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!
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.