Hello everyone, this week I want to pull the trigger on a home media server that will only be used for 4K blu-ray movies and the only thing where I’m unsure of is what drive I should go for since the media server will only be running when I want to watch movies or any other media so no 24/7 operation, It will most likely be operating on average 4-6 hours per day. So, my following question is, is it worth paying more for the red drives? They are about 25$ more expensive, buying 4 will mark up the price by 100$ but I’m getting 1 year extra of warranty out of it, are the red drives truly more reliable? If they are I’m willing to pay the extra 100$ for the peace of mind.
If it were me with the use case you describe, no they would not be worth it. The year of extra warranty would be nice but you’re saving enough to basically buy another brand new drive. The NAS firmware and potential for slightly lower power consumption is offset by your use case of not running them in a NAS box and not running it 24/7
Yeah that’s where I’m unsure if I should spend the extra money since I could just buy another hard drive after 2 years if one of them fails from the leftover money, I’ve never had a hard drive fail on me and I even have a 1TB wd blue that has been running 24/7 in a surveillance system for the past 3 years and there’s still no issue with it to this day but somehow I’m not sure what I should do, I think I’ll just go for the blue ones since I’ll probably never see the benefit of having NAS drives. I’ll probably wait till tomorrow to make up my mind and order, and I don’t even know if this is a downside for my case but the blue drive and the standard wd red are both SMR, only the wd red plus is CMR
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My takeaway when it comes to spinning storage has been that if reliability is what you’re going for, the only drives ‘worth’ the extra money are the enterprise-class drives like the HGST Ultrastar-DC/Seagate Exos/etc. And those things can get expensive.
I’m sure there’s some difference in hardware between the WD Red and Blue, but the biggest difference between these ‘consumer’ drive product lines appears to be the firmware. Based on what I’ve read it looks like MTBF ends up depending a lot more on the specific drive model than the product line it comes from - for example, the latest BackBlaze Drive Stats report shows an 8TB Seagate model failing three times as often as its 6TB counterpart which probably just has one less platter, etc.
TL;DR: In my opinion, unless you want to go enterprise, just get whatever’s cheaper.
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SMR shouldn’t be that bad since you’re going to mostly use it to play movies and such. As long as you aren’t going to use it for writing a lot of data at one go and the array doesn’t get absurdly large, SMR should be okay.
If you plan on raid, don’t do SMR… or if doing any COW filesystems like btrf, zfs, bcachefs.
Things will probably work fine, but sometimes there’s issues.
Larger drives tend to be CMR or some EAMR variant. 4k native drives, or drives that can be switched into 4k are a better buy than 512b drives.
I’m doing a similar thing and have used Ironwolf drives, mainly because I don’t want the hassle of re burning them if there’s a failure. Other more important stuff is stored as well though in fairness, so it’s in RAIDZ2 on TrueNAS.
What’s your server OS?
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You’re writing engagement, is effectively minimal [when adding/removing movies]
Are you running this package in a RAID, or as independent drives?
The server will be running linux on a 10th gen i3 since it’s enough for transcoding 4k media, no raid, the drives will be running independently, on average the server will be running for 4 to 6 hours at most, I’m only building it so I can permanently have my own 4K Blu-ray library and just watch a movie in peace when I feel like it, I might use it every day or might use it once a week or a month, I just want to have everything I want ready to go, the only reason why I’m building it as a server and not just plugging the drives in my pc is because I want to use PLEX on my TVs, think of it more as a mass media storage rather than a server since it won’t operate like a server meaning 24/7. The price difference from 4 WD blue to 4 wd reds is the price of the i3 itself, if you guys think there’s no point in going red wd plus drives then great, I’m pretty much buying the i3 for “free”.
tl;dr I only want to store movies and use it a couple of hours when I feel like it, no raid, no constant writing. Just permanently stored movies until the drive is full and then leave it be without ever deleting anything.
Interesting, why not just get a single 16T or 18T drive… or a pair of 12T drives for example?
It’d probably be more cost effective per terabyte, … or are you getting a special deal for 4T disks?
I wouldn’t trust a single 16TB drive and don’t really like the idea of losing everything, much easier to replace 3.5tbs of data instead of 16
Here’s an idea…
your budget is 300, but you’re bound to run out of space at one point, so how about not losing anything, and keeping some upgradability in the system…
step 1.
You buy a 6TB disk and a 10TB disk, and setup snapraid … you’ll only have 6TB protected, but additionally maybe you can get 4TB that won’t be protected initially, but you can still use it if you want to.
step 2.
You’re at 2 disks.
Once you fillup 6TB, not sure how long that’s going to take, … or at some point in the future when disks go on sale, get a 16T or 18T or 20T disk.
With snapraid and mergerfs, this gives you 16T protected capacity (+10T for +16T cost ; and total 50% byte efficiency).
step 3
You’re at 3 disks
Once you fill that up, get another 16T disk… this gives you +16T of protected storage for a total of 32T protected storage (66% byte efficiency).
step 4
You’re at 4 disks,
Once you fill up 32T, buy another 16T disk to swap instead of a 6T, and you get 10T3 + 6T2 = 42T of protected capacity, total byte efficiency 42/58=72% byte efficiency
If you keep the 6T drive, you’ll have 6T4 +4T3 +6T*2 = 48T / 64T (75%)
You can keep going, but getting above 90% needs lot of disks, and it’s complicated because when you have lots of disks, statistically you’ll have trouble more often.
Generally 7/8 (87.5%) is as far as one normally goes with raid efficiency… hyperscalers also usually don’t get much better with various erasure codes.
If a disk goes bad at any time, you lose what’s on that disk temporarily, but can reconstruct it from other drives, warranties for bigger enterprise disks go up to 5 years.
Have a look at perfectmediaserver.com and the mergerfs+snapraid section.
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I pretty much decided to switch to 8TB drives and I settled on two 8 TB WD Red Plus. The blue and standard red drives are SMR and I’m really not a fan of 1mb/s write speeds when they’re almost full, there was literally no other choice, the 4TB drives seemed small and with 4 of them upgrading further on would have been a limiting factor, the 6tb blue was on sale and I could’ve gotten 4 x 6TB but again, smr so it’s a pass again.
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I’m happy with my Red Plus, they’re amazingly quiet while operating.
Make sure you register them if there’s any extended warranty programs applicable where you live.
They come with the standard 3 year warranty
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