Question I must be doing NAS wrong. Suggestions?

[VirtualLarry]

I have a number of aging NAS units that have data on them. I would like to purchase new drives, with mfg warranty, and a new NAS unit to replace them, after transferring the data over.

More of a general data-hoarder, I don't have a bunch of downloaded music and movies to save. Plenty of downloaded linux ISOs though. (3+TB)

Newegg has 8TB Toshiba N300 NAS HDDs for $129.99, but they also had the 16TB for $259.99, so I've ordered a few of those.

Now I'm looking at a 4-bay NAS, that can take 16TBx4 drives.

I see after I've already ordered, that Amazon has 14TB He14 WD DC drives, renewed, for $129. That alone there would have saved me a few bucks on drives.

 

[Shmee]

I would generally go with drives that have known 5 year warranties, so that would be WD Red pros, WD golds, Seagate Exos, etc. Data center and Pro NAS grade. I don't know the status of warranty really on renewed drives, it may depend on the make and model? That said, they are cheaper.

Another solution would be to convert one of your computers over to a NAS, using TrueNAS or something. You can even get 4 bay hotswap cages for the case, as long as it has the needed ODD slots.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, the 16TB N300 Toshiba drives are new retail (possibly OEM-packed) from Newegg.

I don't know if they're He drives. For longevity, I almost hope that they aren't.

 

[bhelhokie]

Amazon has 14TB He14 WD DC drives, renewed, for $129

I just bought 10TB HGST He DC drives for my NAS project. I haven't had time to mess around with them yet except to make sure they are detected in BIOS. But, I wanted to warn you that they are Power Disable Mode HDDs, and I had to use the bundled SATA power extension cables to override this mode to use with a regular consumer motherboard. If you're thinking of buying an off-the-shelf NAS unit, make sure it supports this feature as you won't be able to use this cable.

Yes, I hooked up my drives without the extension and was in awe how quiet they were till I realized they weren't on... lol

 

[VirtualLarry]

Amazon.com

Looking at maybe that one. Or a Nimbustor 4 Gen2 4-bay.

That one is a Ryzen 9-bay (5x 3.5", 4x 2.5" SSD caching), 32GB RAM, 10GbE-T + 2x 2.5GbE-T.

 

[In2Photos]

I still use unRAID. I've had my server set up for years on ancient hardware, just recently "upgraded" to an i5-2300 with 8GB of RAM. Before that it was an old Athlon 3000 1.9GHZ and 2GB of RAM. Easy to run on any old hardware you have laying around. You can make it as simple or as complicated as you want. I have mine send me an email everyday with drive status since I don't check it all the time. You can use whatever case you want whatever NIC you want, etc.

 

[manly]

Repost

Question - Best quality for cheapest NAS HDDs? Seagate IronWolf? Toshiba N300/X300? WD Red/Red Pro? HGST Enterprise? Looking for 10TB+

Ok, so it looks like perhaps (?), it's time to swap in some fresh drives into one of my NAS units. Let me give you some history. I've got two QNAP units, a TS-451 and a TS-431, and an Asustor 6104T. All are 4-bay NAS units, the TS-451 and Asustor have Intel CPUs, the TS-431 has ARM. I've got...

forums.anandtech.com

I haven't bought any hard drives in some time, but goHardDrive is popular over on SlickDeals:

14TB

goHardDrive.com is your one stop shop for all your hard drive. We are Wholesale Hard Drives, Hard Drive Distributor, Hard Drive Supplier, Hard Drives, Internal Hard Drives, External Hard Drives, SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Hard Drive, USB 3.0 External Enclosure, Seagate ST31000528AS 1TB 32MB Buffer...

www.goharddrive.com

I suspect they are mainly server pulls (when they say "renewed"); but "manufacturer recertified" is also available. Some vendors reset the SMART counters, but goHardDrive doesn't so you will see actual SMART data such as power on hours.

 

[Shmee]

The 2nd drive listed at goHardDrive sounds like a pretty good deal. The 14TB WD Ultrastar DC. https://www.goharddrive.com/WD-Ultrastar-DC-HC520-WUH721414ALE600-14TB-HDD-p/g01-1496-cr.htm

It says 5 year warranty, would that be through WD or from the site?

 

[biostud]

How much of the data do need to access regularly?
Couldn't you just put it in on external drives and plug them in if needed?

 

[Shmee]

How much of the data do need to access regularly?
Couldn't you just put it in on external drives and plug them in if needed?

External drives for backups should be done in addition to a NAS. But IMO they work together, both should be done. NAS is great for image backup and restore tasks, VMs, hosting servers etc...ad depending on hardware and network infrastructure, usually faster than most external drives. But having an offline backup on a HDD is great as it is not online, so for in the case of a ransomware attack. Also it is easy to keep a backup drive offsite in storage or safe deposit, so if the place burns down, you don't lose everything.

