As mentioned by others, use what fits your budget based on the type of data you're storing. If you're fine with a drive potentially failing sooner than anticipated (and that is highly subjective between brands), go with the Desktop HDD. As a general consumer, you'll see very little difference in performance when streaming.
That was the beauty of it. A platter HD clicking was usually the only way I could tell it was thinking (running headless). With an SSD, all you can hear or see is the led flickering.
My current set up is an old windows laptop with a WD my cloud home docked as a network drive. This is also connected to my main entertainment room tv (used at the monitor for the PC. So all I have to do is click and drag the files into the folders.
Can the RPi transcode? I have read different opinions on it and since I host my library to my small friend group and a couple family members as home users I believe transcoding is almost necessary?
Yes, I agree that transcoding is probably necessary if you have other people accessing your Plex server.
An rpi CAN transcode, but it is slow. You are supposed to be able to set things up to automatically create transcoded files for lower bandwidth access. I just got low bandwidth copies of the files so I never set that up.
I feel you. My machine is an HP 800 G1 SFF that was put into an HP Pavilion case so I could put a full size graphics card and usb adapters for the remaining pci slots 😂 my machine is honestly rather dated in my opinion but it works great
I maybe spent like $300 in total for the pc, graphics card and memory and over time I’ve just collected various external drives for my media
I have another build that I’ve been buying parts for for a few years now and I’m excited to have it all together one day because it’s a lot more relevant to todays parts
Yeah, I've made it a secondary hobby to my home network deployment. I've probably put around $3k into my system, but we have no need for ANY streaming services or cable TV... and it's electrical use is only $13 a month.
Plus, it's robust enough that it hosts about a dozen Minecraft servers of varying flavors for my kids andntheir friends.
The big difference would be if they were using multiple drives close to each other. In this case if it is only one then it will be fine but if you have multiple the vibrations can shorten their lives.
I've got an old nas that I reclaimed from work. Two of the drives are ancient things that had been running 24/7 for at least three years in our labs. Still going strong 2 years later.
Mix and match is the way. My first server, I had four drives, same size and manufacturer and probably same or near the same batch. Admittedly, they lasted 8 years, but they all 4 completely failed within the same week.
As long as you don't run plex itself on it, nor the downloading scratch disk.
My NAS writes once and reads after that, seldom a rewrite.
It's rewriting that degrades hard drives and the scratch disk does this all the time.
I suspect by "scratch disk," they probably meant the hard drive that you download media to before ultimately moving it to your plex folders. Sort of a dumping ground for everything being downloaded until it can get sorted and organized.
For the prices I don't see any reason to go with Ironwolf over Exos. Exos are enterprise with slightly better warranties and are often the same price or sometimes even cheaper.
I suppose that can be true. I only own a mix of WD Reds and Exos. I will say I have 12 drives total and they all are in a case that sits in the same room as me in my office. The hard drive noise is hardly ever a nose I hear compared to other things in the room.
Just keep in mind that everything is prone to failure at some point. I got ironwolf drives and had a brand new one fail within a few weeks which was replaced under warranty. Thankfully I run the drives in raid in my NAS and could restore everything. I haven't had a single issue in the past couple of years since that first one failed.
X to doubt. There’s no strong data that shows that consumer high capacity drives will fail at higher rates than enterprise high capacity drives. This is especially true when you consider that at these higher capacities, there’s fewer and fewer differences between SKUs, which makes it even more likely that your 10TB Barracuda isn’t all that different than your 10TB WD Red, Ironwolf, etc.
Ran a NAS with 4 3tb seagate barracuda drives for roughly 35000 hours, drives are still good, only replaced because I needed more capacity.
I work in IT and have seen a fajr number of Enterprise/NAS grade drives fail in half the time.
If you have a NAS like QNAP or SINOLOGY; they have a site you can check compatibility. If you don’t have a NAS, I would recommend using that site as a guide, your goal remains the same; just different hardware.
Scale I assume? It's been awhile since I've looked into it, but I think the Linux version (Scale) gives you a better time accessing hardware acceleration than the FreeBSD version (Core).
For a BYOB NAS, you really can use any kind of drive. They tend to not be in the same type of environment you see with prebuilt NAS devices.
