8-10TB sata drive recommendations for storage server

[Sauron]

Hello,

 

I'm looking to expand my storage server with an 8 to 10 TB hard disk; right now it has three 3TB WD Red drives which are nearly full and, since it only has one more HDD slot, I thought I'd buy a larger fourth drive. I don't care too much about speed as long as it's serviceable (it's mostly accessed through wifi or 100Mbit ethernet anyway) but I do care about reliability and price.

 

I looked at Reds again just because in my experience they've worked just fine but they're a little pricey compared to other options that on the surface look pretty similar such as the Seagate Barracuda, which is currently quite a bit cheaper - so my question is, would I regret it if I got a Seagate instead? Do you guys have any other suggestions aside from these two options? If you need to know local pricing you can check what's available on amazon.it.

 

In case it matters the drive will be formatted in either BTRFS or EXT4 depending on what I can be bothered to set up when I get it.

[Bruno_A]

I was setting up a NAS, at work, and one of the brand new hard drives, Seagate Ironwolf drives, which are built for continuous operation, was dead on arrival. I call it bad luck, as they are actually great drives. I don't think you would regret going with Seagate. Keep in mind, however, that the drive you linked, is a consumer drive, and you might get more reliability with an Ironwolf or WD Red drive.

[Wh0_Am_1]

Western Digital and Seagate are both extremely high quality drive manufacturers, although I would recommend aiming for Seagate's Ironwolf series instead, as the Barracuda line is basically Seagate's WD blue drives, meanwhile Ironwolf are like WD Reds, the reason why WD Red's and Seagate's Iron wolf drives are so expensive, is because they are designed for 24/7 operation in close proximity to other working drives, and they generally have better warranties (and sometimes even drive savers warranties). 

[Bruno_A]

3 minutes ago, Wh0_Am_1 said:

Western Digital and Seagate are both extremely high quality drive manufacturers, although I would recommend aiming for Seagate's Ironwolf series instead, as the Barracuda line is basically Seagate's WD blue drives, meanwhile Ironwolf are like WD Reds, the reason why WD Red's and Seagate's Iron wolf drives are so expensive, is because they are designed for 24/7 operation in close proximity to other working drives, and they generally have better warranties (and sometimes even drive savers warranties). 

Agreed. I am not sure about the WD Reds and Ironwolf warranties, but I was impressed to find that if your WD Black, a more expensive than your standard WD Blue, fails, WD will send you a replacement before they receive the broken one. This is not something you finf in WD Blue drives, for example, and I would expect a similar, or even better system, with enterprise and 24/7 operation targeted drives.

[Electronics Wizardy]

If you want it cheaper, Id get those external 8tb drives. There often found at 130usd. There not as nice of drives, but should work fine, and even if you lose one, its still cheaper to buy a extra, than buying reds or ironwolfs.

[Sauron]

3 minutes ago, bruny06 said:

I was impressed to find that if your WD Black, a more expensive than your standard WD Blue, fails, WD will send you a replacement before they receive the broken one.

Coincidentally that happened to me a few years back with a DOA Black, can't complain about the service

7 minutes ago, Wh0_Am_1 said:

the reason why WD Red's and Seagate's Iron wolf drives are so expensive, is because they are designed for 24/7 operation in close proximity to other working drives

Sooo I know that's the theory but does it actually translate to a tangible difference in a small 4 drive server with a relatively low rate of access?

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

If you want it cheaper, Id get those external 8tb drives. There often found at 130usd. There not as nice of drives, but should work fine, and even if you lose one, its still cheaper to buy a extra, than buying reds or ironwolfs.

I'm not too keen on an external drive, first of all I hear the reliability is quite low and secondly there are some space concerns - I'd rather have it fit inside the server considering there's a slot for it. Plus, the server only has USB 2.0 so if I wanted to access some file on it while something was being written directly by the server I'm afraid it might crawl to a sludge - can't really have that since it's a media server and I want it to serve some high bitrate content when I need it to.

