Recommended hard drives for TrueNAS

[idgar]

Hi,
which hard drives (7200RPM) do you recommend for building a ZFS vdev?
I see a lot about WD Red Pro but unfortunately the price has raised a lot (for 4TB for instance), at least in Amazon.
the other option I saw is Toshiba N300. someone has experience with it?
are there other recommendations?

 

[sretalla]

WD Red Plus is also acceptable and should be priced lower than the pro (be aware that the 5400RPM rating on some of those doesn't mean that they won't spin up to 7200). Also the WD purple range offers a similar product which is 7200 RPM above 4TB. Ensure that you avoid the WD Red (not plus or pro) as those are SMR under 8TB size.

I have seen others in the forum reporting use of the toshiba N300s, but have no personal experience with those drives to share on that.

I have seen plenty of folks using Seagata IronWolf drives and they seem to mostly be happy about them.

I would say that WD Elements shucked drives are well supported and tend to be white label Helium-filled disks at a much cheaper price than the reds for essentially the same thing, a lot of the m ore senior members have experience with those and have published how-tos for the shucking.

 

[Forza]

Seagate EXOS are also pretty good Enterprise grade drives. There are often campaigns/discounts on them too.

 

[mistermanko]

In Germany, these Toshiba Enterprise drives are really good value. But I have no experience with them.

 

[Ericloewe]

which hard drives (7200RPM)

Why 7200 RPM? More heat, more noise, more power consumption, marginal performance gains at best...

 

[mistermanko]

Why 7200 RPM? More heat, more noise, more power consumption, marginal performance gains at best...

Find me affordable 5400RPM drives with more than 8TB, and I love you till end of days...

 

[Ericloewe]

Sure, there are some situations where 7200 RPM disks make sense, but not because they're 7200 RPM.

 

[winnielinnie]

Why 7200 RPM? More heat, more noise, more power consumption, marginal performance gains at best...

I don't even know the RPM of drives anymore.

I've seen different speeds of the same drive either through documentation, labeling, marketing, software, user feedback, etc.

Do I trust the manufacturer? Is it a "set speed"? Is 5400 really 5400? What the heck is 5900? What is 5640? Is 7200 really 7200? Can firmware change this, or is it immutable for the physical manufactured drive?

On WD's own website, if you click on WD Red Plus 8TB (128MB cache), the RPM is listed as 5640. But if you change it to 256MB cache, the RPM is listed as 7200. Yet the smaller capacities of the same series are listed as 5400.

The Red Pros, regardless of capacity are listed as 7200. Are they really 7200? Why are the Red Pluses of the same capacity listed anywhere from 5400 to 7200?

I've yet to understand the definitive answer. Where can one find the real RPM of a drive before purchase?

It only gets more confusing if you wish to shuck from external drives, since the readings of SMART/hdparm might not match up with what you find online based on the model #.

 

[Ericloewe]

With some luck, datasheets for the upmarket HGST version of the same disk. But yeah, I care very little, too, these days.

 

[dak180]

Why 7200 RPM? More heat, more noise, more power consumption, marginal performance gains at best...

Find me affordable 5400RPM drives with more than 8TB, and I love you till end of days...

I would echo this but I am fairly sure that there are no ~5400 RPM 8TB+ drives being manufactured new, just ones labeled as such but are actually 7200 RPM and slowed down via firmware (see the WD red flavors).

 

[winnielinnie]

I would echo this but I am fairly sure that there are no ~5400 RPM 8TB+ drives being manufactured new, just ones labeled as such but are actually 7200 RPM and slowed down via firmware (see the WD red flavors).

See my above reply. This is frustrating to me, since real RPMs have real-world effects, as explained by @Ericloewe earlier:

Why 7200 RPM? More heat, more noise, more power consumption, marginal performance gains at best...

If one purchases a drive, whether internal or to shuck an external, and by all accounts they see "5400RPM", they expect it to run quieter, produce less heat, and draw less power. If the website or manual lists 5400RPM, yet it really spins at 7200 (firmware? misleading label?), then it's the equivalent of writing "5400RPM, nice and quiet!" with a black sharpie marker on the side of the drive to satisfying your needs.

As for the term used by WD called "Performance Class", what does that even mean? The drive "reports" as 5400 or 5900 RPM, but it's really 7200 RPM? But even though it rotates at 7200 RPM, it performs the equivalent to a slower RPM? Eh? So a lose-lose? Is that just "marketing-speak"?

 

[HoneyBadger]

You get the performance of 5400rpm, and the heat and vibration of 7200rpm. Isn't it great?

 

[idgar]

OK, so my current vdev is 3x3TB old Toshiba drives (7200RPM and not marked for NAS) and I need to replace one of them. at the beginning I thought it's worth to keep the same RPM but I'm unsure newer 5400RPM are slower than the previous, yet I believe it won't make much difference (if you think otherwise please let me know).
So now I want to buy 4TB 5400RPM (option to increase the vdev in the future + afraid the advertised capacity of other 3TB HDD will be slightly lower and that I wouldn't be able to replace it), And the main options I thought about are WD red plus and seagate ironwolf (in some reviews and also by the datasheet it looks like toshiba are really noisy).
now the real question is what to choose... Red Plus should be more quiet but slower compares to ironwolf but unsure about reliability which is quite important to me.

 

[Etorix]

Just don't care about RPM (for all the above reasons…) and get whatever WD Red Plus/Pro, WD Gold (aka. HGST Ultrastar), Seagate Ironwolf (Pro), Segate Exos, Toshiba N300, Toshiba MG you can find for the best price in the right capacity. ZFS will happily use anything. Vdev performance, of course, will be limited by the least performing member, which is likely to be an older drive.

You may also shuck external USB hard drives. In 3.5" these generally contain "white label" drives which are OK for NAS duty, though you'll have to check carefully and make sure you do NOT end up with a SMR drive.

 

[fuzzygel]

hi, I am a newbie to TrueNas, coming from Synology NAS

just wondering is there such a thing as HDD compatibility list for TrueNAS?

 

[sretalla]

just wondering is there such a thing as HDD compatibility list for TrueNAS?

Not really. Most drives can be used, but with ZFS as the filesystem, you'll need to avoid SMR drives (https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr-drives.141/).

What's probably more important is the controller: https://www.truenas.com/community/t...s-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.81931/ https://www.truenas.com/community/r...t-multipliers-and-cheap-sata-controllers.177/

 

[fuzzygel]

thanks, really appreciate the links, it would definitely help me to learn about the TrueNas ecology