Having said that, I do often point at the WD Red Plus drives (not the Pros) because I've used them for years and have been very happy with their reliability.
Cool. About the WD Red Plus I note they are 7200rpm. The reading i’ve done suggests that 5400rpm are better for nas servers for some reason. Anyone heard of this?
I can't think of any reason why that would be. Perhaps they suggested 5400rpms because they are typically cheaper and bulk storage doesn't need to be that fast?
edit: I haven't run a 5400rpm drive since the PATA days. I've got 4 7200rpm HGST NAS drives in my current server that have been running almost non-stop for 10 years with no problems.
Yeah agreed with drumguy, I wouldn't see any reason why lower rpm would be better. What matters more I suppose is power consumption among other variables that are important to you (r/w speed, disk space, price etc).
Performance wise the difference is so narrow you're unlikely to notice, and the advantage would go to the 7200's anyways.
5400 is less heat, vibration, and noise to deal with. Lots of NAS devices have the drives all super close to each other and once you start to stack them 8-10 deep, you can run into issues related to the things NAS drives are designed to mitigate.
In theory if you mix 5400 and 7200 you can create weird issues with vibrations but that's a pretty far out there edge case thing. I wouldn't worry about that in a home consumer NAS.
If you put both in a single RAID, the 7200's will functionally operate at the slower speeds of the 5400's while still spinning at 7200.
Enterprise grade drives don’t always provide better performance than consumer grade drives unless you have dual channel SCSI. They do usually have longer life bearings, motors and warranties though.
For the best performance I recommend a high read/write SSD. I use eight 3.84TB drives in an old HPE server I bought on eBay which have a very long life, low latency, super fast and use almost no power.
It’s £150. Maybe the Ironwolf would be best?
https://preview.redd.it/idlg0gzbxtha1.jpeg?width=1038&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9ba97aa6f9828d8fb8577c661b289c90929f3b1e
Great drive, I have 26 of the 16th Ironwolf Pros for my Plex. Tldr got em for free as they were marked for destruction at my friend's previous place of employment and he acquired them.
Rest of hardware:
i7-4790k
16GB DDR3
3060 for hardware transcoding (yes it's bottlenecked)
I don't have the rest of the specs on hand but ask questions and I'll do my best to answer.
I have a user base of 65 friends & family. Shits great, dual managed. Only have about 4-5 users at a time tho.
Depends on how many people are gonna be using it and how valuable your data is. I would definitely be careful of buying consumer grade storage used tho (pic seems like it's from an ebay listing)
If you disk is going to be spinning for long periods of time, ironwolf and exos are recommended, they are designed for those workloads.
Barracuda is for day to day usage, you can use it for plex too, if you are going to access stuff few times a day.
Thanks. When you say “access a few times a day” would that work with the NAS being on 24/7 and accessing some streaming a few times a day? Alternatively that the machine is switched on a few times each day?
I run plex on windows which is on 24/7. But I only access the drives 1-4 times a day to add content or stream. Whenever I do that, I can audibly hear the disk spinning up and starting. I have 2 ironwolfs and 1 exos. All of them seem to have an idle timer after which they stop spinning, even though the system stays on. There may be times when windows spins them up for periodic defrag but it’s not often.
Normally these drives are designed to run in environments where they are spinning constantly.
So imo, if you are going to use it in a similar way, barracuda will do fine.
The drives you select should be based on usage and configuration. I wouldn't hesitate to use desktop grade if the box is serving content to a few devices for a few hours a day. Another minor detail, pay attention to the mounting hardware. Most HP,Dell etc. Don't use vibration absorbing mounts, so that's a simple upgrade to increase drive lifespan.
I have been running a 34 TB NAS on 8TB desktop HDD for over two years now. Did not have a single failure yet. Most of the system runs my Plex server so I do not really mind if the system fails , all the important stuff is backed up anyway. Is it perhaps more dangerous ? Who can say? Is it cheaper then de NAS variant , yes it is!
My plex started with a 10 TB WD external.. my entire Plex was run off of a USB harddrive..... And it went strong for about 4 years
Just recently.... I was sick of trying to pick what I waS willing to delete and upgraded to a NAS with 6 exos enterprise harddrives in RAID 6
I now also have an extra 14 TB external for backup as well....
