Some questions about refurb drives.

[afaraz623]

Hello everyone,
So I've just built a nas for the first time. It's in the testing stage, I'm just monitoring everything for now and have thrown in a mixture of laptop and desktop drives I had laying around.
The main purpose of my nas is to conveniently and quickly transfer data to all of my computers. You see, I live in a third-world country and the internet speeds here are god awful, like 500kbps on a good day awful. So having a place where I can just dump all my downloads is useful plus my machine learning data sets, they can get pretty big too, and some other things as well. No personal stuff tho.
So my data (400gigs give or take and not exceeding 1TB anytime soon) is not irreplaceable but would take me ages to get everything back. 400 gigs on a wonky 200~500kbps connection with frequent dropouts...oh god.
Having said that, my strategy is to keep cold spares on hand and just replace the drives currently in my system one by one when they go bad. This seems logical to me but I could be wrong.
OK back story covered, now let's get into the main problem. What drives should I choose, new Seagate Skyhawk 1TB drives will run me around 7400pkr(41usd) each, and refurb WD greens are going for 2500pkr(14usd) so almost exactly a one third price difference. Any suggestions / constructive criticism will be very appreciated.

System specs:
Dell precesion T3500
XEON w3540
8GB ECC Ram
Four 500GB HDD in raidz2
Samsung something 128ssd with a 32GB flash drive as a boot mirror.
INTEL CT Gigabit NIC (Thank you for suggesting an intel nic, its just plug and play, love it)

 

[sretalla]

WD greens are not recommended (although there is a thread about using wdidle to effectively turn them into Reds... I haven't done it myself, so can't confirm it's possible/reliable to do).

I can't readily find anything indicating that the skyhawk drives would be SMR, so those would probably work OK (but do your due diligence to confirm they are CMR before purchase).

 

[Arwen]

One suggestion for a first time user of TrueNAS, is to follow best practices:
- Set up E-Mail alerts
- Setup at least monthly disk self tests
- Setup at least monthly ZFS pool scrubs, (both boot pool and data pool)
- Keep pool data usage under 80-90%, meaning DON'T fill up your pool
- Use different datasets, (with possibly different configurations like compression), for your different data uses
- And of course, backup your data!

Sometimes ZFS and or TrueNAS can seem hard or complicated for new users. And in someways that is true.

For outright simple uses and simpler GUI, sometimes to right answer is to use a pre-packaged NAS, like from QNAP. I'm not trying to steer you in that direction. But, in case another new, potential user reads this and sees their is more than just install software and go. That other new user can determine if they want & can use TrueNAS safely.