Do I need NAS drives for my Plex server/home file server?

[DrMacintosh]

Hello all, I have a 2018 Mac mini (running Plex and a Linux VM) with an OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad hooked up to it. Currently, I have a 6TB WD Blue and a 2TB Seagate Barracuda installed in the OWC enclosure. I have plans to populate the other 2 bays, what I fill those two bays with is up I the air at the moment. I'm wondering if I actually need NAS drives for what I believe to be very minor usage.

Usage:

• The WD drive holds my Plex library and serves at most 3 streams of video (2 Direct Play, 1 Transcode)

• A Linux VM which is almost constantly doing a few MB/s of download/upload

• The Seagate drive stores personal video content and other files

If I do get NAS drives, it would be a pair of 8TB Ironwolf drives in software RAID1. These drives would house my Plex media library. If I don't go with NAS drives, I would probably get a pair of 8TB or higher WD/Seagate Blue/Barracuda drives and put those into software RAID 1.

I know that NAS drives are designed to handle vibrations, but are vibrations a serious concern in a 4 bay enclosure with very minimal drive activity? I've also heard that consumer drives in RAID could have issues with dropping out and causing issues with the array. Is this a concern for my uses?

 

Thanks for any tips!

[Dedayog]

No, you don't need them.  Are they a good idea?  Yes.  Reliability is what you're after.

[Godlygamer23]

The dropping out issue I believe relates to drives that use SMR, rather than CMR. If the system is not aware of the drives being SMR, it will consider them non-responsive and drop them. As long as the system is aware they're SMR and fully compatible with them, you shouldn't run into that issue. However, I would stay away from SMR drives as they are really slow when rebuilding arrays. I have used WD Blues in a RAID array, and never had issues with drop-offs. For context, I was using FreeNAS at this time.