Yeah, my advice would always be to buy used enterprise-grade drives with SMART reports. Data center drives get swapped out for minor issues, or just for operating hours with no issues. Plenty of life left in them for home lab use, especially if you're running something like TrueNAS with active health monitoring and load balancing.

[–] whats_a_lemmy@midwest.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What's a good place to buy these in small lots? Or does it not matter to use a mismash of individually purchased drives for NAS purposes?

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I usually buy on eBay.

For RAID it's more important to use matched drives, but this is one of the reasons I avoid RAID, it's basically legacy technology with few real benefits. ZFS is better, or btrfs. With ZFS on TrueNAS in particular, drive pools are managed very competently and there's no need to match models or age or anything, with the only caveat being that if drives are mirrored, the size will be limited by the smallest drive. You can even mix drive speeds within a pool, the system will adjust read/write load balancing to meet the drive specs.

Don't use RAID, use a modern drive pooling system.

[–] whats_a_lemmy@midwest.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks!

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 2 points 1 week ago

You're welcome. Just try to get a SMART report before you buy the drive, and do a little reading so you understand what the report is telling you. If you can't get a report beforehand, definitely run smartctl soon after you get it, and get a refund if the condition is unusable or doesn't match the seller's description.

[–] Dultas@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

I'm slowly migrating to used SAS drives since my NAS supports it.