Which HDD for RaspberryNAS?

[Paddymagkekse]

Hello everybody,

 

I built myself a RaspberryNAS and now since everything is working quite great I wanted to upgrade the storage. Currently, I have a 64GB SD Card inserted but to have some redundancy, I would love to install two 2TB 2,5" HDDs running in Raid 1.

There are currently three products, which came to my mind:

• 2000GB Toshiba L200
• 2000GB Seagate BarraCuda
• 2000GB WD Blue Mobile

The thing is that all of these products tend to have a lot of negative reviews. Often the drives fail after a short amount of time and at least in Germany, there seem to be difficulties with the warranty. 

Is this just how it is and I can freely "pick my poison" or is there some alternative?

All of these drives cost around 50-60€ and I would love to keep it in this price range but if there is a serious uplift in quality/performance/longevity I would be ready to pay more. 

 

Greeting

Patrick

[Dedayog]

Correct, just pick your poison.   For the most part, they're all going to be the same in your use-case.  I personally prefer Toshiba for my HDD's, but it's not based on anything tangible like performance.

[Archer42]

One advice would be - look at external usb drives. They are often considerably cheaper and contain the same hdd-s. Avoid wd because they solder sata-usb adapter onto hdd and do your research before buying, but in general you can just disassemble the box and get hdd out if you need, or use it as is since you are going to connect it over usb one way or another anyway.

 

Also raid 1 is... questionable. Consider all possible solutions before committing to it. Especially since all this hdd-s are going to be smr, and smr does not mix well with raid...

[Paddymagkekse]

I found a WD Red Plus with 1TB which costs around 75€ but is built with CMR. So it costs more than double per TB. Is it worth it?

 

I need Raid1 because I plan to store some personal stuff which I would very much like to not lose.

[Archer42]

9 minutes ago, Paddymagkekse said:

I found a WD Red Plus with 1TB which costs around 75€ but is built with CMR. So it costs more than double per TB. Is it worth it?

At this price? No. Might as well get ssd.

 

9 minutes ago, Paddymagkekse said:

I need Raid1 because I plan to store some personal stuff which I would very much like to not lose.

Do not need raid1 for that. Need backups. Raid1 does not guarantee you will not loose your data, it just protects you from very specific hardware failure - singe hdd failure.

 

If you are doing it on raspberry pi on linux the simplest way is to attach 2 hdd-s, use one as nas, use second one for backups. Can use something like borgbackup to schedule them pretty easily and will have version history too, so if stuff gets encrypted by cryptolocker or something you'll still have your data. Just be sure not to create samba share for second hdd.

 

Should be more or less fine with smr this way too. But be aware - this is not ideal solution either. If PSU fails violently, someone drops the thing while it is working or something you can still loose all the data on both hdd-s.

[Paddymagkekse]

I plan to copy the personal stuff to my home computer too. I would have to be very unlucky to lose the data nevertheless
But I think I will go for the Raid just because it's quite cool to play around with and I should have up to double the read speed, which comes in quite handy. I have to keep in mind that this is just a Raspberry-Project and not some top-notch Synology-Server.

 

Another option would be that I get two Sata-to-USB Adapter and then buy normal 3,5" drives to avoid the smr stuff. How about that?

https://www.seagate.com/de/de/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/

It maybe won't be looking as good but then I don't have to worry about that stuff 

 

 

[Archer42]

32 minutes ago, Paddymagkekse said:

I plan to copy the personal stuff to my home computer too. I would have to be very unlucky to lose the data nevertheless
But I think I will go for the Raid just because it's quite cool to play around with and I should have up to double the read speed, which comes in quite handy. I have to keep in mind that this is just a Raspberry-Project and not some top-notch Synology-Server.

If you just want to experiment with the stuff its fine. However - be careful and always have backups. Because you never know when or why something like this happens. Basically data loss without hardware failures at all, simply because of raid.

Also speed will, in case of raspberry pi, be limited by single USB through which everything works...

 

32 minutes ago, Paddymagkekse said:

Another option would be that I get two Sata-to-USB Adapter and then buy normal 3,5" drives to avoid the smr stuff. How about that?

That's an option. However it will be large and ugly, with whole bunch of wires, psu-s for each hdd etc. If that's fine - why not?

Also raid on smr hdd-s is not necessarily impossible. It works, to a degree. But in certain conditions it will be extremely slow. Also might take a week or two to rebuild in case of hdd failure, with increased probability of second failure and array loss.

[Paddymagkekse]

Well experimenting was my first intention, but seeing that smr drives really perform that bad, I'm not so sure anymore.
I thought it would be just a little inconvenient but 1-2 Weeks for rebuilding a Array is nuts.

 

Too bad I already bought a USB Hub with active power delivery (which seems to too little for two 3,5" drives) and two 2,5" drive enclosures.
This starts to get really annoying.

[Archer42]

26 minutes ago, Paddymagkekse said:

Too bad I already bought a USB Hub with active power delivery (which seems to too little for two 3,5" drives) and two 2,5" drive enclosures.

3.5 drives usually have their own psu because they require 12v and way too much power for a usb port. So powered hub will not help with those anyway.

As for 2.5 enclosures - do you mean regular usb-sata boxes? Because there is not really much reason to buy those, you can buy external hdd-s (basically hdd with the box already included) cheaper than hdd-s themselves (without a box) cost.

 

Also not sure if relevant, but what i really liked for using with SBC (raspberry pi or not - does not matter) is seagate backup+ hub 3.5 inch external. It has its own usb hub built in, which is powered too. So you can power you SBC directly from hdd box itself, only have one psu, and still have usb port available on the box so you can daisy-chain them if you want to. And you do not have to buy anything extra (usb hub, psu for raspberry pi). The only issue is - most of them are SMR too.

[Paddymagkekse]

Yeah I am looking everywhere I can for pmr 2,5" drives but there really seems to be not a single drive model besides the red wd which is unfortunately expensive for its size.

 

I also looked for already cased external drives, but there are also only smr drives. And docking stations don't only look like a giant drive toaster, but also have their own faults.

It's so sad that my small Pi Project doesn't work out because of the drives.

 

But I will keep looking for a cmr drive

 

EDIT: 

Ladies and Gentlemen, we got them!

I found on a spec sheet from Toshiba a listing of which models of their 2,5" uses cmr and which smr (here).

In a nutshell, every drive up to 1TB is available in both smr and cmr and everything higher than that uses smr. 

So you have to look for the exact modelnr. to get the cmr.

1TB might not be the world, but it's sufficient enough for my scope and I rather would buy two more and put them into Raid5 or so, than use SMR drives.

Also, the 1tb Version only costs like 50 bucks, which is totally fine

 

So, unless you have a reason at hand why I shouldn't do that I would order two of them