striped together with the striped array mirrored across to the other in software RAID. If you have an array failure you drop to two drives, but this limits your chances of having another drive fail while you're rebuilding the array. If one drive from each array fails, you can still recover your data. With 8TB of usable space, it's still not too difficult to set up a backup to another machine, or a NAS, or two 4TB external drives. RAID 5 with four drives is workable, but not ideal for parity and data recovery reasons, because you'll only be able to suffer a single drive failure, and you're almost guaranteed to suffer a total array failure when rebuilding the array with a new drive because of how much information you're storing on it.
Another option is storage spaces in Windows 10. This gives you all 16TB of space for use, and if you end up running out of space (storage spaces makes a shadow copy of your data, so 8TB is effectively available) you can just add more drives to the pool. If you're able to backup this machine properly, there's no reason why it can't work, though it's less reliable than ZFS when recovering from errors or recovering data. In the Linux world, JBOD achieves a similar aim to storage spaces.
As mentioned before, ZFS/UnRAID is an option that's very popular with enthusiasts who care about being able to recover, as well as store their data properly. Remember though that RAID isn't a backup solution - it's only there for storage and error recovery, not for backing up stuff. Tape drives and properly stored Blu-Ray discs are better for large sets of data like the one you're describing. Wendel from Tek Syndicate goes into ZFS in this video and also explains why it's good, but not perfect.
Other people here have more experience with RAID arrays than I. They have given some good advice already. WD Reds are a good choice.
Firstly, you can use four 4TB drives in a RAID 10 array; that's two drives striped together with the striped array mirrored across to the other in software RAID. If you have an array failure you drop to two drives, but this limits your chances of having another drive fail while you're rebuilding the array. If one drive from each array fails, you can still recover your data. With 8TB of usable space, it's still not too difficult to set up a backup to another machine, or a NAS, or two 4TB external drives. RAID 5 with four drives is workable, but not ideal for parity and data recovery reasons, because you'll only be able to suffer a single drive failure, and you're almost guaranteed to suffer a total array failure when rebuilding the array with a new drive because of how much information you're storing on it.
Another option is storage spaces in Windows 10. This gives you all 16TB of space for use, and if you end up running out of space (storage spaces makes a shadow copy of your data, so 8TB is effectively available) you can just add more drives to the pool. If you're able to backup this machine properly, there's no reason why it can't work, though it's less reliable than ZFS when recovering from errors or recovering data. In the Linux world, JBOD achieves a similar aim to storage spaces.
As mentioned before, ZFS/UnRAID is an option that's very popular with enthusiasts who care about being able to recover, as well as store their data properly. Remember though that RAID isn't a backup solution - it's only there for storage and error recovery, not for backing up stuff. Tape drives and properly stored Blu-Ray discs are better for large sets of data like the one you're describing. Wendel from Tek Syndicate goes into ZFS in this video and also explains why it's good, but not perfect.
Other people here have more experience with RAID arrays than I. They have given some good advice already. WD Reds are a good choice.