Choosing HDD for a low budget NAS

Level1Techs INBOX.deb
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To Logan, Wendel and probably Qain (and the awesome forum members)

I will try to keep this short and as clear as possible.

I decided to slap together a home NAS mostly dedicated for music and video storage for me and two other people, but i came across a problem. I can't figure out/ decide which HDDs would be better for me.

I am thinking about one 3TB WD RED for now and getting another one or two later for redundancy and increased capacity. OR would it be better to just get several 1TB ones and set them up for raid immediately?

Also would the WD RED drives be the best choice for me, or should i go with something like Seagate barracudas? (I am hoping that the drives won't fail in 5-10 years)

I don't want to cheap out completely but don't want to "waste" money either. so please do keep in mind that MB/$ matters a tad bit more than the safety of my movies and music.

Thanks to everyone in advance!

Wills

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I'm sure the WD Red line is a good choice here, but personally I'd look to the 4TB Seagate 5900 RPM drive(ST4000DM000). Sure it's not rated like their official NAS drives, but it gives a lot of storage for the money, uses little power and is very quiet for a 3,5" drive. One drive of any kind is to be regarded as unreliable anyway, so get a second one in there for mirroring if you really need that kind of safety for movies and music. Or just do a backup on some other drive on the network for the really important stuff, like perhaps your favorite lossless encoded music and that vintage movie you might not easily find again if things go south.

Keep in mind that RAID does not replace a good backup, RAID is primarily for keeping system downtime low. Backup is actual safety. Never trust any drive to last. Never even trust a single RAID array.