2.5" HDD Recomendations

[CrashDive]

Hello everyone,

I'm planning on building a NAS from an old HP Proliant DL380 G5 I picked up free from my friend and it has 8 2.5" drive bays I figure I should make use of. I think 8 drives is more than enough for my system and I'll probably only be using 4 or 5 drives tops and I would like about 3 TB of storage. I also have no particular interest in speed.

So far I've found: (I use Australian Dollars)
- WD Green WD20EZRX 2TB ($160)
- WD Red WD10JFCX 1TB ($110)

And that's really all I can come up with for drives that would even be semi appropriate for use in a NAS. I'm just not yet comfortable navigating the 2.5" drive market and am at a bit of a loss on what to choose. Should I just choose the two drives listed above or is there some other gem hiding amounst the sea of cummy laptop drives? At this point I'm *almost* tempted to populate all the drive bays with cheap 500GB drives and setup a mirror config with them.

Any thoughts or drive recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks :D

 

[Mirfster]

I had asked a similar question before in this thread.

Samsung (now Seagate) and Toshiba both have a 2.5" 2TB 5400RPM SATA drive for around $100; Samy has the Spinpoint M9T ST2000LM003 and Toshy has the MQ01ABB200 3Gbps. WD/HGST of course has the WD Green WD20NPVX which is not recommended for FreeNAS use. It is unclear why they do not make that in a WD Red.

I was leaning towards the Samsung, but am still holding out for SSDs to get lower in price.

 

[Arwen]

I use the following in my miniture media server, with ZFS. It's 2TBs, but absolutely
needs to have the spin down feature disabled. Mine racked up 48,000 Load_Cycle_Count
until I realized it was doing that.

Seagate Samsung SpinPoint M9T ST2000LM003

During ZFS scrubs it does get hot due to the media server being fanless, so I have a cheap
USB fan on the media server.

 

[CrashDive]

Thanks guys, I'll have a look into those drives. If anyone else has more drive suggestions please share, there seem to be far too few options of 2.5" drives but that might just be the way it is.

Again, thanks for the suggestions.