What are people using for NAS storage drives now days?

[Donut417]

Been thinking of an upgrade. Word on the street we should be getting a $600 bonus, maybe more. I have a 4 day Qnap NAS, currently I have a 8 TB WD drive I shucked out of an external enclosure. I have a 1TB SSHD that I took out of my old laptop. Absolutely no redundancy is used. The large disk has some data on it, but mostly its just Plex live TV recordings. My plan in to move that drive to my Plex server locally (The drive is EXT4 formatted, I would assume Linux could just read it?). I would then buy 5 hard drives and do like a RAID 5. 5 drives so I have a cold spare, safety 3rd. 

 

I dont really have tons of data per say. BUT Id like to backup my Steam Library (about a TB currently) on my gaming computer. I need to back up my MacBook and my moms computer. I do utilize some cloud storage such as One Drive, Google Drive and iCloud. But I have a limited data cap on the internet of 1.2 TB and on a slow month we use about half and a heavy month we are just scraping by. 

 

The biggest issue I found is finding drives that are designed to do this type of work, but not hell of expensive. I was looking at some 4TB Iron Wolf drives that seem to be just one the $100 mark. But not sure. 

[markwoll]

I'm using Toshiba N300 8tb drives x 6.in a readynas. Much faster than my older WD Red 2tb drives that I recycled into a TrueNas Core box.

Then I back that up on a 10tb external drive, that one can be slower.

Hopefully the chia thing burns out so I can get a bigger backup drive.

Be aware of the SMR drives show up in the less expensive external drives, not good for nas drives, unless you don't need any performance,

[trag1c]

I've been using Seagate 4TB NAS drives in my server for about 4 or 5 years and they've been going strong. I have 5 of them in a hardware RAID 6 array and I get decent reads and writes out of the whole array. 

[CerealExperimentsLain]

Seagate 16TB externals contain Exos x16 SATA drives these days so I use those but I only have about four.  Nearly the rest of my fleet are 8TB Archive and Compute (SMR) drives from Seagate, but they're fine in UnRAID as data drives and too large to warrant retiring before they fail.  I upgraded my parity drives to 16TB though so any 8TB that fails can be replaced wih a 16TB.

[Donut417]

8 hours ago, markwoll said:

Hopefully the chia thing burns out so I can get a bigger backup drive.

Forgot about that. Guess its better to wait to upgrade. It kinda sucks that Id like to help put money in to the US economy but cant because you cant buy shit. Wanted to rebuilt my Plex server, well cant do that, hard to find hardware (Though its getting a bit better). Wanted to maybe upgrade to a 4K TV. Well I have to wait on that because I want maybe a new Xbox to play blurays and games, well unless I want to pay 3 times as much for one I cant do that.  No sense in getting a 4K TV if you cant really enjoy it. SMH........... 

[Voarsh]

On 6/30/2021 at 3:37 AM, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Seagate 16TB externals contain Exos x16 SATA drives these days so I use those but I only have about four.  Nearly the rest of my fleet are 8TB Archive and Compute (SMR) drives from Seagate, but they're fine in UnRAID as data drives and too large to warrant retiring before they fail.  I upgraded my parity drives to 16TB though so any 8TB that fails can be replaced wih a 16TB.

Never shucked, but I can believe that.

I always buy my 16TB Exos at £300 (I actually bought one I probably didn't need just before Chia took off for like £293) - glad I did. 

I prefer not to shuck because of the 5 year warranty. If you have 12+ 16 TB drives, you'll probably want to fork out a bit more for that peace of mind of a replacement.  

[CerealExperimentsLain]

1 hour ago, Voarsh said:

Never shucked, but I can believe that.

I always buy my 16TB Exos at £300 (I actually bought one I probably didn't need just before Chia took off for like £293) - glad I did. 

I prefer not to shuck because of the 5 year warranty. If you have 12+ 16 TB drives, you'll probably want to fork out a bit more for that peace of mind of a replacement.  

When CAD$380 (220 BPD) could get me an external to shuck, the savings is huge.  Most drives will fail well after their warranty expires too.  So I basically self-insure.

[Voarsh]

23 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

When CAD$380 (220 BPD) could get me an external to shuck, the savings is huge.  Most drives will fail well after their warranty expires too.  So I basically self-insure.

Well sure, but most warranties are 3 years, especially for shucked drives. And by shucking it makes "returning" these units more tricky - that is, you must convincingly not break the pins or have them inspect it. 

[CerealExperimentsLain]

9 minutes ago, Voarsh said:

Well sure, but most warranties are 3 years, especially for shucked drives. And by shucking it makes "returning" these units more tricky - that is, you must convincingly not break the pins or have them inspect it. 

I don't think you know what 'self-insure' is.  I mean 'The cost savings is so low, even with premature failure or two, I come out ahead'.

[NelizMastr]

I’ve been alternating between WD and Seagate over the years. Greatly depends on the price when I’m shopping for drives.

 

Currently running 4 WD Red Pro 4TB drives in my 4-bay Rackstation RS815+.

They’re performing very well. Had Ironwolf 4TB drives before, they were replaced after 3,5 years because of their hours. They moved to my father-in-law’s NAS.

[Jarsky]

I'm using 10 x 8TB WD "He10"'s shucked from the 8TB WD Easystore (I believe they are the "NESN" variant on the model name). 

I got them when they were on sale for US$129.99 I believe off memory. 

 

I want to replace them with the 16TB-18TB variant but they're still to expensive right now for me, ill worry about it when I run lower on space.