NAS Drive Choice [UK]

kartelious · July 4, 2023

I've acquired an old pc from a relative - Athlon II x2 250 (iirc) upgraded to have 8gb of DDR3 and replaced the PSU.
TrueNAS Core has been installed on a 256GB SSD and I have two old laptop HDDs; a 1TB and 500GB.
In setting things up and testing, one of these HDD died, and the other errored when trying to import it so I think using them is out of the question.

What I want to achieve is a NAS that can be remote accessed and doesn't need to be on 24/7.

(btw this is the first time doing this, so if im doing something stupid, then let me know ヾ(•ω•`) )

So what I need is some new drives - they can only be SATA 2.5"/3.5".

Interms of data to backup, the current required capacity is around 750-850GB and will increase over time but idk how fast.

The first question: HDDs or SSDs?

In the UK, a 2TB HDD is around £45-50; 1TB SSDs can be as low as £35 (no cache probably QLC), or minimum £55 with cache; 2TB SSDs start around £70 (no cache probably QLC again).

The second question: redundency?

The answer is yes, but how to go about it? I'm assuming I should buy atleast 2 drives and use something like RAID 1?

Ideally, I don't want to spend more than £100 on drives, but please let me know what you think would be most appropriate.

Thanks in advance.
kartelious

Bersella AI · July 5, 2023

I would take a try with two 4TB hard drives, since they cost barely higher than 2TB ones. However, be cautious that there have been hard drives implementing SMR marketing, which perform poorly and are harder to recover data from failure.

The following models are recommended since they implement relatively safe CMR:

WD40/42PURX
ST4000VX000/001/007/015/016

Also, the cheapest marketing SSDs are actually not necessarily made of QLC chips, rather having TLC chips with some early defects. Still, they cannot be considered safe for storing critical data.

Lastly, RAID is not necessarily needed for redundancy. Other solutions like cloud backup or local Rsync can be considered.

Hope these would help you

scrumptious starfruit · July 6, 2023

On 7/4/2023 at 3:32 AM, kartelious said:

doesn't need to be on 24/7.

If this is supposed to serve the use case where you're not at home/near your nas and then want to use it but it's powered off, you'll probably want the machine to support wake-on-lan, and then you'll probably have to have a router or some other device which is always on that can send the magic WoL packet to it when needed.

On 7/4/2023 at 3:32 AM, kartelious said:

The second question: redundency?

Agree with the other comment, RAID is maybe not the best option given this budget. You should have a backup of your nas somewhere, so if you only have budget for 2 drives, one of those should probably be a backup drive not connected to the nas. Ideally a backup would be offsite to cover the case of disaster like fire or water damage. It also prevents user errors that RAID can't fix, like accidentally running the wrong command and now your files are deleted, getting a virus, power outage causing corruption, etc.

If you don't plan on RAID, you could potentially use SSD internally and HDD for backup if it saves money. Personally for the data drive of a nas, I think HDD/SSD doesn't matter too much for speed. Obviously an SSD for your OS drive will help the system run faster, but in the situation of loading a file from nas, the disk speed is not usually a noticeable bottleneck. SSD is less likely to have mechanical failure but it has other failure modes to be aware of. Whatever you go with I recommend running a tool like stressdisk for a while to make sure you have good drives, most drives will either fail quickly in first few months or last many years with appropriate care.