WD Red \ Purple vs Seagate IronWolf \ SkyHawk. Raid, NAS, HomeLab, CCTV

himaro · 18 Apr 2019 at 11:56

So, I'm building a home server to replace my ageing Proliant microserver G7.
It's going to have it's work cut out for it, as it's going to be doing the following

NAS
CCTV (BlueIris)
PLEX
HomeLab
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Jenkins
- Whatever I need it to be!

I'm thinking of getting a dedicated raid controller & have 6 2TB HDD's in either raid 10 or 5 (maybe 6?)
However, I'm unsure what HDD's to get... NAS or CCTV? WD or Seagate?
The OS's (assuming virtualisation here, Win10 Pro& CentOS.) are going to be on a M2 SSD.
What's your advice?
And what free hypervisor would you use as well, while I'm here. Does VMWare still have a free version?

FreeStream · 18 Apr 2019 at 13:09

UnRAID.

Disks don’t really matter (make sure they are 1TB+ platter versions though!), get 7200 RPM versions for parity drives though.

Get NVME SSD as a cache/apps/VMs drive.

I currently run a Haswell era Xeon with a 4-port NIC running:

PfSense (NIC his PCI passthrough)
Ubuntu Server
Docker running multiple things inc Plex.
Had passthrough GPUs in the past too.

Works a treat.

7x4TB drives at the moment. Mix of RED (666GB/1TB platter versions) and Seagate 5900RPM NAS drives.

1TB 850 EVO as the cache/apps/VM drive.

Did ‘normal’ RAID A long time ago, not necessary for the home environment.

Armageus · 18 Apr 2019 at 13:35

Why not keep the Microserver as the NAS (especially as it has ECC ram e.g. for ZFS), and just buy a NUC or similar to use for the hypervisor side of things?

himaro · 18 Apr 2019 at 15:54

Armageus said:
Why not keep the Microserver as the NAS (especially as it has ECC ram e.g. for ZFS), and just buy a NUC or similar to use for the hypervisor side of things?

I have considered doing something along those lines, I've not really looked much into NUC's in the past.
However, I'd rather have everything inside one bit of hardware, for simplicity and keeping running costs lower. It may not actually BE lower running costs, but it looks it too the wife

I was considering upgrading to a Gen8 or 10 HPE microserver, but ultimately, getting something like the Silverstone CS380 case means I can easily upgrade as need be.