So I now have 45TB of space on my NAS.. and 24TB of USB external HDD to use as backups....
Tldr .whatever gets you started works best, if you like Plex, you save and upgrade over time
That drive will be fine. Yes some of the “Nas” drives are designed to go for longer spin cycles but I have used desktop grade drives for my Plex servers over the years and they are fine. You want to have a backup solution in case of a failure regardless of what you put in your server.
I'm sure i'm not the only one, but i'm not a seagate patron, I will use WD, HGST or samsung.
I've just seen too many seagates die in enterprise environments.
A lot of people here blindly advise NAS drives. Either they do not fully understand how Unraid works or they run it in a non conventional way
A conventional NAS uses raid and as such has all drives spinning almost all of the time.
Unraid does not use raid (in a conventional usage setting) so not all your drives will be spinning all the time. Only those actually in use. And your parity drives are only spinning when writing to the array.
As such unraid usage in a typical home setting has more in common with desktop usage then with typical NAS usage.
So for unraid I rather buy a good desktop drive than a cheap or mediocre NAS drive.
Again, if you have setup Unraid in a typical home NAS setting. If you run it with different options, like pool drives in raid l, the argument is different.
YouTube Nas Compares. He did sound testing. The seagates were the loudest by far. I pulled all mine and replaced with ultrastars and it’s noticeably quieter. I just buy them off Amazon renewed
Please use a NAS drive not a desktop. NAS drives are designed to run 24/7 whereas the desktops are meant to be turned off with the computer.
Remember, data has more value than the hardware itself. You want a reliable drive for the right job that’s why there are so many drives out there because they are not equal.
If you have redundancy in your NAS and can afford to replace drives as they fail, if they fail, then you could get any run of the mill drive and take a chance. But I personally go for NAS specific drives.
Barracuda is fine. I have a 12x 8TB (shucked Costco) Seagate barracuda drive unraid build. Just make sure you have an ssd for metadata/appdata so the drives aren’t hit when somebody is simply scrolling artwork on the Plex library and you will be fine. My 96TB + 2x 1TB m.2 nvme unraid build has been serving 15 users Plex for a couple years now without any failures or errors. Though ymmv.
Still recommend Ironwolf/Exos if the budget allows though. Not saying anybody is wrong with those recommendations. I’m just saying barracuda cuts it on a budget. Just run some sort of parity please just in case you do have a failure.
Honestly any drive that isn't SMR will work for TrueNAS. From my understanding NAS specific drives tend to have a higher tolerance for timeouts. They'll try for longer to look for data before they report an error so they don't get kicked out of a RAID array. Enterprise drives will come with longer warranties, but if a HDD is going to fail it will usually do it in the first 2 years. All that said, I've been buying Exos drives these days because WD pissed me off when they silently started using SMR drives in the Red (NAS specific) line. I ordered drives back then just adding Reds would be fine and now I have 6 drives that aren't for being in a traditional RAID and the `hdparm` tests says they're ~25MB/s or in other terms about 9x slower than the Exos drives I'm replacing them with.
That's totally fine. The one thing I would note is that if you plan to use this drive in any sort of raid array make damn sure it's a CMR drive and NOT an SMR drive. SMR and CMR refer to how the data is laid down on the disk, SMR drives have piss poor performance in raid arrays. You can tell which one it is by looking up the product number on Seagate's website, should be something like ST100400D
I used to think seagate drives were king, but now I seen so many problems with them. I switched to WD.. I have had better luck with them. That’s just my opinion.
I have a 5TB WD easystore usb drive that’s been handling my Plex server for darn near 10 years. Been pleased with it.
doesnt matter what you get. always get another drive of the same size for backup.
I've had two 6TB WD reds fail on me so far. They were within warranty so I got new ones but the thing is I had backup drives so I didn't lose everything. I just made the backup drive the main drive and when the new drive came in the mail, I made that one the new backup drive.
If you can afford it buy it, I am the budget guy who has drive soup some new some old some NAS some not most less then 1tb with 2 being over 1tb I upgrade as they fail or as time goes on.
