The title says basically everything but let me elaborate.
Given the recent news about the sold out of harddrives for the current year and possibly also the next years (tomshardware article) I try to buy the HDDs I want to use for the next few years earlier than expected.
I am on a really tight budget so I really don’t want to overspend. I have an old tower PC laying around which I would like to turn into a DIY NAS probably with TrueNAS Scale.
I don’t expect high loads, it will only be 1-2 users with medium writing and reading.
In this article from howtogeek the author talks about the differences and I get it, but a lot of the people commenting seem to be in a similar position as I am. Not really a lot of read-write load, only a few users, and many argue computing HDDs are fine for this use case.
Possibilites I came up with until now:
- Buy two pricey Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red HDDs and put them in RAID1
- Buy three cheaper Seagate Barracuda or WD Blue and put two in RAID1 and keep one as a backup if (or should I say when?) one of the used drives fails.
I am thankful for every comment or experience you might have with this topic!


The downside is they are more expensive, the louder part is for big servers I think, but not HDDs
And yes, I was talking about used ones, sometimes they’ve got the SMART values listed, sometimes I ask
And with production run I mean produced at the same charge or the like. As those have a higher chance of failure. If you buy two new from the same shop, odds are that they came in the same shipment etc.