Hey there,
as the title says I’m currently shopping for NAS drives and I need some advice because I’m not into the HDD space at all. In the past I just bought whatever was cheap and would hold my data, but those were single drives whenever needed and not for a NAS/RAID.
So to start off, these drives will be going into a self-built NAS, probably FreeNAS/TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, or (less likely) a custom Linux install with btrfs or openZFS.
The files are mainly going to be video files (largely my own Bluray rips and other media) and music (mostly a FLAC collection, some MP3s here and there).
I know that SMR drives are not a good idea but that’s about the end of what I know about NAS drives.
I know there’s NAS specific drives that are better suited due to vibration resistance and other firmware optimisations, which is why I’m looking into those primarily.
While looking up drives I did stumble on some datacenter drives though that seem to be oddly cheap. From this topic it seems the consensus is, if the datacenter drives are cheap(-ish), they can be used on NASes just as well.
Just for comparison, I saw these 2 drives:
- Toshiba 14 TB (MG07ACA14TE) starting at 307 Euro (was 311 yesterday) = 21,40-ish per TB
- Seagate IronWolf NAS 10TB (ST10000VN0008) starting at 306 Euro = 30-ish per TB
- virtually the same price, but 4 TB difference in size
- both are CMR, both are 7200 rpm, both have 256MB cache, both are helium filled
- the Toshiba though is rated for 2.5x the MTTF, has 2 years more for warranty
What I don’t know though is that the Toshiba is listed as “4K with emulation (512e)”, and I don’t know what that means in practical terms.
I know that is the sector size (which from my understanding limits the maximum amount of files since even files of less then 4KB take up at least one sector?). With that limited knowledge seeing as my files won’t be smaller then 4KB for the most part, it seems this won’t matter. But I don’t know enough to know what the smaller sector size means in practical terms for the file system.
The second thing is the Persistent Write Cache, but from the word alone I would assume that just means that the cache remains intact in case of a power-outage and the data will be written next time the power turns on.
So TLDR: Why is the Toshiba so cheap in comparison? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
And are there any other things I should look out for?
Note those are probably not going to be the final drives (sizes) I will go with, but these very conveniently close in price for comparison’s sake.
Thanks in advance!