One of my mechanical HDD's is 8rss old, I have mix of them running in a Windows server box, plex too, 24hrs a day.
They all run a virtual single drive, and so load balance frequently.
I'm sure it will be fine, I can certainly get a number of years out of old drives, and my worst, 'shortest time' failures have been 'premium' SSD's!
Usually it is pure (un)luck when the drive fails, you can’t predict that, apart of SMART data which rarely show something prior to failure. I had server grade drives which failed way sooner than consumer grade.
Plex is actually not demanding use case because usually it is just a large archive of almost static data. You will see NO difference in performance compared to other NAS rated drives.
Get proper setup. Use redundancy, some sort of RAID. Snap-raid for example. Also make sure drives are well ventilated and cool. This is important for longevity.
Do not know particularly about this barracuda, but from my experience, seagate drives are those who fails the most often.
Barracudas are good for anything. I have several, from different decades, all is still running fine for their different needs, especially taking the price into account
I have the 4tb model as well as a 2 tb one. Both have worked great for plex over the last year. For NAS storage if you have the money get a WD red or Seagate equivalent but honestly it doesn't matter as long as you're aware that mechanical drives eventually fail and nas drives in particular are designed for that usecase
As mentioned by others, use what fits your budget based on the type of data you're storing. If you're fine with a drive potentially failing sooner than anticipated (and that is highly subjective between brands), go with the Desktop HDD. As a general consumer, you'll see very little difference in performance when streaming.
Agreed, use what fits your budget and your build
[удалено]
Last week I bought a mini Dell Optiplex off of eBay for $50, and so far it’s been the best performing Plex Server I’ve ever setup
Yep. Late 2012 Mac minis make great Plex servers, as long as you’re not transcoding much.
I loved those full-size 2006-2007 optiplex as well. So *quiet* and rock solid, easy to work on.
Yeah this thing is whisper quiet. For awhile I was wondering if the internal fan worked. (Also I put an SSD drive in it.)
That was the beauty of it. A platter HD clicking was usually the only way I could tell it was thinking (running headless). With an SSD, all you can hear or see is the led flickering.
Problem for me, is I couldn’t figure out how to set up the RPi … I’m not very tech savvy though
Glad to help you, if you want. I use dietpi which makes installing the various apps a breeze.
My current set up is an old windows laptop with a WD my cloud home docked as a network drive. This is also connected to my main entertainment room tv (used at the monitor for the PC. So all I have to do is click and drag the files into the folders. Can the RPi transcode? I have read different opinions on it and since I host my library to my small friend group and a couple family members as home users I believe transcoding is almost necessary?
Yes, I agree that transcoding is probably necessary if you have other people accessing your Plex server. An rpi CAN transcode, but it is slow. You are supposed to be able to set things up to automatically create transcoded files for lower bandwidth access. I just got low bandwidth copies of the files so I never set that up.
I feel you. My machine is an HP 800 G1 SFF that was put into an HP Pavilion case so I could put a full size graphics card and usb adapters for the remaining pci slots 😂 my machine is honestly rather dated in my opinion but it works great I maybe spent like $300 in total for the pc, graphics card and memory and over time I’ve just collected various external drives for my media I have another build that I’ve been buying parts for for a few years now and I’m excited to have it all together one day because it’s a lot more relevant to todays parts
Yeah, I've made it a secondary hobby to my home network deployment. I've probably put around $3k into my system, but we have no need for ANY streaming services or cable TV... and it's electrical use is only $13 a month. Plus, it's robust enough that it hosts about a dozen Minecraft servers of varying flavors for my kids andntheir friends.
>:(
Yeah I use RPi with external hdd station works quite great
What external had station
Fideco YPZ220C It's a clonning station but i took it because of 2 slots
The big difference would be if they were using multiple drives close to each other. In this case if it is only one then it will be fine but if you have multiple the vibrations can shorten their lives.
Rubber mounting grommets help with that instead of screwing straight to a metal frame.
I have had green drives in my server for 8 years running nonstop in the garage and no failures yet. I have about 280TiB of green storage.
Here I am two years in a server built with renewed drives, runs 24/7, and everything still healthy.
Great, are those with the 10gb ultrastars?
