Help me decide between these 3 HDDs for my 1st NAS

[WereCat]

I have no prior experience with NAS storage and I never really had HDD fail besides 2.5" notebook drives that went trough abuse.

 

Right now I'm looking at these three 8TB drives:

 

WD Gold - 227 EUR

WD Red Pro - 227 EUR

Seagate IronWold Pro - 217 EUR

 

WD Red Plus and Seagate IronWolf are just 10 EUR to 15 EUR cheaper so I may as well get the Pro versions.

Any reason not to consider WD Gold over Red Pro at the same price?

[Mumintroll]

I don't know much about NAS drives, but aren't Seagate harddrives less reliable, have a higher failure rate than most other brands?

[YoungBlade]

If they're the same price and the same generation drives, then WD Gold should be better in general. They're the enterprise class drives in WD's lineup, so are the best for multidrive environments and a bit faster.

 

Ironwolf Pro and Red Pro are direct competitors. It's just whether you want WD or Seagate.

 

Unless you're getting something special by going with the Pro drives, I don't see any reason not to go with the WD Gold.

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, Mumintroll said:

I don't know much about NAS drives, but aren't Seagate harddrives less reliable, have a higher failure rate than most other brands?

I have 5 Seagate HDDs at home from 2012 and they still run fine. IDK... there are probably faulty batches sometimes that spike reliability data. I know the 3TB Barracudas were problematic at the time.

[will0hlep]

I currently have a NAS with 12 Seagate HDDs. 8 of them are Ironwolf, 3 are Ironwolf Pro, and the last is an Exos 7E10.

 

Also, during 4 years of operation, I've had 3 more Ironwolfs that failed (2 of them failed in warrenty).

 

I have not had any failures from my Ironwolf Pro or Exos drives yet, but they are much newer (2023-2025).

[WereCat]

4 minutes ago, will0hlep said:

I currently have a NAS with 12 Seagate HDDs. 8 of them are Ironwolf, 3 are Ironwolf Pro, and the last is an Exos 7E10.

 

Also, during 4 years of operation, I've had 3 more Ironwolfs that failed (2 of them failed in warrenty).

 

I have not had any failures from my Ironwolf Pro or Exos drives yet, but they are much newer (2023-2025).

What's the disadvantage of Exos in NAS over IronWolf Pro? The Exos is over 40EUR cheaper.

[will0hlep]

21 minutes ago, WereCat said:

What's the disadvantage of Exos in NAS over IronWolf Pro? The Exos is over 40EUR cheaper.

So, from my understanding, Exos is seagates enterprise line of drives. They are rated for better MTBFs than Ironwolf pro drives, but they are slower and a little louder. Apparently, they also don't typically play nice with solutions like Synology, but of course that is unimportant if you are building your own NAS.

 

That said: I sit right next to my server and because I wear headphones I really havn't noticed any change in sound since I put the Exos drive in. Also, the slower speed matter less and less as you add more drives, because networking is almost always the bottleneck.

 

I'd say if Exos drives are cheap near you they are definately worth considering.

[WereCat]

1 minute ago, will0hlep said:

So, from my understanding, Exos is seagates enterprise line of drives. They are rated for better MTBFs than Ironwolf pro drives, but they are slower and a little louder. Apparently, they also don't typically play nice with solutions like Synology, but of course that is unimportant if you are building your own NAS.

 

That said: I sit right next to my server and because I wear headphones I really havn't noticed any change in sound since I put the Exos drive in. Also, the slower speed matter less and less as you add more drives, because networking is almost always the bottleneck.

 

I'd say if Exos drives are cheap near you they are definately worth considering.

Well, after looking at the Exos drives I have a hard time considering the Pro drives, they just don't make much sense to me.

 

I can either get 8TB EXOS 7E10 for 177 EUR or get 2 of them outright and have redundancy with mirror which works up to 100 EUR less vs 2x WD Gold.

Or I can get 16TB EXOS X18 for 290 EUR at which point it's just stupid to go half the capacity WD Gold or IronWolf Pro which are around 70 EUR less. (18.125 EUR/TB vs 28.375 EUR/TB)

 

My original plan was to get single HDD and buy one for redundancy later as I don't need redundancy right now so even the 16TB seems tempting at that price.

 

I plan on building my own NAS, I've already ordered parts and I'm just deciding on drives now. Perfomance is not very important to me. I will add NVMe storage if performance will become necessary.

I hope I can have the NAS in a different room so noise shouldn't be of much concern but even the Seagate Barracuda 1TB I have took out of my PC was getting on my nerve, that's why I went all SSD storage in my PC.

[will0hlep]

Oh, one more note, make sure your buying SATA Exos drives (as they are enterprise they have SAS and SATA versions).

25 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Well, after looking at the Exos drives I have a hard time considering the Pro drives, they just don't make much sense to me.

 

I can either get 8TB EXOS 7E10 for 177 EUR or get 2 of them outright and have redundancy with mirror which works up to 100 EUR less vs 2x WD Gold.

