I built a NAS a while back, probably January 2020. I wasn't sure how much we'd use it so I built it cheap and only put a couple WD Red 1TB drives (mirrored RAID). Well, turns out I've filled them already and I'm going to have to either replace them or add more drives to the case.

First question is that I seem to remember that WD NAS drives had some sort of controversy over certain ones using shingled magnetic recording. I've only ever used WD but I'm not married to them. What's the go to NAS drive these days?

Second, should I just replace the 1TB drives with the new ones and resilver them (one at a time, of course) or just add more drives to the mix. Replacing will save me having to teach everyone to use different folders or how to find the stuff in different places. I think I may just replace them and use the 1TB drives elsewhere.

But first things first, let's decide on a set of hard drives. What do you suggest?

WD Red Pro have been my go-to NAS deployments for a long time.
Great performers and longevity.

WD Reds were built in both SMR and CMR versions for a while and WD wasn’t transparent about which was which. They’ve since come clean and put the CMR variant in a line called Red Plus which are basically CMR Reds if you don’t want to pay the extra to buy Red Pros. Either will work well in NAS devices. I’m using 8TB WD Reds in my NAS. WD80EFAX is what I have.

I have purchased 18 NAS drives in the last 8 months, a mixture of WD Red and Seagate Ironwolf. Yesterday one of the Ironwolf drives, three weeks old, just died. Right now my RAID 5 is degraded waiting on a replacement. In the future I think I’ll stick with WD. They’ve been rock solid.

As for the WD SMR/CMR brouhaha, that was a stupid move by WD. You should absolutely avoid a SMR NAS drive. Rebuilding a degraded volume with a SMR drive can take a week. The SMR drives are the regular red series under 8 GB. To be sure you get a CMR drive, stick with the Red Plus or Red Pro series, or an older Red with EFRX in the part number (SMR drives have EFAX in the p/n in the regular red series under 8GB).

All of the Seagate Ironwolf series are CMR/PMR drives, if you choose to go that route.

Since the "I" in RAID is for Inexpensive, I buy the cheapest things I can find for my home setup since it really doesn't matter, and I have cloud backup anyway. It's a 3-2-1 backup strategy. I can tell you that the Seagates have had more issues than the others. On the other hand the WD's have hung in there --- even the used ones.

I just purchased a couple of 4tb SeaCats ironwolf drives. They run very cold in th unraid server I built of of an dell r710 I purchased off of eBay.

So far unraid has worked well for me. Had an older 1tb hard drive start to fail and I replaced it with the 4 tb ironwolf. The array was rebuilt and it is working well. Nice thing about unraid is that it just adds the hard drive to your free space no changing your directory structure. The parity drive protects from 1 drive failure. You can add a second parity drive to protect from 2 drives failing.

I've read some have jumped ship to Seagate Ironwolf but, as you've all said, I've never had an issue with a WD. I'll look at the WD Red+

About 4 months ago I had a WD Red 4TB start throwing SMART errors in my UnRaid NAS. The power-on time was something line 4yrs (doesn't include idle/spindown time). I think I bought it in 2013 or 14. I replaced it with.... a WD Red 4TB.
The other 2 drives (parity & Data1) in that 10TB box are Toshiba x300 6TB. I would have got one of those but they were out of stock at the time.

One thing to add. If you are going WD, look into shucking a few external enclosures. The Best Buy WD Elements 14TB sells for around $200. A WD Red 14TB is around $350 retail. The white label drive in the WD external enclosure is reported to be a relabeled Red for a 40% discount. Of course this voids the warranty, so you’re rolling the dice. The drives at that size would be a CMR drive.

quote:

Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
As for the WD SMR/CMR brouhaha, that was a stupid move by WD. You should absolutely avoid a SMR NAS drive. Rebuilding a degraded volume with a SMR drive can take a week. The SMR drives are the regular red series under 8 GB. To be sure you get a CMR drive, stick with the Red Plus or Red Pro series, or an older Red with EFRX in the part number (SMR drives have EFAX in the p/n in the regular red series under 8GB).

Huh, learn somethin' every day. Might be why my parity checks and large transfers (20GB+) have been a lot slower since I got the replacement 4TB (EFAX)

I ordered 2 WD Red Plus 6TB drives. Even if we go at full bore then we should have 5 more years on this size drive. If we only get a couple out of it then that's OK, too.

Next project is off-site backup of the server.

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I've read some have jumped ship to Seagate Ironwolf

I've used WD reds for years and had great luck with them. I can't speak for the current state of Seagate drives but at one time they had a quite high failure rate. I have swapped out a lot of dead drives in the last 10 years, and the vast majority of them were Seagate drives.

quote:

Originally posted by mark123:
I've read some have jumped ship to Seagate Ironwolf but, as you've all said, I've never had an issue with a WD. I'll look at the WD Red+

I changed to Seagate Ironwolf in my NAS. No issues. I have WD and Sandisk in my desktops.

These guys

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/h...drive-test-data.html

I got a pair of 6TB drives in today. The first one is in and is resilvering now. I probably won't do the second one until tomorrow. The entire computer/network really slows down when resilvering.

The next question is what to do with the 1TB drives?

quote:

The next question is what to do with the 1TB drives?

Build a second NAS, use it for a backup, or separate out files where you don't want someone accessing other things IE business records, bank statements, checks...

sort of your secret second level defense....

I think I really put too much money into this server. It rarely goes above 7% on the CPU (Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-9100F CPU @ 3.60GHz). I could have probably just used the old Core2Duo in my old computer.

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:

quote:

The next question is what to do with the 1TB drives?

Build a second NAS, use it for a backup, or separate out files where you don't want someone accessing other things IE business records, bank statements, checks...

sort of your secret second level defense....

Perfect idea.

I think I'm also going to move the pihole off of the NAS and put it on a Raspberry Pi.

quote:

Originally posted by mark123:
I think I really put too much money into this server. It rarely goes above 7% on the CPU (Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-9100F CPU @ 3.60GHz). I could have probably just used the old Core2Duo in my old computer.

Probably. My main server is a Synology NAS DS920+ with a J4125 processor and 8 gb RAM. Even while simultaneously pushing three plex streams, handling large file transfers, and backing up to a large external drive, my cpu doesn't break 15%. The only time it ever gets any workout is when visualizing Win10 on it, or (obviously) running Handbrake on it.