Current best price - storage size - robustness hard disk recommendation for home server?

[emk2203]

My current servers at home chug along happily with 4 TB harddisks. Since the latest press releases from manufacturers already boost 14 TB (!) disks, I was wondering. What is the current community recommendation for a drive size with mature technology and a good price / size ratio? The "workhorse" recommendation, so to speak?

Focus on home usage, the WD Red 8 TB are supposed to be quite loud compared to the 4 TB ones, for example.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

We were just talking about that this morning. It looks like 8TB drives are the sweet spot...

4tb - $134 - 0.0335
6tb - $190 - 0.0316
8tb - $250 - 0.0312
10tb - $404 - 0.0404

We still have a lot of 2TB drives deployed and a lot more spares on the shelf because they come with every desktop we buy (pulled and replaced by 250G SSD). Even with a stack of effectively free 2TB drives, we're looking at eights. We're at the tipping point where we need to buy more bays or larger drives.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[LTCM]

Depends. Are you willing to use consumer drives? Are you willing to shuck external cases?

Personally, I wouldn't pay more than 25 cents a gb. But then again I take the meaning of RAID to heart.

 

[Chris Moore]

Even with a stack of effectively free 2TB drives, we're looking at eights.

You can send some of those 2TB drives to me. I have an old server using 2TB drives that I need to keep online for another year and I need to replace a drive right now. It has 16 Seagate Constellation drives with 57000 hours (ish) and one of them has around 600 reallocated sectors.

 

[Chris Moore]

Depends. Are you willing to use consumer drives? Are you willing to shuck external cases?

Personally, I wouldn't pay more than 25 cents a gb. But then again I take the meaning of RAID to heart.

The last time I bought new drives for my home NAS, I bought these:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822179031
The price on the 8TB model is pretty sweet too.

 

[LTCM]

The last time I bought new drives for my home NAS, I bought these:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822179031
The price on the 8TB model is pretty sweet too.

Nice deal. 6TB ones are great as well.

This is going to get me lots of hate - might even get me banned - but I take the stance that you are safer in some ways with consumer drives.

My (hypothetical) seven drive Raidz3 with an on hand spare compares very well against a (hypothetical) six drive Raidz2. At least in my opinion. I'd be using 8tb consumer Seagates vs WD Reds of course, and some aren't comfortable with that. To each their own.

 

[Chris Moore]

Nice deal. 6TB ones are great as well.

This is going to get me lots of hate - might even get me banned - but I take the stance that you are safer in some ways with consumer drives.

My (hypothetical) seven drive Raidz3 with an on hand spare compares very well against a (hypothetical) six drive Raidz2. At least in my opinion. I'd be using 8tb consumer Seagates vs WD Reds of course, and some aren't comfortable with that. To each their own.

I am using all Seagate Desktop drives in my home NAS. I have tested spare drives ready to go in if necessary.
I have not had any problems since I switched to these.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[emk2203]

Depends. Are you willing to use consumer drives? Are you willing to shuck external cases?

Personally, I wouldn't pay more than 25 cents a gb. But then again I take the meaning of RAID to heart.

So, if I am willing to use consumer drives and shuck external cases, what would you recommend to stay below the 25 cents?

 

[MrToddsFriends]

My current servers at home chug along happily with 4 TB harddisks.

One thing that might affect you and just in case you are not aware of that fact (I'm not familiar with your N40L and N54L HP Microservers): Most HDDs >= 6TB have some screw holes shifted and/or omitted. More precise: Shifted bottom screw holes (center to rear) and/or omitted side screw holes (center missing).
http://www.storagereview.com/6tb_hdds_causing_problems_for_system_vendors_but_not_the_way_you_think

And while I'm at it, just in cast you didn't have a look at this resource so far:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...e-performance-analysis-buying-information.62/

 

[Chris Moore]

So, if I am willing to use consumer drives and shuck external cases, what would you recommend to stay below the 25 cents?

I have not done that math, but the best prices are currently on the USB enclosure drives and if you catch a sale, then you can get an even bigger discount.
The last batch I bought was 4 x 4TB drives at about $105 each when that was about $10 off the regular price.
Always have a couple spare drives on hand and do the burn-in on all the drives prior to putting them in service. Keep spare drives in a moisture barrier container with some desiccant.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[wblock]

Best Buy had the 8TB WD external drives for $150 over the holidays. They are back up to $200 now. Internally, these are Red drives, although not all of them have the Red labels.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

This is going to get me lots of hate - might even get me banned - but I take the stance that you are safer in some ways with consumer drives.

I'm pretty sure most folks here use non-enterprise drives. While WD Reds and the like are popular, pretty much any drive is well-represented.

We buy refurbished HP desktops that come with used 2TB drives. We remove the used 2TB drive and replace it with an SSD. We then pack our FreeNAS servers with those 2TB drives. We could get away with half as many 4TB drives or a quarter 8TB drives. A wide stripe of 2TB mirrors has a huge performance advantage as well as a substantial (for us) cost advantage.

That's one of the reasons I often recommend buying a lot more drive bays than you think you need - it's easy to add drives that you might not otherwise use. The cost of 2TB drives versus 8TB drives is trivial compared to the rest of our electrical bill. In a home environment where cool, quite and efficiency are paramount, the math might work out differently. But, for us, more spindles is a cheap performance boost with little downside.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[Chris Moore]

So, if I am willing to use consumer drives and shuck external cases, what would you recommend to stay below the 25 cents?

This is the best price I can find right this moment. I just did a search and the math, it works out to just over 21 cents a GB, ignoring the fact that a 8TB drive is not actually 8TB...
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-External-Desktop-Storage-STEL8000100/dp/B01HD6ZLQ6?th=1
I make no guarantees about what you will find inside the enclosure. There were a few early reports that the drives were SMR drives but the most recent results were that they are regular Desktop drives.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...firmware-flash-for-better-freenas-usage.59566

 

[emk2203]

One thing that might affect you and just in case you are not aware of that fact (I'm not familiar with your N40L and N54L HP Microservers): Most HDDs >= 6TB have some screw holes shifted and/or omitted. More precise: Shifted bottom screw holes (center to rear) and/or omitted side screw holes (center missing).
http://www.storagereview.com/6tb_hdds_causing_problems_for_system_vendors_but_not_the_way_you_think

And while I'm at it, just in cast you didn't have a look at this resource so far:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...e-performance-analysis-buying-information.62/

Actually, the listed servers are backup now - I have a nice new system which I put into the sig as soon as I can figure out how to make buttons there. The new screw holes shouldn't be a problem.

And thanks for reminding about the analysis chart - but I was more interested in first-hand experience about reliability, pitfalls, shortcuts like gutting external exclosures and subjective noise. The community has given good answers, I think I have a good overview now.