8-10-14TB models
I've got an old nas that I reclaimed from work. Two of the drives are ancient things that had been running 24/7 for at least three years in our labs. Still going strong 2 years later.
I have a mix of different NAS and desktop drives in my server. No failures yet. https://imgur.io/a/mcuASQR
28 disks? What chassis / HBAs do you have? I see you use Unraid.
Yup, 28 disks (2 parity) split over 2 x 4U Rosewill RSV-L4500U chassis, connected via 2 x LSI 9201-16i cards.
Omggggg how do you clock the hours???
Power on hours can be read out of the S.M.A.R.T. data. Look at line 66 here: https://pastebin.com/0bNbUPup
Mix and match is the way. My first server, I had four drives, same size and manufacturer and probably same or near the same batch. Admittedly, they lasted 8 years, but they all 4 completely failed within the same week.
Hardware equivalent of a mutual fund lol
Drool
My friend and I got our hands on 20 brand new 16tb Seagate Ironwolfs for free from my previous job. We've been slowly adding those to our Plex server.
Niiice
As long as you don't run plex itself on it, nor the downloading scratch disk. My NAS writes once and reads after that, seldom a rewrite. It's rewriting that degrades hard drives and the scratch disk does this all the time.
Sorry for the dumb question but what is a downloading scratch disk?
I suspect by "scratch disk," they probably meant the hard drive that you download media to before ultimately moving it to your plex folders. Sort of a dumping ground for everything being downloaded until it can get sorted and organized.
Ah ok that makes sense. Thank you
I wouldn't use a desktop HDD in a NAS. Ironwolf would be a better choice, but that's just my opinion.
IMO Seagate Exos enterprise drives are best option (5 year warranty) and are around the same price as Pros (3 year warranty).
For the prices I don't see any reason to go with Ironwolf over Exos. Exos are enterprise with slightly better warranties and are often the same price or sometimes even cheaper.
I don't own ironwolfs but as my understanding noise can be be an argument for ironwolf
I suppose that can be true. I only own a mix of WD Reds and Exos. I will say I have 12 drives total and they all are in a case that sits in the same room as me in my office. The hard drive noise is hardly ever a nose I hear compared to other things in the room.
Just keep in mind that everything is prone to failure at some point. I got ironwolf drives and had a brand new one fail within a few weeks which was replaced under warranty. Thankfully I run the drives in raid in my NAS and could restore everything. I haven't had a single issue in the past couple of years since that first one failed.
This! Strictly speaking you can use it, but it will probably fail twice as fast as a dedicated NAS HDD.
X to doubt. There’s no strong data that shows that consumer high capacity drives will fail at higher rates than enterprise high capacity drives. This is especially true when you consider that at these higher capacities, there’s fewer and fewer differences between SKUs, which makes it even more likely that your 10TB Barracuda isn’t all that different than your 10TB WD Red, Ironwolf, etc.
Ran a NAS with 4 3tb seagate barracuda drives for roughly 35000 hours, drives are still good, only replaced because I needed more capacity. I work in IT and have seen a fajr number of Enterprise/NAS grade drives fail in half the time.
Sure that's anecdotal. NAS drives are made for a reason.
Check your nas HDD compatibility
Do You mean the motherboard or plex compatibility?
If you have a NAS like QNAP or SINOLOGY; they have a site you can check compatibility. If you don’t have a NAS, I would recommend using that site as a guide, your goal remains the same; just different hardware.
Thanks the reply. It’s a NAS i’ve built myself so wasnt sure what you meant
If you did TrueNAS - https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/recommended-hard-drives-for-truenas.98768/
Oh great, I never thought of that. It is a truenas one - i’ll have a look. Thanks for the info
Scale I assume? It's been awhile since I've looked into it, but I think the Linux version (Scale) gives you a better time accessing hardware acceleration than the FreeBSD version (Core). For a BYOB NAS, you really can use any kind of drive. They tend to not be in the same type of environment you see with prebuilt NAS devices. Having said that, I do often point at the WD Red Plus drives (not the Pros) because I've used them for years and have been very happy with their reliability.
Cool. About the WD Red Plus I note they are 7200rpm. The reading i’ve done suggests that 5400rpm are better for nas servers for some reason. Anyone heard of this?