 

[manly]

The 2nd drive listed at goHardDrive sounds like a pretty good deal. The 14TB WD Ultrastar DC. https://www.goharddrive.com/WD-Ultrastar-DC-HC520-WUH721414ALE600-14TB-HDD-p/g01-1496-cr.htm

It says 5 year warranty, would that be through WD or from the site?

I think the warranty would come from the seller. If it's truly a "manufacturer recertified" drive, it might be covered by WD (or Seagate).

HC520 is one of WDC's earliest He-filled models, so expect a lot of power on hours.
HC530 was also recently on sale from another vendor, but OOS now. ServerPartDeals provides just a 2 year warranty, and the SMART counters will be reset:

Refurbished: 14TB Western Digital Ultrastar 7.2K RPM SATA 3.5" Hard Drives $117.20 + Free Shipping

ServerPartDeals has select 14TB Western Digital Ultrastar 7.2K RPM SATA 3.5" Hard Drives (Manufacturer Recertified) on sale for $117.22 each. Shipping is free. Thanks to Community Member T ...

slickdeals.net

Caveat emptor.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

If your data footprint is only 3TB, do you really need more than one NAS? (Or two for a backup...)

Do you really need to archive 3TB of Linux ISOs? (Wouldn't it make more sense to just keep the 3-4 latest for the distro you use?)

I've got a trio of 8TB in a mdm stripe+parity array and back it up to Crashplan. Way cheaper/easier than managing multiple boxes, IMHO.

 

[VirtualLarry]

"You can store your life on it."

 

[dave_the_nerd]

"You can store your life on it."

Yeah, but, as we like to say at my office; "What problem are you trying to solve?"

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Over the years, I've had RAID5 arrays of 4x [same-size HDDs]. Then I started using DrivePool software for my server. Sooner or later, I'll need to upgrade part of my network to 10Gb Ethernet, a specification that VirtualLarry included. At this stage in my life, I'll compromise speed for simplicity.

Anyway -- I merged my Win2012 server system with an HTPC I was resurrecting to use with my new Smart TV. I wanted fresh hard disks, since the ones I had were running non-stop for 7 years. I had two spare HDDs in anti-stat wrap -- these were all Hitachi or HGST NAS drives. I bought a couple more, and they weren't "new", even for being in resealed anti-stat bags.

I discovered that there are tons of high-capacity NAS drives for sale which had been pulled from server farms, refurbished, and re-warrantied based on the "power-on-hours" accumulated in the Smart data. Some of these drives had 0 power-on-hours or some value less than a few months, so they were warrantied accordingly -- some with 5 year warranty. The longer the warranty, the higher the used HDD price.

My Hitachi/HGST's were 3TB drives. I don't mix sizes in my drivepool, although I can, and probably will do so later if I add higher-capacity disks. I was able to find some HGST "He" 8TB drives for reasonable prices in comparison to new. Didn't buy any, but the possibilities were noted.

For this resulting "Media PC backup server", I've been loading *.MP4, *.WMV, *.*ISO and other playable file formats onto my drivepool. While I have (what I might think are) a ton of movies and DVR captures, I'm still using just over 2TB of storage on a 12TB drivepool. So it really doesn't make sense for me to buy even a couple 8TB drives unless I am planning a more extensive project, a NAS or PC-server of some sort.

 

[mxnerd]

3TB of Linux ISOs

I also have several flavors (over 10) of Linux + NAS ISOs on my system, but it's under 100GB. Only keep latest 2 versions of the same distro.

 

[tcsenter]

Clean that archive up! Mine is getting unwieldy as well. Hey the city here contracts a recycler company to come around picking up scrap metal, electronics, among other stuff. They do it twice per year. Announced with a flyer stuck to garage doors on Thursday they would be coming Monday (yesterday). I got rid of a bunch of stuff about six years ago, but not enough. And acquired more since then.

I bit the bullet and went through some stuff, asked the hard questions like 'I haven't used this in 15 years, doesn't that increase the likelihood that the 'event' I'm saving it for might happen in the future?' NO

Put enough stuff at the street to have nearly filled a short bed pickup to the rail. Wondering if they thought I was a business or something. Supposed to be for residential only. Feels pretty good don't regret a thing! And less nagging too is a motivator.

You cahn doo eet!

 

[aigomorla]

I only use HGST Helium drives now.
I only get the refurbs tho... as i have had great luck on them.
I always have 2 fresh drives after SMART tested on standby in static bag incase one dies.
I always use at least Raid-Z2 drive redundancy or do a straight up Raid-10 incase of drive failure.
When i can buy 3-4 refurb drives for the price of 1 new drive, and the chances of me losing more then 2 drives on 1 setting without losing the entire PC i would need to hit the devil's lottery, and then i would probably have bigger things to worry about like the server room caught on fire as a result from it.

That is just me tho... and my NAS to server to main enterprise class switch is on a 10gbe backplane, so i can pull whatever i need onto another server at 10gbe speeds which is a gift from heavens above.