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:

  1. Buy two pricey Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red HDDs and put them in RAID1
  2. 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!

  • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    I buy consumer grade drives. I’ve had some fail over the years. It’s inevitable no matter if you spend money on consumer grade or server grade. @NaibofTabr@infosec.pub @infosec.pub pretty much gives a succinct breakdown of the situation further down in this thread. I’m pretty fastidious about backing up my data. I’ve been burned a couple times, nothing earth shattering, but it’s enough to do a proper 3,2,1 scenario for all data. And I treat my drives well. Each drive bay has it’s own cooling fan. I keep an eye on the S.M.A.R.T status as well. But even all of that isn’t going to save you from a crash.

    Recently, I tried to revive a friend’s 4 tb external he stored all his pictures on. He is a photographer. The first thing I asked was, where’s your backup? What backup? Well, he’s now got a 4 bay NAS, doing RAID, and backing up nightly in a 3,2,1 schema. It just takes once for most people.

    • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      2·
      56 minutes ago

      My last HDD failed in ATA (so consumer stuff, the legendary Deathstar) era, not one in 3 home NAS systems - I’m just saying your millage can very & is luck based.

      Also RAID will have more reads/writes than non-RAID systems.