Is Nas more demanding on hard drives than other media server apps?

[justforplex]

Ive got a few 2tb drives in a nas/plex box I built out of a desktop pc box in 2018. Works fine but lately wondering if the nas system taxes the hdd units more than would say just a plex server installation on linux or windows? Is this a known thing or not really? I remember there being some discussion about using "red" drives being preferred by nas for longevity, are my regular non-red drives headed for destruction sooner in a nas setup than they would be normally? I suppose there is no real way to know or answer that....

 

[sretalla]

You're packing a lot into a single question there...

A NAS doesn't "do" anything differently to a PC in regard to disks per se.

However, the operating system default settings for things like power management and the filesystems used can result in big differences in how the disks are accessed and how often.

Because TrueNAS uses only ZFS, I'll focus the points on that, but the way that logging and reporting is done also has an impact (independent of which filesystem would be used), so that's something to consider... You don't get a "reports" section which caries historical information in Windows, Mac or Linux, so the NAS is doing that right out of the box and is often something new folks notice and then ask "Why is my pool disk writing somethign every 5 seconds and driving me insane making ticking noises all the time?". (because you didn't pay attention to the location of your system dataset and move it to a pool based on SSD(s)).

ZFS is a complicated beast with a lot of benefits if it's implemented on the right hardware the right way.

It uses RAM to cache reads and writes (with some notable "special cases" for synchronous writes) and with the right tuning and setup, provides very fast and reliable storage for local applications/containers/jails and for block storage to VMs, iSCSI or file sharing protocols like SMB or NFS.

Becase of the way transactions to the pools are grouped (into transaction groups) and subsequently written to disk in a way which has been arranged optimally based on the available resources on the disks, disk controllers or even disks themselves (in particular those of the SMR variety) can get overwhelmed by the floods of data and can in some cases simply refuse to cope (think USB stick controllers and SMR disks, bot of which should not be used for ZFS pools).

A NAS (when used as "designed"... in the case of TrueNAS, for the Enterprise), will assume you want its services all the time, so will leave drives spinning all the time (which is good for drives designed to do that, but not great for consumer drives which were designed to be to spun down for half the day or more).

TL/DR: I suspect that your non-NAS drives may have an early grave in their future if you're using TrueNAS with all settings as default.

 

[Alecmascot]

remember there being some discussion about using "red" drives being preferred by nas for longevity, are my regular non-red drives headed for destruction sooner in a nas setup than they would be normally? I suppose there is no real way to know or answer that....

I have put 50,000 hours on WD 2TB Green drives. Just run WDidle first.
This is a low usage home environment.

 

[pschatz100]

I always thought that one of the reasons NAS drives were preferred was due to there being lots of vibration caused by spinning disks when several disks are mounted in the same case. NAS drives are designed to accommodate that situation - regular consumer drives are not.

When I build my first NAS, I used WD 2TB Green drives adjusted with WDIDLE3. They ran for many years without issue - albeit in a good quality case.