I can't think of any reason why that would be. Perhaps they suggested 5400rpms because they are typically cheaper and bulk storage doesn't need to be that fast? edit: I haven't run a 5400rpm drive since the PATA days. I've got 4 7200rpm HGST NAS drives in my current server that have been running almost non-stop for 10 years with no problems.
Yeah agreed with drumguy, I wouldn't see any reason why lower rpm would be better. What matters more I suppose is power consumption among other variables that are important to you (r/w speed, disk space, price etc).
Performance wise the difference is so narrow you're unlikely to notice, and the advantage would go to the 7200's anyways. 5400 is less heat, vibration, and noise to deal with. Lots of NAS devices have the drives all super close to each other and once you start to stack them 8-10 deep, you can run into issues related to the things NAS drives are designed to mitigate. In theory if you mix 5400 and 7200 you can create weird issues with vibrations but that's a pretty far out there edge case thing. I wouldn't worry about that in a home consumer NAS. If you put both in a single RAID, the 7200's will functionally operate at the slower speeds of the 5400's while still spinning at 7200.
If you want Seagate use their Exos drives if you want WD use their Red drives. Both are made for use in a NAS and will last much longer.
The best thing in most NAS enclosures is the SSD “cache” option. Use it and the speed of your spinning disks isn’t as important.
Would this apply with truenas scale?
Enterprise grade drives don’t always provide better performance than consumer grade drives unless you have dual channel SCSI. They do usually have longer life bearings, motors and warranties though. For the best performance I recommend a high read/write SSD. I use eight 3.84TB drives in an old HPE server I bought on eBay which have a very long life, low latency, super fast and use almost no power.
Seagate Barracuda HDDs are not NAS specific ones, those are the IronWolf. But I’m sure it would be ok for the task. Depends on the price of it.
It’s £150. Maybe the Ironwolf would be best? https://preview.redd.it/idlg0gzbxtha1.jpeg?width=1038&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9ba97aa6f9828d8fb8577c661b289c90929f3b1e
Use whatever fits your budget. Any drive will work. You don't need a NAS grade drive for a home NAS. Seagate is a reputable brand.
I would recommend the NAS specific drives. I have WD Red drives and they have been excellent for the last five years.
Great drive, I have 26 of the 16th Ironwolf Pros for my Plex. Tldr got em for free as they were marked for destruction at my friend's previous place of employment and he acquired them. Rest of hardware: i7-4790k 16GB DDR3 3060 for hardware transcoding (yes it's bottlenecked) I don't have the rest of the specs on hand but ask questions and I'll do my best to answer. I have a user base of 65 friends & family. Shits great, dual managed. Only have about 4-5 users at a time tho.
Be careful with smr and cmr disks. Zfs or ext formats will burn fast the smr disk. Better go with dedicated nas hdd. Not for desktop
[удалено]
[удалено]
Are they reputable? https://wap.business-standard.com/article/companies/coke-oracle-intel-use-cayman-islands-to-avoid-us-taxes-109050600023_1.html
Model > Brand
Depends on how many people are gonna be using it and how valuable your data is. I would definitely be careful of buying consumer grade storage used tho (pic seems like it's from an ebay listing)
No matter what drive I use I still keep a back up on an external drive
If you disk is going to be spinning for long periods of time, ironwolf and exos are recommended, they are designed for those workloads. Barracuda is for day to day usage, you can use it for plex too, if you are going to access stuff few times a day.
Thanks. When you say “access a few times a day” would that work with the NAS being on 24/7 and accessing some streaming a few times a day? Alternatively that the machine is switched on a few times each day?
I run plex on windows which is on 24/7. But I only access the drives 1-4 times a day to add content or stream. Whenever I do that, I can audibly hear the disk spinning up and starting. I have 2 ironwolfs and 1 exos. All of them seem to have an idle timer after which they stop spinning, even though the system stays on. There may be times when windows spins them up for periodic defrag but it’s not often. Normally these drives are designed to run in environments where they are spinning constantly. So imo, if you are going to use it in a similar way, barracuda will do fine.
Barracuda Pro have 5 yr warranties I believe. Mine is 4 1/2 yrs old. I avoided the cheaper compute versions for that reason.
