For boot drives just grab the cheapest ‘okay’ brand of ssd - I think for me it was WD Blue. Kingston, WD, Crucial, Seagate, Samsung, it really doesn’t matter too much. Back-up your config once a month just in case.
If you want to run VMs for anything, then getting a mirror of SSDs (sata or NVMe) is a good idea.
How I’ve set up mine is that I have an NVMe 128 GB just for the OS, one SSD 256 GB for the app pool (jellyfin, tailscale, filebrowser), which is regularly backed up to the HDD pool (two WD mirrored). It is working just fine.
Yeah, and theoretically, a surveillance drive could favour maintaining throughput over ensuring perfect data integrity. Keyword here is: THEORETICALLY.
And with redundancy, ZFS would take care of any flipped bit.
Beside that, Purple firmware is also designed for use in arrays, like Red but contrary to Blue/Black/Green.
Purple is closer to Red (Plus/Pro) than anything else. If Purple is what you can get for a good price, go for it and don’t bother.
30% price gap?! All Purple it is then…
(If you really wanted to mix and match different drives to spread the risk of failure, you’d throw a Seagate in the mix.)
My pool is a mix of purple, red and ironwolf drives. The reason is I did not want to buy online and not many stores are available here. I just mixed brands because that is the best practice.
It’s Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks at the end of the day
I’d get 1 purple, 1 red plus and 1 ironwolf just to make sure the drives are from different batches. Decrease the possibility of them failing at the same time.
But you can still get all purple and you will be fine.
