NAS specific hard drives

Mr crowley · 14 Apr 2019 at 14:26

Hi
I'm currently speccing a nas which will be for home use, for keeping general media on. I'm thinking of using freenas, and i'm just looking at the requirements which recommend specific NAS hard drives such as WD red. I was going to use 4x 3tb drives with the ZFS feature to provide raid, to have 6tb storage which will be mirrored, so would this eliminate the need to use top notch hard drives? If so, the only advantages remaining with the WD red would be noise/power consumption?
I suppose another option would be to not use the ZFS raid and just trust the better hard drives, although this seems less safe to me

Cooler running · 22 Apr 2019 at 01:03

I'd say WD reds are a minimum for NAS use (I prefer Iron Wolf as they're a little faster). If you're asking whether its a good idea using raid/parity with worse disks than the Reds, I'd say no. Reason being that non-NAZ disks are generally not designed to run 24-7, they may have higher failure rates in a NAZ than they would do in their natural environment.
If you're asking whether drives rated higher than Reds are enough to not bother with raid? I'd say that drive quality should be taken as a separate decision, especially as hard drive failures in a NAS are generally rare when it comes to NAS drives VS Enterprise.
Generally Enterprise quality drives come into their own either because of compatibility (SAS for example) or because changing and rebuilding takes man hours, so enterprise looks like good value thought that lens.

As a side note, you say that 4x3tb would give 6tb of storage? If you're on a budget and looking to do zfs I'd personally go for raidz1 instead of raidz2. I personally would vouch for 2+1 using 4tb drives in your case, as you'd get more storage for less money.

Stay in touch as I'm planning a similar build at the moment.

Mr crowley · 23 Apr 2019 at 14:41

Yes thanks for the info about the raid, i'm just researching as I go so point taken. Looking at getting the hardware soon as I've got some error checking ram on the way, just trying to nail down the minimum cpu/mobo spec which would run well as on the freenas forums people report ZFS being a bit more power hungry

Cooler running · 23 Apr 2019 at 22:03

Mr crowley said:
Yes thanks for the info about the raid, i'm just researching as I go so point taken. Looking at getting the hardware soon as I've got some error checking ram on the way, just trying to nail down the minimum cpu/mobo spec which would run well as on the freenas forums people report ZFS being a bit more power hungry

Don't read into minimum specs too much for a NAS, for years the off the shelf Nas boxes had 512mb of memory and a single core 1.2ghz processor. You'll struggle to buy anything that bad that is newly produced.

Free Nas says 8gb-16gb Ram, I've ran it before with 2gb. It just means that it takes a little longer to do backups and such, usually the general usage won't suffer much on a lower spec - still not recommended to do that for obvious reasons but not the end of the world.