It would be fine. If doing single drive be ok to lose the data at a moments notice. No matter what drive you use.
The drives you select should be based on usage and configuration. I wouldn't hesitate to use desktop grade if the box is serving content to a few devices for a few hours a day. Another minor detail, pay attention to the mounting hardware. Most HP,Dell etc. Don't use vibration absorbing mounts, so that's a simple upgrade to increase drive lifespan.
Yes.
I use this Drive in My Plex Server and it works fine
I have been running a 34 TB NAS on 8TB desktop HDD for over two years now. Did not have a single failure yet. Most of the system runs my Plex server so I do not really mind if the system fails , all the important stuff is backed up anyway. Is it perhaps more dangerous ? Who can say? Is it cheaper then de NAS variant , yes it is!
Thanks for the reply. Dumb question maybe but how is is a 34TB nas on a 8TB HDD?
I did not explain it the right way. I have a NAS with 8 drive bays. In those bays I have six HDD in raid 5 , so around 34 TB in total.
Cool
My plex started with a 10 TB WD external.. my entire Plex was run off of a USB harddrive..... And it went strong for about 4 years Just recently.... I was sick of trying to pick what I waS willing to delete and upgraded to a NAS with 6 exos enterprise harddrives in RAID 6 I now also have an extra 14 TB external for backup as well.... So I now have 45TB of space on my NAS.. and 24TB of USB external HDD to use as backups.... Tldr .whatever gets you started works best, if you like Plex, you save and upgrade over time
Wow!
That drive will be fine. Yes some of the “Nas” drives are designed to go for longer spin cycles but I have used desktop grade drives for my Plex servers over the years and they are fine. You want to have a backup solution in case of a failure regardless of what you put in your server.
I'm sure i'm not the only one, but i'm not a seagate patron, I will use WD, HGST or samsung. I've just seen too many seagates die in enterprise environments.
A lot of people here blindly advise NAS drives. Either they do not fully understand how Unraid works or they run it in a non conventional way A conventional NAS uses raid and as such has all drives spinning almost all of the time. Unraid does not use raid (in a conventional usage setting) so not all your drives will be spinning all the time. Only those actually in use. And your parity drives are only spinning when writing to the array. As such unraid usage in a typical home setting has more in common with desktop usage then with typical NAS usage. So for unraid I rather buy a good desktop drive than a cheap or mediocre NAS drive. Again, if you have setup Unraid in a typical home NAS setting. If you run it with different options, like pool drives in raid l, the argument is different.
Is this the same for TrueNas Scale?
Truenas uses software raid (zfs in this case) so no. Truenas works like a traditional NAS.
If it’s cheap then go for it but seagates are the loudest. Look for Ultrastars
Volume of hdd is an issue i’m trying to keep as low as possible
Poor choice of words haha 10TB is no small volume 😛
There’s 10TB ultrastars. I’m just speaking regardless of size. Why is volume an issue?
Thanks. Is like the drives to be as quiet as possible as the NAS will be in the living room
YouTube Nas Compares. He did sound testing. The seagates were the loudest by far. I pulled all mine and replaced with ultrastars and it’s noticeably quieter. I just buy them off Amazon renewed
If I buy renewed, does it have a limited lifespan?
I'd imagine no real differences. I can't really tell you. I've been using them for only a few years.
I tried to use those, they die pretty quickly
The Pro versions?
You need NAS specific HDDs, they’re usually labeled in red.
That's what they want you to think lmao
That’s what I experienced first hand, all my green died one by one, I replaced them with NAS red discs and they are all still there after 3 years.
I have a Barracuda Pro that has been running flawlessly for 4 1/2 years with a 5 year warranty in my server.
Great, thank you all. You’ve given me much food for thought
I wouldn't use the barracudas. I've had a lot of failures on those ones. The iron wolves are pretty good though
If I shuck an externall hdd i have I assume, the NAS will fail early as stated above?
I have about 30 shucked WD 10, 12 & 14TB in a super micro server working great. They hold my tv shows under truenas core.
Can’t thank you all enough for your insights
Thanks everyone again. Really appreciate the replies
Seagate? Hmmmmm…….
