Planning new NAS but what drives to use

I’m new to this forum, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask.
Also NAS / storage is not something i know to much about.

I am looking at making a new NAS to get away from Onedrive simply to make it fit my needs.
Where i am stuck right now is what drives to use. I am planning on using HDD’s but what drives to get? NAS / NAS Pro / Enterprise.

Is there a difference in terms of performance, how long they will last etc.

Mind you this is something newer to me as i don’t work with storage devices at all!.
I’m willing to learn as much as possible, thank you in advanced!

Those terms are mostly marketing and doesn’t mean that much.

Most important is to make sure you don’t get SMR drives. (E.g. many WD Red non-Pro are not suitable for NAS use.) Lots of info about this online if you search for e.g. SMR vs CMR.

Another specific of drives marketed for NAS or Enterprise is that they may abort failed reads faster - that is, a consumer drive might do everything possible to retrieve a bad sector, retrying for minutes, which can make some NAS/Enterprise controllers/software fail the entire drive since it’s not responding. If you’re running some kind of RAID/ZFS setup with redundancy you actually want the drive to fail within a set time limit so that the system can continue working.

Vibration tolerance is another thing, especially with drives marketed as Enterprise. I’m not sure how much this really matters in a home setting, I think it’s more for large disk shelves in racks?

Anyway, you need to look at these specific things, along with warranty time, idle power use et cetera, rather than just the marketing label.

How much storage are you aiming for? How do you intend to do backups?

1 Like

Thanks for the reply, and all the info. Now i got something to go of on.

I didn’t knew about CMR or SMR was a big deal. I always thought it was just the amount of cache or how the drive was made aka cheap vs non cheap.

I plan on using Truenas or HexOS (it looked interesting so i bought it when it launched).
The use will be for movies, storage of games and in general everything else i need to store. Maybe a few VM’s but I don’t know as this will something for the future with a jailer BSD setup.

Storage amount i am looking at 8-10 TB drives, they tend to be a good price here. 12 and over is way to much for my budget at the moment. The amount would be 5 drives or 8 drives. Looking at the miniforums N5 NAS or Jonsbo N4 case. So around 30-60 TB with a Z1 / Z2 (correct me if i’m wrong)

My movies are 4K blu-ray so they’re around 20-100 GB depending on the movie really.

I was looking at Toshiba N300 due to price but our stores in denmark doesn’t display if drives are CMR or not which is great right!?.. how does the WD Red Pro hold up? are they worth looking at? or even seagate maybe?.

I have no actual industry insight, but the “public opinion” seems to be that all drives of the same generation and make are pretty much made the same. There might be binning - drives with more vibration and/or marginal sectors going to consumer lines? - and there are differences in firmware (error handling, power saving and such). And then major differences in marketing and sales channels. Again, all hearsay from random internet people. :slight_smile:

I would use a separate SSD pool for VM storage.

I will mention backups again: remember that RAID/Zn is for uptime/availability, not backup! I have a NAS/homeserver that’s similar to what you describe - storage of media, some personal files, and running a few VMs like game servers - and I’ve chosen to run ZFS on individual drives rather than use redundant pools. So I have a couple of NVMes for active storage - a cheap one for static media and a good one for VMs and other active data, and then I backup that periodically to a 14 TB HDD. If a drive dies I will have some downtime and lose the data since the last backup, but I can tolerate that. It’s a suitable compromise for my needs, and I’d much rather have a proper backup than redundancy. Just something to think about!

Makes sense, I’m gonna take a look at the toshiba drives. Some how they cost 20-30% less then WD / Seagate here.

I was planning on getting some SSD’s for a VM pool as you suggested. I have some U.2 drives at work that is not in use and we’re planning on throwing them out so i might just format them and take them home.

I never really got what the backup and the rest was. It makes a lot more sense now. I do have access to my works server room and is allowed to place a nas at work where i can run the backup and shut it down after the backup is complete. Isn’t that “Cold backup storage” or am i wrong? this is all kidna new to me.
I do have a drive at home that is taken out every month to make a cold backup and then put back in storages again.

