A noob asking for help in building a NAS.

Patwikx · January 20, 2022

Hey everyone. I am planning to build my own NAS (Truenas) and I'm kind of stuck on choosing what hard drives should I use. I don't have a lot of budget laying around so I figured here's what I should build.

Storage needed: Around 10-15TB of storage.

CPU: Intel Core i3 10th Gen (stock cooler)
Mobo: MSI H510M-A PRO
RAM: HyperX 2x 8GB 2400MHz
PSU: RM450W
SSD: Samsung 860 EVO 500GB (boot drive)

Here comes the part that I'm having a hard time choosing.
HDD: should I go for the WD Red or Purple? What are the pros and cons of the two?

Note: I'm a noob about building this kind of stuff so I appreciate all the help.

Thanks!

FloRolf · January 20, 2022

Your boot drive is kinda overkill but I guess you have that collecting dust.

Personally I wouldn't go with a WD again because of the hole smr/cmr controversy and I am not sure if they fixed it for their lower capacity drives. I went Ironwolf for all my newer drives and they are good.

As for config you should either go RaidZ1 or RaidZ2 depending on how many drives you want to be able to afford to lose.

And then 4x4TB or 5x4TB will give you 12 TB of usable storage.

You could also get like 2x10TB in Raid1 but I personally would always go with more smaller drives.

Edited January 20, 2022 by FloRolf

jde3 · January 20, 2022

On 1/20/2022 at 4:32 AM, Patwikx said:

Hey everyone. I am planning to build my own NAS (Truenas) and I'm kind of stuck on choosing what hard drives should I use. I don't have a lot of budget laying around so I figured here's what I should build.

Storage needed: Around 10-15TB of storage.

CPU: Intel Core i3 10th Gen (stock cooler)
Mobo: MSI H510M-A PRO
RAM: HyperX 2x 8GB 2400MHz
PSU: RM450W
SSD: Samsung 860 EVO 500GB (boot drive)

Here comes the part that I'm having a hard time choosing.
HDD: should I go for the WD Red or Purple? What are the pros and cons of the two?

Note: I'm a noob about building this kind of stuff so I appreciate all the help.

Thanks!

You can kind of use whatever you want. ZFS was designed to use unreliable cheep media. It expects drives to fail.

Couple things on this:
* make sure your system reporting and alarm emails are working. You need to be notified of failures.

* You want to avoid any drive labeled SMR. (CMR or PMR is ok)

* Raid 5 has been depreciated for 2 decades and Raid 6 has been depreciated for more than 5 years now. Enterprise uses Raid 7-3 minimum (one parity level higher than 6). Use at least double parity (raid6). Uncorrectable disk errors in a sector on a Raid 5 can cause your entire array to fail to resilver even if you only lost one drive. The larger your array gets the more common this kind of failure is.

But otherwise enterprise wholesale, refurbished, white label stuff works just was well as those ones in the ad's for "PRO IRON RED's Designed for XTREME Nas'ing" So long as it's got the specs you want from a known brand, it's fine. - I got a box of ~30 3TB SAS drives for free from an old NetApp array 3 years ago.. not one has failed yet, and when they do.. I got lots of spares. (note: you can't plug and play NetApp drives into a normal system without some extra work, usually they aren't usable to a consumer.. but business destroy or throw these out when they upgrade.)