HDD's option's and opinions

[gingerbee]

my main reason for sticking to 4TB drives is the fact I have a boatload of them already and it's much easier to have direct one for one backup using the lot of the drives I already have, if money was not a concern yes I would buy 8x16/18 TB drives

just wondering about the Ironwolf and WDred's are not enterprise drives ?? their consumer drives ??? just wondering

Also forgot to mention that this pc will only be on at most a couple of times a month to add/pull data on/off of so it doesn't/wont sit here running 24/7 in turn I think this helps when using the low-cost SMR drives I am using

 

[MARSTG]

3.0 charlie told me Ironwolves run like tanks so I am trusting him. I have one right now in my RAID5 matrix as an online spare and I think I will insert it so I can remove the 2TB WD black, which is the slowest of the bunch, and maybe put it as an online spare.

 

[gingerbee]

damn I also just realized that there are WD red, red plus, and red pro's wtf, just the WD red comes in SMR or CMR it seems the others IE plus/pro are all CMR drives lol ok that's a little confusing product stack

 

[Sagath]

3.0 charlie told me Ironwolves run like tanks so I am trusting him. I have one right now in my RAID5 matrix as an online spare and I think I will insert it so I can remove the 2TB WD black, which is the slowest of the bunch, and maybe put it as an online spare.

I've replaced all my old Reds with iron wolves in two NAS. I had 4 out of 9 reds shit the bed within 5 years. The wolves are still going strong.

 

[lowfat]

I'm not familiar w/ the storage software you are using. Does it use drives for parity?

I'd also suggest moving to larger drives.

 

[gingerbee]

Thanks very much, Sagath so I have not heard too many things good so far about those red drives

Snapraid is my parity software and Drivepool is just what the name sounds like but it can be used like raid 1, but I don't use it like that I use it just to group drives into one large pool, I have it set up to fill up one drive at a time till said drive is filled to the level I set it too, then I have a copy of each drive one to one put away (storage box for HDD). Snap raid for parity of the pool, right now I only have one parity drive but will be moving to two in the next couple of months once I get around to it. for me to move all my data and have room to grow I will have to buy min of 6-8 drives because I will also have to move all backup data to larger drives hence why I will be sticking with my lowly 4TB but I still want to hear everyone opinions on what HDD they may or would use all the info I can get can help.

I ended up going this route to make it easy for my wife over the phone if needed to access any and all data from this archive server in case I end up in the hospital for any stretch of time ( which can and does happen a lot ) I mean I would bet I could walk her through maintenance of said server cause it runs on windows and each drive can be pulled from the server and plugged right into any windows pc to access the data.


Snapraid is not used a hell of a lot because it is a CMD user only the GUI someone wrote for it I can't get working and once you use it for a bit it's really easy to use with CMD plus I can just write in a note pad the commonly used commands so I don't have to type them out all the time lol, yes lazy but it works for my needs

that zoning for SMR sound kind of cool not 100% sure I get it all but only read it through once so far good read for sure

 

[anabioz]

I've replaced all my old Reds with iron wolves in two NAS. I had 4 out of 9 reds shit the bed within 5 years. The wolves are still going strong.

 

[JD]

I don't think you can really judge based on the "name" alone, there's been some sizes of Reds and IronWolfs that were really bad for reliability and others that are great. Can even be down to the manufacture date too.

Red (SMR) and Red Plus (CMR) are all 5400RPM drives as far as I know, 3yr warranty.
IronWolf's are usually 5400-5900RPM at smaller sizes and 7200RPM on larger ones, 3yr warranty.
Red Pro/IronWolf Pro are all 7200RPM and 5yr warranty.
These are all NAS drives, I don't think you'd see them in an enterprise SAN.

Gold/Exos are "enterprise" drives, designed for 24/7/365 workloads in server environments. Usually run a bit louder too.

I still think your strategy with 4TB drives is making this pretty complex to maintain. If you are "starting over", why not go with a pair of large drives and forgo "RAID" for now? Sounds like you manually mirror to another and put away which is the correct backup strategy anyways. RAID is only about keeping uptime/availability.

 

[gingerbee]

I don't use raid at all Drivepool does just that pool a group of drives into one drive to the OS, also with the WD red, there are SMR and CMR with a different price.

to be honest, it hasn't been hard at all sorry if I implied that it was, the reason I want to keep using the software is how easy all of it has been unless I switch to UNraid but think that will happen.

So far I am back at my Ironwolf's but I am not rushing into anything for the new hardware setup.

Thanks for everyone's opinions and thoughts they always help and I am really wondering Solace what HDD do you use ??? or do you not use HDD anymore ???

 

[anabioz]

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Enjoy!