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Choosing 8TB HDDs for NAS Upgrade

936 views 10 replies 5 participants last post by  FastMHz 
#1 ·
Hi all,

So my NAS with a gross total of 40TB has some 2TB drives in there that are getting on in age. Samsung HD204UIs to be exact with over 51000 hours on them:



The drive config is basically a mirror of every drive, no RAID. I've had two drives go out in the past couple of years, and swapping in a new one is as easy as duplicating the mirror onto a new HDD:



All the primary drives are pooled together using DriveBender:



I'm wanting to move to Four 8TB drives, which will also open up spaces for expansion. Trying to decide amongst the variations of these 3:

Toshiba N300 8TB NAS HDD
WD Red 8TB NAS HDD
Seagate 8TB IronWolf NAS HDD

"Shingled" drives are a no-go for me. 5400RPM may be preferable over 7200RPM. Other than that, reliability is of utmost importance, more than power consumption. I'm sure 4 8TB drives will use less power than my current stack no matter what they are.

Cheers!
 
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#2 ·
Few questions:

  1. What type of data are you storing on this array?
  2. What type of RAID / redundancy are you looking for?
  3. How much usable space are you after?
  4. Will you be backing up this data or is it non-critical (ie. media)?
  5. What is your budget for the new drives?
 
#3 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by PuffinMyLye View Post

Few questions:

  1. What type of data are you storing on this array?
  2. What type of RAID / redundancy are you looking for?
  3. How much usable space are you after?
  4. Will you be backing up this data or is it non-critical (ie. media)?
  5. What is your budget for the new drives?
1. Mostly music and movies
2. 100% mirrored internally; I have a portable NAS for 3rd copy
3. 16TB to match what I have now
4. Internal mirror + portable NAS for backup
5. Trying to keep it around $1000 at the most which works if I can get the drives around $250 on sale for 4
 
#4 ·
I have ten of the 8TB WD reds in service for a little over a year now with no issues. But they still seem excessively pricey to me. I doubt you would get 4 for your budget.
 
#5 ·
I would get the Reds. Toshiba doesn't have a great track record with reliability and Seagate's IronWolf line is still too new to know about reliability.
 
#6 ·
Sounds like WD Red it is. Now to hope for a ShellShocker deal or something.
 
#7 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by FastMHz View Post

1. Mostly music and movies
2. 100% mirrored internally; I have a portable NAS for 3rd copy
3. 16TB to match what I have now
4. Internal mirror + portable NAS for backup
5. Trying to keep it around $1000 at the most which works if I can get the drives around $250 on sale for 4
I would just like to point out that an internal mirror whether it be RAID1 or RAID10 is in no way a backup and should not be considered as such. It will not protect you from hardware failure, user error (misclick, etc.), or some time of disaster (flood, fire, etc.).

I saw you mention in your OP that you won't considered shingled drives. Is there a reason you won't consider a non-striped array since you will be storing mainly media on it? There are a lot of pros to doing so that I can speak to as I run two non-striped arrays for my media (one backs up the other).
 
#8 ·
In addition to the internal mirrors of my main NAS, I have a portable NAS in a waterproof case kept in a different location with another copy of the data.

I don't want to mess with RAID because of rebuild times and proprietary controllers. And on 8TB drives, the horror of that thought....
 
#9 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by FastMHz View Post

In addition to the internal mirrors of my main NAS, I have a portable NAS in a waterproof case kept in a different location with another copy of the data.

I don't want to mess with RAID because of rebuild times and proprietary controllers. And on 8TB drives, the horror of that thought....
A non-striped array such as UnRAID or SnaPRAID is completely controller independent. I have 2 different servers containing 10 x 8TB SMR drives in them. Rebuild time is 20hours which is quite good for drives of this size. I've never actually needed to do a rebuild but I've tested it a few times for future use. The best thing about a non-striped array is that even if you lose more drives than you have parity for, you only lose the data on those drives. All the data on the other drives is still in tact since it's not striped across multiple disks.
 
#10 ·
If you don't want to mess wit RAID then SnapRAID is the best solution as you are not tied to any OS. I run Linux Mint 18.1 on my server with the media drives formatted to XFS with weekly snapshots and scrubs in SnapRAID. My data doesn't change often so I don't need to do daily snapshots so weekly are more than enough.
 
#11 ·
Thanks for the SnapRAID reference. I'm checking that one out.
 
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