Coming in to ask an age old question regarding drives in a SATA NAS.
To explain what I’m after/use case.
I won a NAS from Ugreen that takes 4 SATA drives, now they didn’t provide drives which is fine, and I’m looking on the used market in the UK.
As we know all PC components are skyrocketing atm which sucks and I am kinda on a really tight budget for buying drives.
I looking at a site/store in the UK called CEX (Computer Exchange Store) at some drives, ideally 4TB or higher, I’m seeing the WD purples/Seagate surveillance drives going for £65 per disk which is about what I’m good to pay per disk, thinking buy one now, one next month.
I’d love a higher capacity drive, or even a WD Red/Seagate equivalent but cost per drive is just too much for what I can realistically spend right now (what with house rent, bills etc… going up too it’s mental)
Is there any real downside to running a purple in a NAS?
My use case will be as follows.
Either raid 1 or Raid 6
Used purely for archival storage, with occasional reads.
I take shedloads of photos, photographing gigs, festivals and events, and really just want to archive my data.
Again I’d love to buy a red or similar drive but those are just outta my comfortable price range at the moment.
If this is a poor idea, would getting 3TB standard drives instead be better? They’re a little friendlier on the budget if you will.
Speaking only from my own experience, I’d avoid Western Digital. I’ve replaced most of mine because they’ve developed fatal mechanical issues. All WD Red drives (non-shingled). My Seagate-drives are chugging along, no issues there.
If you can stomach the cost, Seagate Exos (enterprise drives) are actually reasonably priced, and very reliable in general. Getting refurbished drives is a good idea, but they tend to sell out fast. If not, I’d wholeheartedly recommend Seagate IronWolf drives are solid.
I’m happy with and have used CeX for refurbished small drives (vastly preferable than ebay, or amazon new), provided you handle the redundancy (RAID 1, 5) yourself. They have good warranty policy but they don’t have a magic wand that can stop them failing.
WD/Seagate/Toshiba can all be fine, but not SMR (and WD are the worst company attitude of these three, but then it’s refurbished, so not like you’re giving them any money directly).
That’s why I’m looking at CEX cause of the return policy.
I understand I’m rolling the dice on used drives, though I won’t lie the drives in my main PC including the 6TB HDD and 1tb boot NVME are all 2nd hand anyhow, heck most ALL of my pc is 2nd hand parts lol.
Ideally I’d like something 4tb or higher per disk, being a data hoarder I want to keep and archive as much stuff as I can.
And I’ve checked out Bargain hardware too, that’s my 2nd place to order from though the cheapest in stock is £235 which is out of the question atm. just one drive alone would cut way into the wages and cause a which bill do I pay for situation XD
This is the part that’s killing me!! Years back I bought an 8TB drive from CEX 2nd hand for about £80/90 now 2nd hand they’re over £150 which honestly I can’t stomach for the moment unless I get christmas money lol
I used to have SSD’s fail on me back in the day (~2009-2014) but in recent years they have been more reliable for me than even enterprise hard drives have.
When I have a bunch of hard drives (pools of 12x) usually one or two will fail in the first year or two, and then they will last for a long time, up until 40k+ hours when some start developing reallocated sectors again.
In the past decade I can only remember one SSD that failed on me, and that was a Sabrent Rocket. All of the others I’ve used have been perfectly fine.
I wouldn’t really be wanting to do this if I didn’t get the NAS, but as I won it in a competition sans drives I might as well use it to be honest, start doing the rule of 3 that I preach at my tech support job.
So do you think as surveillance drive would do as a stop gap till I can pony up the cash for a better set of drives once the prices hopefully come down, or I find an in the wild score at an electronics recycler?
Fair, I’ll hold off till either I find a set of drives at a good price that are NAS specific or my email to Seagate works and they sponsor some drives.
In my experience, all brands had at some time or another made a bad model but their other ones have been fine. I have a bunch of shucked 10tb wd drives that have been fine for many years for example, and had drives from seagate 4tb recertified and some old 500gb toshiba ones fail in the past.
Do you remember what model name or at least the size?
as a sample size of one .
but im only buy NAS rated drives even if use case is a media server suppling one plex tv