NAS drives

[champ222]

Hi All.

Im building a new NAS and im debating on some new drives. I currently have:

2tb green
3tb red
4tb red
6tb red

I currently have about 10.5 ish tb of data. It tends to fill slowly, so im not desperate yet. But im tempted by a 12tb drive as it would be easier to copy the data from the old server to the new. Rather than from the usb based backup drives.

Im probably going to go unraid, based on reviews, though i havent tested anything yet, and am currently debating a parity drive. If i go that way, ill need two 12tb drives.

The new server can only hold 4 drives. So id move the 2tb and 3tb on. But for the cost of two 12tb drives, id only gain 7tb of space. This is the price you pay for parity i guess.

Looking around at drives, it all seems very expensive.

Ocuk seems strangely expensive compared to others. I can buy a Toshiba 12tb nas or enterprise drive for about £206 elsewhere. The enterprise comes with 5 year warranty.

Or i could get used drives for around £130 ish with 24 months warranty from a "high street second hand place". Not sure how good the warranty is, but its better than my other used options in this regard.

Or i could skip the parity all together (i dont do it currently) Its mainly media, and is backed up, whenever i think to do it. The non media stuff doesnt change much, so id be unlikely to lose everything i cant get again.

Ive always gone for 5400rpm drives as they are fast enough with less noise/power/heat, but most large drives seem to be 7200rpm nowadays.

What would you do?

Thanks

 

[champ222]

Yeah your right, better off avoided i guess. I'll keep an eye on the market place and see what comes up.

Its weird how the external drives are often cheaper... dont you tend to get any old random drive in them though?

Why we needed a name for this "Shucking" is a mystery. Ive only just heard it, and i hate it. Who makes up this ****?

There must be a huge pile of drive enclosures that everyone has shucked (shudder) the drives from. I could do with a few to put old NAS drives in to use them as USB backup drives... whats the opposite to shucking? there must be a stupid word for it

12TB drives are already pushing what i want to spend really.

Thanks for your input, appreciated

 

[champ222]

I wouldn't go larger than 12 TB, my Unraid server runs 8TB drives. Large drives take a lot of time to clear and parity check in Unraid so there is a balance of drive size vs check/recovery time.
As you are limited to 4 drives, using a 12TB drives is fine.

The aim of parity is so you can afford one drive to fail and still have data available.
Downloading 20TB of media can be done, but is a hassle when a parity drive could have saved you the effort and you just replace a disk.
Parity is not backup, it's purely availability.

I would agree on used drives, a warranty from them is no use if you lose your data and have to spend 2 weeks recovering it while getting paid out a % of the drive cost.

You can look a shucking, but these days is seems no cheaper and there is more risk of warranty if you shuck and a drive fails ( I threw the cases away but kept the USB boards as my drives are now out of warranty)

Not much point using unraid without parity, might as well save the cash and just use a random linux distro to share the drive.

Shop around on drive prices. I would recommend you buy two different brands to eliminate the risk of common failure.

Parity is an investment, drives in normal use typically last way beyond the warranty.

Its all currently backed up on a bunch of usb drives, so i wouldn't have to download the lot, but just copy it back from the backup drives, but its a hassle that is avoided by parity for sure. Ive found some 12tb nas drives from toshiba for under £200 each.. its likely the best i can find at the moment

 

[champ222]

The drives in the larger WD Elements always seem good. If you think about it, how many different physical large HDDs do WD make in each capacity? It's not going to be many and they're all NAS or Enterprise drives so these get a white label and a new model designation for use as external drives.

Shucking is the word used for opening an oyster, allegedly because that's the noise it makes. We're getting a drive out of its shell so it seemed appropriate to whoever first used it.

Yeah i guess. Bit of a waste of plastic though. Manufacturers should price the bare drives appropriately.

Thanks

 

[champ222]

There are websites that compare current prices on a range of drives to make it easier to identify where the best value is at any given time, by cost per TB of each.

I use Unraid and currently my largest drives are 14TB; I'd agree with the sentiment about not going for the largest capacities.

Thanks.

Where is the best noise to capacity ratio do we think?