I am putting together a Free NAS home server. The primary use will be as a media server for an HTPC. This is really my first venture into home servers and I have a few questions I haven’t been able to find good answers to.
First, is a NAS level drive really necessary for a home media server? I know the drive is designed for 24/7 performance, but is it overkill?
Second, is there any performance issues to consider? I know these drives tend to run slower. Since the primary use will be to serve up media, including HD content that can 10-20GB per file. I do not want my bottleneck to be my hard drives. I guess I should mention, my current plan is to use 3 or 4 drives 12TB total capacity in RAID 5. This will be on a Gigabit wired network.
Also, the machine I will be using for this build is also in question. I have access to an older Fujitsu R650 workstation. The machine has two 4 core x5450 Xeons and can support up to 32 GB of ECC DDR2. I am worried about the age/outdated components, but I can pickup this machine, the drives (new) and RAM for around $500.
Thanks in advance.
honestly i have never had a drive fail besides the sata power connector breaking off of one but that was my own fault and poor cable management, wd red's or the hgst's seem to be popular and are not that much more expensive, and still cheaper than wd blacks
I've had similar experience with drives. The only drive that has ever failed on me, was actually in a used Mac Pro 1.1 I picked up last year. I still have 15 year old 40 GB drives that are still running without any issues. Yeah I was looking at the WD Reds, the price isn't that bad.
It's worth it. If you were using RAID you definitely need at least NAS drives as the firmware on other drives doesn't work properly in RAID. For freenas any drive should work but the NAS drives are made to run 24/7 and have a higher MTBF. My server used to have 8 WD greens and they all failed within a month of each other after about a year, I replaced them with reds and I haven't had any issues since.
The WD reds are 5400rpm (or 5900 or something like that) but the performance is still okay, they will saturate a gigabit network connection so for a NAS they're fine. If you want something faster the red pros are 7200rpm as well as the HGST NAS disks (which have the same specs as the red pros but have a shorter warranty which is why they're cheaper).
I still have a couple of seagate eco drives (can't remember what they were called) which I had from when I was using the WD greens, they're still working okay but I often have problems with them disconnecting and remounting in read only mode and needing to have check disk run on them. These are the sort of issues you can get from running desktop drives in a 24/7 environment. The reds have been solid and never give me any problems.
Here is a SMART report for my disks, you can see that the reds which are about two years old now all have a 5% chance of failure (this is the same for new disk which I have in another computer) whereas the two seagate desktop drives have 10% and 19%. So it's sort of an okay indication of the durability of NAS drives vs desktop drives.
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For 3 or 4 disks you can use the cheaper WD reds but if you're planning on having 8 or more drives you need to use something like the red pros, HGST NAS or some other server grade disk which has rotational vibration sensors. When you have a lot of disks in one box the combined vibration can cause read/write errors or even damage the disk so you need to use disks which can compensate for it.
