Hello, I’m looking to build a replacement for my last TrueNAS that I just sold. I’ve decided on the platform, a Dell PowerEdge R730xd with a 330HBA card and 12 bays. Included is a dual SSD for boot and cache.
What I’m torn on is the hard drive selection, looking to see if I can find a deal during Amazon Prime’s days.
Usage will be home backups, some tinkering in containers but nothing that needs bleeding edge performance. 10Gig Ubiquiti Switch and 10Gig NICs on the workstations feeding to this NAS.
Any recommendations for drives and pool setup? Will probably fill all 12 slots with drives.
When NAS is considered, for me, the choice narrows down to WD Red and Seagate IronWolf.
Since you plan to have 12 drives, I would go with WD pro, rather than plus (plus are recommended in systems with up to 8 drives). IronWolf can also be pro.
“Bleeding edge” are WD gold, which is designed for data centers and not needed for you.
But what I would recommend is not to buy all 12 from the same series! Get for example 6 WDs and 6 Seagates. Create a pool(s) of one manufacturer and backup pool(s) of another. If there is a fault in production, this decreses the chance of bigger failure.
If you’re considering used, I had good luck with these this month. WD Ultrastar DC HC520 12TB SATA III 3.5" Data Center HDD HUH721212ALE604. About 500TBW and 0 errors on any. ETA about 4 years old and 100% Helium.
As for the drives, whatever comes cheaper per TB among anything suitable for a NAS: WD Red Plus or Pro / WD Gold (= HGST) / Segate Ironwolf (Pro) or Exos / Toshiba N300 or MG.
@Dave_Haertel You never specified how much storage you wanted, and the redundancy. Since you had a previous TrueNAS system, I suspect you already have a drive configuration in mind (Mirrors, RAIDZ2, etc). Also, is this a production system or home system?
Knowing what your capacity and configurations would allow us to come up with a good solution vice a guessing game.
Amazon does have some WD Red Plus drives on sale (I’m sure you could have looked that up), but you should comparison shop. You may find a better deal elsewhere. Ensure they are CMR and not SMR drives. If the price is too good to be true, walk away.
The Ultrastars I referenced were bought from an ebay seller who is currently out of SATA stuff, but I’m sure there are various capacities coming out of other datacenters. Not sure how i feel about used from Amazon. You can’t refurbish or renew a HDD (not profitably or quickly anyway) so the question is does used bother you? For me, these were going in a backup NAS as another copy of data after main NAS and WD Red Pros that are new and fresh.
@joeschmuck I’m more concerned with the quality and the durability of the drives. I’ll be somewhere probably between 10TB and 20TB depending on the price per TB, but specifically I’m more concerned about the drive itself. My last system was very small, (4) 4 TB drives in a RAIDz1 w/1 VDEV. Since this will be a much larger implementation, I was thinking multiple VDEVs
I’m not opposed to used, but I would probably invest in multiple spares in the beginning so that will drive my cost up some, maybe not compared to all new drives but certainly something to consider when trying to balance new vs. used.
12 drives is not that large. 11- or 12-wide raidz3 is still within “acceptable” range.
The issues is that larger drives put more data at risk in case of failure, so a higher raidz level is highly desirable.
If you go with 2*6-wide Z2, you may begin with one vdev, if that’s large enough, and add the second later.
This is actually an important decision and should be made now before buying any drives. If you wanted 18TB, buy three 20TB drives and create a 3-way MIRROR.
This allows you to have good redundancy. It allows you to have ample physical space (9 slots in your 12 drive cage) for future storage.
As for quality of the drives, there is one place you can buy a used quality drive and have a 5 year warranty and to be fair, you are paying for a warranty.
Drives fail, some sooner than we want but in general, drives run for a pretty long time these days.
I could easily tell you to buy three 20TB drives, make a 3-way mirror and call it a day. But you should care about your project enough to understand the pros and cons. Sometimes there is no perfect answer.
The ONLY site selling used hard drives that I have heard great things about is goharddrive.com and here is a link to a 20TB drive which should be fine, but others can chime in.
Pros to large drives: Generally less money per TB. Don’t need as many drives to hit your target capacity. Less overall heat generated because you are using fewer drives.
Cons to larger drives: Longer resilver/copy times for a single drive failure.
The one Con listed above can be a big one for some people, which is why I would recommend a 3-Way MIRROR as these will copy the data much faster, it doesn’t need to regenerate the data spread across many drives.
Not sure if this is the answer you wanted but it is one possible path you could take.
I actually had planned on filling the bays, so that’s why I wasn’t as concerned about the per drive capacity, if I filled all 12 and setup 3 VDEVS it would be more capacity than I would probably use at 10 or 12 TB per drive. If I went up to 20 TB drives, I know I would be looking for things to fill it with, so in my situation around 12 is probably the go to with regard to capacity.
With that said, going to a mirror is probably ok with the amount of drives that will fill the unit so I’ll definitely lean that way, more so if I go the used drive route. I’m counting on at least 1 or 2 failures in the first couple of years if I go used, if that doesn’t happen, great, if it does I’ll be prepared by buying 14 drives to start with.
You must be using Solar power or on a Wind Farm. 12 drives is a lot of power. Or you have too much money in your bank account. Let me give you my transfer number
