NAS: RAID 6 and drives

xrapidx

xrapidx

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I've finally bit the bullet and started sorting out my storage, I've bought a 8bay Buffalo device and want to start with four 4TB disks - the question is, are the WD NAS drives worth it over the WD Green drives?
 
xrapidx said:
I've finally bit the bullet and started sorting out my storage, I've bought a 8bay Buffalo device and want to start with four 4TB disks - the question is, are the WD NAS drives worth it over the WD Green drives?
Click to expand...

Reliability/features aside the one recent and interesting argument I saw when buying drives was using the warranty as a kind of "rental" system. i.e. 2 year warranty you expect the drive to fail by then so work out the cost pear year for that drive and then use that price point to find the best drive.

I ran Seagate 2TB LP "green" drives for a good number of years (24/7) before the first one failed in my ZFS array. I've started replacing them with the Seagate 4TB NAS drives mainly for the error recovery control and longer warranty.

PS. If you want a off the shelf NAS you should have gone Synology or QNAP. Home built nothing beats NAS4Free/FreeNAS. IMO.

I skim read this. May be of some use: http://www.wegotserved.com/2014/09/26/round-hard-drive-right-home-server-nas/
 
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Thanks - I'll give it a read

The Synology and QNAP stuff was just too expensive.

I was actually looking at the various drives and their warranties yesterday, I might end up with the Enterprise drives as they have five year warranties and aren't much more expensive.
 
xrapidx said:
Thanks - I'll give it a read

The Synology and QNAP stuff was just too expensive.

I was actually looking at the various drives and their warranties yesterday, I might end up with the Enterprise drives as they have five year warranties and aren't much more expensive.
Click to expand...

For me the enterprise drives were overkill, rather go with your plan which is RAID6 and spend the extra money on an additional disk.

Those new 6 bay Dell T20's Esquire sell should make decent ZFS based NAS systems.
 
I looked at those, but wasn't keen on the smaller disks 2.5" disks

I see WD Purple drives are slightly cheaper than the Red drives, so want to investigate those... and then the Seagate Enterprise SV35 drives are on par pricing wise with WD Red/Purple

I don't want to consider anything less than RAID6 - so need four drives to start off with, which'll be in the reason of 10k - but'll hold me for awhile.
 
xrapidx said:
I've finally bit the bullet and started sorting out my storage, I've bought a 8bay Buffalo device and want to start with four 4TB disks - the question is, are the WD NAS drives worth it over the WD Green drives?
Click to expand...

It will entirely depend on how "hard" your going to use the drives. If it's for storage and occasional movie playback, the green drives would be fine but if you're going to hammer them hard, most of the time (i.e. heavy DB development / lots of CCTV footage storage / etc) then rather get the NAS drives.
 
I need to rebuild my storage server too. Just so damn expensive!

Got myself a nice HBA, now I just need the disks, then going to build a nice ZFS array.
 
At this stage, it's just for personal backups - and then my entire entertainment will be on there - I've tons of music, ripped blurays, etc...

My main concern is redundancy, teats why I don't even want to risk RAID5.

I am planning on getting about 4-6 CCTV camera's - but that's probably a year away.
 
xrapidx said:
At this stage, it's just for personal backups - and then my entire entertainment will be on there - I've tons of music, ripped blurays, etc...

My main concern is redundancy, teats why I don't even want to risk RAID5.

I am planning on getting about 4-6 CCTV camera's - but that's probably a year away.
Click to expand...

I'm currently running a raid5 array and wish I didn't, nothing wrong with it currently but when things to go wrong they tend to terribly wrong with raid5.

Won't do anything except raidz2 from now on, running a FreeNAS box at the office with this setup and it's been great - had all 4 of our Seagate drives fail over the course of 2 months and it was a breeze to just replace disks.
 
xrapidx said:
I looked at those, but wasn't keen on the smaller disks 2.5" disks

I see WD Purple drives are slightly cheaper than the Red drives, so want to investigate those... and then the Seagate Enterprise SV35 drives are on par pricing wise with WD Red/Purple

I don't want to consider anything less than RAID6 - so need four drives to start off with, which'll be in the reason of 10k - but'll hold me for awhile.
Click to expand...

I checked again. I thought it was 6 x 3.5", but it's only 4 x 3.5". There are also only 4 SATA ports, so if you wanted to add 2x2.5" drives later you'd need a SATA controller.

Yeah that 4 x sparkly new drives is a bitter pill to swallow. I'm going to cycle my 2TB drives out slowly as my budget allows.
 
DrJohnZoidberg said:
I'm currently running a raid5 array and wish I didn't, nothing wrong with it currently but when things to go wrong they tend to terribly wrong with raid5.

Won't do anything except raidz2 from now on, running a FreeNAS box at the office with this setup and it's been great - had all 4 of our Seagate drives fail over the course of 2 months and it was a breeze to just replace disks.
Click to expand...

I've been messing around with various options for a couple of years now, and never committed to anything - I wanted a smallish solution thats fairly hassle free - but offers good space, and expandability. I couldnt really find anything except building something from scratch, and then couldn't find anything the right size, dimension wise.

I know I'm in for a rough time if things go wrong - but will just have to hope it doesn't - its at least better than the situation I'm in now. I actually have two drives (1tb and 2tb) failing at the moment, so they're unplugged and waiting for a backup

morkhans said:
I checked again. I thought it was 6 x 3.5", but it's only 4 x 3.5". There are also only 4 SATA ports, so if you wanted to add 2x2.5" drives later you'd need a SATA controller.

Yeah that 4 x sparkly new drives is a bitter pill to swallow. I'm going to cycle my 2TB drives out slowly as my budget allows.
Click to expand...

One of the reason's I went with this device is its size, 8 drives, and its about the same size as a microserver, it'll give me 24GB of fairly redundant storage which should hold a year or three :P
 
I've pretty much settled on WD Red... is buying five drives at the same time an issue to be concerned about?
 
There is always something to be said for the odd faulty batch but that's why you're going raid 6.
 
morkhans said:
There is always something to be said for the odd faulty batch but that's why you're going raid 6.
Click to expand...

Wondering what the chance of three drives of the same month going at the same time :p Probably worth the risk... one more week to pay day, then I'll finally have my storage sorted.
 
Personally I wouldn't go for the Green series because I would go Seagate and because of their weird power management issues that cause havoc on everything except Unraid where the drives are spun down anyway.

However I wouldn't go for the NAS drives for home use either. What about the middle ground Surveillance/AV ones? They were also built for this purpose of always being on.


And RAID6 all the way, unless you go UnRAID of course which I doubt the Buffalo supports.
 
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