WD Red Plus vs Red Pro in large NAS.

[aerospyke]

Hey, something I've not gotten the answer to... the doco reads that Red Plus are good for NAS up to 8 bays and Pro's up to 24 bays. ... is that for the enclosure, or the array size? I'm building my NAS with 24 bays but will have multiple 4-8 disk pools (some with 4 disks single VDEV, another with 8 disks, 2 VDEVs 4 disk each). In my scenario, is the red plus fine, i.e. the 8 bay "marketing" speak for the array size, or is it to do with the entire enclosure and more to do with environmental pressures, i.e. temps, vibrations etc?

 

[ChrisRJ]

It is about the enclosure, specifically vibrations. What I would recommend is to also look at the enterprise drives. In some countries those are actually cheaper than NAS drives.

 

[aerospyke]

Thanks for the info ChrisRJ, it's what I was afraid of. I don't want to get Pro drives from what I've been reading about noise and running temperatures though, which makes me concerned about where to go from here. Unfortunately, I'm in Australia, there is NOTHING cheaper here :D I'm also looking at 12TB drives, can't see those being less than a mortgage in enterprise drives though :D

 

[jgreco]

is that for the enclosure, or the array size?

It's primarily about the market segmentation. The hard drive manufacturers would like to sell expensive drives to enterprise customers, which is where the biggest margin is.

However, some of us have cheapskate bosses, and my boss understands that the mechanism inside a Black Friday WD EasyStore $190 is effectively the same as the $400 drive I can get in the channel "legitimately". Therefore that cranky old bastard makes me do our company drive buys on Black Friday and then shuck them, at least where that's possible and practical to do.

They've been trying to use "vibration" as a differentiator, and while there may be some mild technical underpinnings to that, it is worth noting lots of operations, including the well-known BackBlaze, make extensive use of various consumer-grade drives. The same goes for lots of hobbyists, such as the Data Hoarder guys, or the ZFS zealots on these forums.