NAS Storage Drive Question

[Furglitch]

I'm in the process of gathering parts for a NAS and just wanted some opinions on storage configuration.

 

Currently, I have two 8TB WD Blue HDDs in a RAID0-ish configuration. (-ish because it's a Window spanned partition). The system doesn't see as much use as my daily driver, mostly for Plex streaming, a little bit of web hosting, and personal data storage (pics and documents).

I'd like to add a drive for redundancy while I'm building, but I'm unsure how to go about it.

Would the best option be to get the same drive as the others (or this similar one), or shell out for a proper NAS drive?

 

If the NAS drive is the best way to go, should I stick to the same capacity? I know it's not possible to use a smaller drive as redundancy, but what about a larger one? Would it limit that drive to 8TB? If the data gets moved to the larger drive, could I expand it to use the full 12?

 

Hopefully I'm phrasing this in a way that's not confusing.

[Electronics Wizardy]

I'd look to using storage spaces with parity so you get a raid 5 like setup where a drive can die and you keep all the data.

 

Probably try to keep to NAS drives like the red plus and ironwolf so you don't get a SMR drive, which can preform very badly in parity raid setups.

 

Bigger size won't be used as the other drives are 8TB.

[Furglitch]

18 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I'd look to using storage spaces with parity so you get a raid 5 like setup where a drive can die and you keep all the data.

I'm going over the different RAID configurations now just to confirm which one I want to use, but 5 definitely seems like the way to go

18 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Probably try to keep to NAS drives like the red plus and ironwolf so you don't get a SMR drive, which can preform very badly in parity raid setups.

Got it. Thankfully the Blues I have aren't SMR drives (as far as I can tell looking at CrystalDiskInfo), and according to reviews of the 'similar one' I linked, that one isn't either, but I'll probably just get a Red

18 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Bigger size won't be used as the other drives are 8TB.

Good to know. I thought as much, just wanted to confirm

[PowerPCFan]

1 hour ago, Furglitch said:

I'm in the process of gathering parts for a NAS and just wanted some opinions on storage configuration.

 

Currently, I have two 8TB WD Blue HDDs in a RAID0-ish configuration. (-ish because it's a Window spanned partition). The system doesn't see as much use as my daily driver, mostly for Plex streaming, a little bit of web hosting, and personal data storage (pics and documents).

I'd like to add a drive for redundancy while I'm building, but I'm unsure how to go about it.

Would the best option be to get the same drive as the others (or this similar one), or shell out for a proper NAS drive?

 

If the NAS drive is the best way to go, should I stick to the same capacity? I know it's not possible to use a smaller drive as redundancy, but what about a larger one? Would it limit that drive to 8TB? If the data gets moved to the larger drive, could I expand it to use the full 12?

 

Hopefully I'm phrasing this in a way that's not confusing.

If you're worried about longevity and don't care about noise then get a NAS drive. Just note that they are usually louder (especially enterprise-grade ones)

 

I made this mistake by buying two 4 TB Seagate EXOS drives for my NAS that's in the upstairs office - it's pretty loud!

[tkitch]

on 3 drives:  Raid 5 (one drive striped parity) is the way to go.

 

Since you're not likely to heavily tax the drives normally, stepping up to high-end drives is likely not much of a concern.

 

and yes, get 8TB Drives, as you'll be limited by the smallest drive capacity in the set.