[FloRolf]

27 minutes ago, Sauron said:

100Mbit

Holy crap that's slow. 

 

I personally have 6 wd reds running without An issues and I can totally recommend them. I only have the 4tb models however. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

I'm not too keen on an external drive, first of all I hear the reliability is quite low and secondly there are some space concerns - I'd rather have it fit inside the server considering there's a slot for it. Plus, the server only has USB 2.0 so if I wanted to access some file on it while something was being written directly by the server I'm afraid it might crawl to a sludge - can't really have that since it's a media server and I want it to serve some high bitrate content when I need it to.

You can take the drives out of the externals and there are normal 3.5 hdd inside. Then put them on the server. Sometimes you get red drives, but you normally get the oem versions, and there about the same in terms of performance. I have 7 of them, and never had an issue over the past 3 years.

 

Speed is fine, you will probably be network limited, even with a usb 2.0 hdd here, 100mbit networking is slow

[Wh0_Am_1]

6 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Coincidentally that happened to me a few years back with a DOA Black, can't complain about the service

Sooo I know that's the theory but does it actually translate to a tangible difference in a small 4 drive server with a relatively low rate of access?

I don't have personal experience with it, but to answer your question yes it does.

 

6 minutes ago, Sauron said:

the server only has USB 2.0 so if I wanted to access some file on it while something was being written directly by the server I'm afraid it might crawl to a sludge - can't really have that since it's a media server and I want it to serve some high bitrate content when I need it to.

The theoretical performance of USB 2.0 is 480 Mbps, meanwhile realistic performance is just over half that, USB 2.0 will not be a bottleneck here.

7 minutes ago, Sauron said:

first of all I hear the reliability is quite low and secondly there are some space concerns 

These are usually WD Blue or Seagate Barracuda drives, honestly I have a 10 year old WD Blue 1TB drive in my build that I extracted 2 years ago from an external HDD enclosure (a really nice one made by Calvary) It was used almost constantly for 6 years as an external drive for media consumption.

[Sauron]

2 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

Holy crap that's slow. 

Yeah, blame the damn powerlines still, good enough for media streaming.

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Speed is fine, you will probably be network limited, even with a usb 2.0 hdd here, 100mbit networking is slow

Yeah but I was worried about simultaneous reading and local writing. 100Mbit is the most common access speed, not the maximum one. Still, as I said, space concerns. Taking them out of the enclosure is a possibility but I would assume that invalidates the warranty...?

1 minute ago, Wh0_Am_1 said:

I don't have personal experience with it, but to answer your question yes it does.

Ok, I'll probably go for one of those then - a 30€ difference isn't enough to cover potentially having to replace the drive prematurely

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

Taking them out of the enclosure is a possibility but I would assume that invalidates the warranty...?

It doesn't void the warranty in the U.S. And even then, Its still cheaper to buy a extra of these externals than buy reds or ironwolfs

 

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

Yeah but I was worried about simultaneous reading and local writing. 100Mbit is the most common access speed, not the maximum one. Still, as I said, space concerns.

The drives in the externals are just as fast as reds or any other drives. And really that network is so slow, you will never be hdd limited.

[FadeToBlack1648]

Not sure about the pricing where you are, but in Europe the Exos drives tend to be cheaper then the Ironwolves. Exos are enterprise drives with 5 year warranty, they are loud though compared to the Ironwolves. Never really figured out why they are cheaper or if there's a downside on using Exos drives other then the noise and maybe a slightly higher power usage.

[Sauron]

32 minutes ago, FadeToBlack1648 said:

Not sure about the pricing where you are, but in Europe the Exos drives tend to be cheaper then the Ironwolves. Exos are enterprise drives with 5 year warranty, they are loud though compared to the Ironwolves. Never really figured out why they are cheaper or if there's a downside on using Exos drives other then the noise and maybe a slightly higher power usage.

It's more expensive here, thanks for the tip though