HDD Choice?

Jonza · July 31, 2015

Hi,

I currently have a HP Microserver Gen8 I am planning to use it as a storage server but I am torn between what HDD to use.

My original plan was to buy two 4TB WD RED Drives. But then I saw this 8TB Seagate Archive drive, clearly this is not a NAS HDD but I am going to be using this storage server as mainly backing up games and photos and stuff, but the main use its keeping all my movies and TV shows on it, which is then streamed to XBMC setups around the house. I only copy a few GB of data a day so I just want to know if the SEAGATE hdd will be good enough or am I better of buying the two 4TB DRIVES?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00EHBERSE/ref=s9_simh_gw_p147_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=desktop-2&pf_rd_r=0EZ78HAFJNZQ14XFK5T1&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=577048407&pf_rd_i=desktop

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-ST8000AS0002-Archive-8000-Internal/dp/B00QGFEQXU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1438333847&sr=8-1&keywords=Seagate+8TB

If I get the 8TB drive it saves me a extra bay been used in my server and its quite a bit cheaper.

Kind Regards

-Jonathan

has159 · July 31, 2015

I suggest getting 2 Hybrid drives, performance of an SSD after a certain amount of times you load something, with HDD storage size i personally own one and it does perform very nicely.

Jonza · July 31, 2015

This is for a storage server for movies and tv shows so I wont be loading the same files over and over....

Captain_WD · July 31, 2015

~snip~

Hey TehJonny,

I wouldn't put everything on a single drive generally when you are talking about secondary storage, backups, streaming and server/NAS usages. I would go for multiple drives for speed increases, redundancy (as @starcoaster pointed out) and better safety of your data. WD Red are good drives for that so it's a pretty good option.

Furthermore, archive drives are designed for long-term cold storage of data that you may never need to access again. It is not the most appropriate choice for a home storage/streaming NAS.

Catain_WD.