Thanks for all the great information you have provided. It really does help :slight_smile:

1 Like

This! Maybe get a 2nd NAS (I have a UGREEN DXP4800 Plus where I’ve put TrueNAS Scale on) where you could “easily” (as easy as TrueNAS is) send snapshots over. And if you put that NAS somewhere else (ie parents house or at work like you mentioned), that would be even better, though setup for VPN adds complexity.
I wouldn’t wait for HexOS to create the “buddy backup” Linus mentioned a few times, hard drives can die like flies if you get a bad batch and keep running the NAS in a degraded state, like I did. Luckily only my ripped BluRays where gone, so I had to re-rip them. So don’t be as stupid as me and shut down the server while you wait for a replacement.

Regarding the drives itself: Look around for certified sellers of refurbished drives. After having to suffer from a bad batch, creating multiple tickets for a replacement etc, getting a burned in and tested drive for cheaper is the way for me. Did that with my backup NAS, runs great so far.
I use Seagate Ironwolf Pros: They are a little quieter and have a better warranty (which I had to use 4 times!) than the regular Ironwolfs. These were the first out of maybe 30 drives I bought for work and home that failed like that.
And maybe get a cold spare if you can afford it. Can be either used to replace a defective drive immediately without waiting for a replacement, or down the line to extend the raid (which is possible with ZFS 2.3.0 which should be in a future TrueNAS Scale version soon)

Yeah, I’m from Sweden and I’ve noticed the same thing. The 14 TB in my NAS is a MG07ACA14TE and it’s been working fine now for, let’s see, 3187 hours. :slight_smile: (The only annoying thing with this drive so far is actually the Power_On_Hours SMART value: it seems to be set to fail at 5 years!)

You really should! Contrary to the situation with HDDs Enterprise NVMes really do seem to be made differently. Things like PLP (Power Loss Protection), Namespaces, NAND charge refresh, and overprovisioning. U.2 can be a bit of a pain/expense to connect (and cool), but well worth it in my (limited) experience!

Toshiba MG07-09 series are in general very good and occasionally on sale, if you want to save a few bucks they’re usually cheaper in .de

I remember Wendell and linus recommending serverpartdeals

But outside of SMR, price per storage, interface and noise what should we look for in drives for a home NAS environment?

Sorry for the late reply, i don’t have a pc at home at the moment.

I was looking at serverpartdeals, seems good. Only thing is VAT and import VAT that might be a issue for me.

1 Like

Yeah i was looking at those, they often cost the same here. I have been looking at .de amazon. The prices are not great compared to buying local here. Denmark doesn’t use EUR but DKK. Makes the prices when converted odd. Its often cheaper for me to buy it here locally when i converted from EUR to DKK.

When i had to connect u.2 to our SAN i ended up booking a tech from the place we bought them. HPE doesn’t make it easier when the bloody thing throws a fit when a controller dies on you…

I have heard that U.2 and NVMe for enterprise / enterprise storage is made nothing like for the home user. I was looking at some enterprise drives NVMe but the price is just insane. 4.000 DKK for 1.92 TB. Yeah no… that’s gonna be in the futhere with a full SSD based server. Honestly i don’t even have a need for a SSD based server. Its just me and my wife. no kids at all and we don’t stream outside our home.

HDD NAS are rapidly phasing out of the enterprise, so do be aware about that. I hear more and more organisations are moving to 30TB or even 60TB SSD drives, simply because operating costs are cheaper and 60TB SSD drives are now offering a decent per-TB cost (1.5x - 2.25x that of equivalent HDDs).

SSD infrastructure are rapidly converging on the EDSFF E1 and E3 standards (E1.S, E1.L, E3.S, E3.L):

So yeah, be mindful of this when investing in a NAS in 2025, other than that, carry on :slight_smile:

1 Like

The NASes I admin at work are Exos and IronWolf Pro. Red Pro’s pretty much interchangeable with the latter. If noise is a consideration, out of the three the IronWolves tend to have the best sonic profile, but I’m mostly working with 16-20 TB. Those are several dB(A) quieter than little drives like 8s and 10s.

N300s we don’t run because either we push up against IronWolf Pro WRL or need Exos’s continuous operation rating.

I’ve only had opportunity to buy once from them so far, mostly because we’re usually buying new on a different version than what they have. Packing job puts every other supplier we’ve used to shame.

+1

1 Like

just gonna leave this here…

2 Likes