The title says basically everything but let me elaborate.
Given the recent news about the sold out of harddrives for the current year and possibly also the next years (tomshardware article) I try to buy the HDDs I want to use for the next few years earlier than expected.
I am on a really tight budget so I really don’t want to overspend. I have an old tower PC laying around which I would like to turn into a DIY NAS probably with TrueNAS Scale.
I don’t expect high loads, it will only be 1-2 users with medium writing and reading.
In this article from howtogeek the author talks about the differences and I get it, but a lot of the people commenting seem to be in a similar position as I am. Not really a lot of read-write load, only a few users, and many argue computing HDDs are fine for this use case.
Possibilites I came up with until now:
- Buy two pricey Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red HDDs and put them in RAID1
- Buy three cheaper Seagate Barracuda or WD Blue and put two in RAID1 and keep one as a backup if (or should I say when?) one of the used drives fails.
I am thankful for every comment or experience you might have with this topic!
If you can use SAS (you’ll need a SAS PCIe card, roughly $50 used), get SAS drives. They are enterprise-grade exclusively, there is a massive supply of used drives as servers get refreshed, and a very limited secondhand market because most people can’t use SAS drives.
You won’t get the latest or largest drives, but you’ll get something that works perfectly fine for home use.
Yes, but enterprise grade stuff on second hand market is basically always fairly priced (you don’t get a “good deal”, just a normal one).
That said, I would still rather go refurnished server disks than desktop, especially lower capacities.
Refurbishes server disks you mean exclusively SAS drives or also SATA?
Also SATA. There’s basically no difference.
(We don’t have all the same needs, so no right or wrong answers. All my current HDDs are SATA, which saves me one smol hassle in potential migrations/changes/salvages/troubleshooting, but nothing major. Perhaps they were even a little tiny bit cheaper new than the same with SAS, but that’s not a rule. I do have two SAS SSDs bcs they looked cool & I wanted to have them even after they become obsolete.)
Oh, and to clarity the mythos around why “enterprise” in cases when the hardware seems the same CMR - this night not be true, but I feel some components (eg on the board) might be better grade or suited by design to work 24/7 or survive hours of some work intensive load (like ZFS repairs). And finding data/reviews on such stuff whilst having other priorities/restraints (loudness, price) is hard.
It’s not really about 24/7, but it is about quality of components. Enterprise gear is made using slightly better parts and tighter tolerances. Things like more expensive capacitors rated for more hours/cycles, better power filters, things like that.
The end result (and this is easily verified) is the failure rate is much, much lower than comparable consumer-grade equipment.
There is sometimes a blurry line between what counts as enterprise vs pro-sumer vs consumer gear, though.
But you need a newish PCIe connection to get decent speeds from the drives no?
This is highly dependent on what your needs are and how you plan to solve it. SATA-3 maxes at 6gbit, which SAS-2 had in 2009. Most cards are x8, and have at least 4 full speed SAS lanes (of whatever generation). That means 24 Gbit. PCIe x8 2.0 (from 2007) had 4 GB (32 Gbit). So if that meets your needs, you can run it on an ancient board.
However, if you need something more advanced, such as SAS-3, a SAS expander, or a card with more native lanes, then you would need to plan accordingly.
I’ve been running on an LSI 9211-4i4e, which is only a PCIe 2.0 card, for many years. I did notice my speeds dropped when I expanded the 4e to a 15-bay DAS (plus the 4 internal SATA drives), but it’s still enough to meet my needs.
I will definitely have to do my homework on all of these transfer rates lol
SAS drives are way cheaper on eBay and such but I don’t know if I feel confident enough to move from SATA to SAS for my first DIY NAS already. It sounds very easy with the PCIe SAS adapter but still daunting at the same time.
Pcie is ridiculously fast. I think you will have a hard time making out even a 1x pcie 4.0 slot with hdds. It can do 1.9 gbytes per second.
idk which naming scheme is worse: PCIe or USB. Not that I would know too much about transfer speeds but the plethora of different version surely doesn’t help.