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How bad of an idea is it to use computing HDDs in a DIY NAS? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 4 months ago by theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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The title says basically everything but let me elaborate.

Given the recent news about the sold out of harddrives for the current year and possibly also the next years (tomshardware article) I try to buy the HDDs I want to use for the next few years earlier than expected.

I am on a really tight budget so I really don't want to overspend. I have an old tower PC laying around which I would like to turn into a DIY NAS probably with TrueNAS Scale.

I don't expect high loads, it will only be 1-2 users with medium writing and reading.

In this article from howtogeek the author talks about the differences and I get it, but a lot of the people commenting seem to be in a similar position as I am. Not really a lot of read-write load, only a few users, and many argue computing HDDs are fine for this use case.

Possibilites I came up with until now:

Buy two pricey Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red HDDs and put them in RAID1
Buy three cheaper Seagate Barracuda or WD Blue and put two in RAID1 and keep one as a backup if (or should I say when?) one of the used drives fails.

I am thankful for every comment or experience you might have with this topic!

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[–] sockenklaus@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Both WD Blues and Seagate Barracudas are (often) CMR.

I don't know about WD Blue but modern Barracudas (not Pro!) use SMR.

But anyway, I wanted to add a thought regarding SMR vs. CMR: It's true that SMR has inferior write speed compared to CMR and that you can experience the effect even after writing a few gigabytes. I don't know if I would call it unbelievably slow though: When writing to SMR drives, I experienced write speeds around 30 MiB/sec which is slow but considering you may be writing to a NAS that is only connected to a 1 Gbps network it is only around 30 % of the write speed you may reach with proper drives. It's slow but it gets the job done when you're not in a hurry and have a tight budget.

Also there are other possible bottlenecks you may encounter: I for example built my homeserver with used enterprise drives in mind and therefore opted for software RAID 6 for double the fail-safety. Turns out that writing to that array is so heavy on my servers CPU that it throttles writing to almost the same point as SMR drives which defeats the whole point of using enterprise drives. 🤣 This may not be a problem for OP because they wrote about buying 2 or 3 drives but everyone should always consider the whole system and not single components.

[–] Clearwater@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

For some reason, there's a weird 8TB 5640 RPM Blue that's CMR. I have one.

Dunno about the rest for sure but I think they're all SMR (except maybe 1TB).