Or I can get 16TB EXOS X18 for 290 EUR at which point it's just stupid to go half the capacity WD Gold or IronWolf Pro which are around 70 EUR less. (18.125 EUR/TB vs 28.375 EUR/TB)

 

My original plan was to get single HDD and buy one for redundancy later as I don't need redundancy right now so even the 16TB seems tempting at that price.

How many drives and what sizes is a complicated topic. Large Drives are cheaper per TB of useable space and because there are less drives, there is less RAID overhead. However, in failure situations smaller drivers are better as the RAID can be rebuilt faster.

 

I myself went down the smaller drive approach, but if I were building it all over again I don't really know what I would do. Probably Less and Larger Drives. After all, more drives is redundancy, but RAID is not a backup.

 

25 minutes ago, WereCat said:

I plan on building my own NAS, I've already ordered parts and I'm just deciding on drives now. Perfomance is not very important to me. I will add NVMe storage if performance will become necessary.

NVMe or SSD storage in a NAS is kinda hard to justify because networking is such a bottleneck.

 

For example, I assume you have a 1Gb/s or 2.5Gb/s networking. Well a single Exos X18 drive is going to have a max sustained transfer speed of 250MB/s, or 2Gb/s, which is basically all of your network badwidth. Even if real world transfer speeds are a quarter of that, you'll still saturate your connection with only a tiny number of drives.

 

I believe SSDs can make sense for running apps on NASs, or as boot drives, but it is case by case.

 

25 minutes ago, WereCat said:

I hope I can have the NAS in a different room so noise shouldn't be of much concern but even the Seagate Barracuda 1TB I have took out of my PC was getting on my nerve, that's why I went all SSD storage in my PC.

Oh, so wish I could do that. Unfortuantly, I hoard way too much data for SSDs.

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, will0hlep said:

Oh, one more note, make sure your buying SATA Exos drives (as they are enterprise they have SAS and SATA versions).

How many drives and what sizes is a complicated topic. Large Drives are cheaper per TB of useable space and because there are less drives, there is less RAID overhead. However, in failure situations smaller drivers are better as the RAID can be rebuilt faster.

 

I myself went down the smaller drive approach, but if I were building it all over again I don't really know what I would do. Probably Less and Larger Drives. After all, more drives is redundancy, but RAID is not a backup.

 

NVMe or SSD storage in a NAS is kinda hard to justify because networking is such a bottleneck.

 

For example, I assume you have a 1Gb/s or 2.5Gb/s networking. Well a single Exos X18 drive is going to have a max sustained transfer speed of 250MB/s, or 2Gb/s, which is basically all of your network badwidth. Even if real world transfer speeds are a quarter of that, you'll still saturate your connection super quickly.

 

I believe SSDs can make sense for running apps on NASs, or as boot drives, but it is case by case.

 

Oh, so wish I could do that. Unfortuantly, I hoard way too much data for SSDs.

Yep, I've already double checked if it's SATA. It is.

I was also originally thinking about getting multiple 4TB drives but 8TB just seem to make more sense if I decide to expand later and the price/TB is also slightly better on 8TB while initial cost is not that bad.

 

I've now decided for the 8TB EXOS 7E10, I will add redundancy later and thanks to it's much lower price it can be done sooner than later. And yes, I'm aware of RAID not being a backup. I'm honestly building NAS out of convenience over necessity so I can share data easily between 6 devices at home.

 

My home network is indeed just 1Gb right now but the board I've bough for NAS has 2x 2.5Gb and 1x 10Gb NIC if I ever decide to improve my home network.

The board has Intel N150 CPU with 16GB DDR5, 2x NVMe and 6x SATA, I wanted to run TrueNAS out of USB stick but apparently it's writing quite a bit of data on the drive so it will wear it down fast. Now I'm deciding if I should get cheap NVMe drive or get a cheap SATA SSD + adapter for USB... 

 

[WereCat]

Thanks for help with decision.

I've ordered the 8TB EXOS 7E10

[Blue4130]

6 hours ago, WereCat said:

 

I've now decided for the 8TB EXOS 7E10, I will add redundancy later and thanks to it's much lower price it can be done sooner than later.

 

Add the redundancy now, it will save you lots of headaches to build it right the first time.

[WereCat]

7 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

Add the redundancy now, it will save you lots of headaches to build it right the first time.

I don't really need it now and I plan on adding 2 drives later so that 1 of 3 can fail.

[Blue4130]

21 minutes ago, WereCat said:

I don't really need it now and I plan on adding 2 drives later so that 1 of 3 can fail.

What raid level are you going to use? What os? It's not trivial to add drives on most nas' and changing raid types is basically a no-go so in the future, you will need enough storage to offload data while you make a new raid.

[WereCat]

2 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

What raid level are you going to use? What os? It's not trivial to add drives on most nas' and changing raid types is basically a no-go so in the future, you will need enough storage to offload data while you make a new raid.

TrueNAS with the ZFS Raid level 1.

I know it's not trivial. I will not have enough data on the single 8TB so I will be able to copy it to my PC while doing the RAID and reformat the HDD.