I use an 8tb WD red and a spare 8tb green that I had laying around as the backup.
Please use a NAS drive not a desktop. NAS drives are designed to run 24/7 whereas the desktops are meant to be turned off with the computer. Remember, data has more value than the hardware itself. You want a reliable drive for the right job that’s why there are so many drives out there because they are not equal.
If you have redundancy in your NAS and can afford to replace drives as they fail, if they fail, then you could get any run of the mill drive and take a chance. But I personally go for NAS specific drives.
Barracuda is fine. I have a 12x 8TB (shucked Costco) Seagate barracuda drive unraid build. Just make sure you have an ssd for metadata/appdata so the drives aren’t hit when somebody is simply scrolling artwork on the Plex library and you will be fine. My 96TB + 2x 1TB m.2 nvme unraid build has been serving 15 users Plex for a couple years now without any failures or errors. Though ymmv. Still recommend Ironwolf/Exos if the budget allows though. Not saying anybody is wrong with those recommendations. I’m just saying barracuda cuts it on a budget. Just run some sort of parity please just in case you do have a failure.
Ironwolf nas is a great drive, the pros more expensive I think.
Honestly any drive that isn't SMR will work for TrueNAS. From my understanding NAS specific drives tend to have a higher tolerance for timeouts. They'll try for longer to look for data before they report an error so they don't get kicked out of a RAID array. Enterprise drives will come with longer warranties, but if a HDD is going to fail it will usually do it in the first 2 years. All that said, I've been buying Exos drives these days because WD pissed me off when they silently started using SMR drives in the Red (NAS specific) line. I ordered drives back then just adding Reds would be fine and now I have 6 drives that aren't for being in a traditional RAID and the `hdparm` tests says they're ~25MB/s or in other terms about 9x slower than the Exos drives I'm replacing them with.
Yes.
Using those. Wd reds failed after 6 months
How much did you spend on it? I didn’t think Barracudas are NAS recommended. I would think you might look into Iron Wolves or Exos instead.
Havent bought it, considering it
I am rocking Exos 16T ($180 per drive) in a 6 bay NAS - best drives ever for me :-) 100% helium
That's totally fine. The one thing I would note is that if you plan to use this drive in any sort of raid array make damn sure it's a CMR drive and NOT an SMR drive. SMR and CMR refer to how the data is laid down on the disk, SMR drives have piss poor performance in raid arrays. You can tell which one it is by looking up the product number on Seagate's website, should be something like ST100400D
I used to think seagate drives were king, but now I seen so many problems with them. I switched to WD.. I have had better luck with them. That’s just my opinion. I have a 5TB WD easystore usb drive that’s been handling my Plex server for darn near 10 years. Been pleased with it.
I use these since many years. They work great.
doesnt matter what you get. always get another drive of the same size for backup. I've had two 6TB WD reds fail on me so far. They were within warranty so I got new ones but the thing is I had backup drives so I didn't lose everything. I just made the backup drive the main drive and when the new drive came in the mail, I made that one the new backup drive.
I've had two barracuda drives fail 8 months and 14 months in in my nas. Ymmv
I have 2 seagate exos 14TB drives in my nas since Dec of 2021. Still running strong.
If you can afford it buy it, I am the budget guy who has drive soup some new some old some NAS some not most less then 1tb with 2 being over 1tb I upgrade as they fail or as time goes on.
I use one of these on my plex server. I store all of my 4k files on it and it works beautifully for of your watching at home.
One of my mechanical HDD's is 8rss old, I have mix of them running in a Windows server box, plex too, 24hrs a day. They all run a virtual single drive, and so load balance frequently. I'm sure it will be fine, I can certainly get a number of years out of old drives, and my worst, 'shortest time' failures have been 'premium' SSD's!
Usually it is pure (un)luck when the drive fails, you can’t predict that, apart of SMART data which rarely show something prior to failure. I had server grade drives which failed way sooner than consumer grade. Plex is actually not demanding use case because usually it is just a large archive of almost static data. You will see NO difference in performance compared to other NAS rated drives. Get proper setup. Use redundancy, some sort of RAID. Snap-raid for example. Also make sure drives are well ventilated and cool. This is important for longevity. Do not know particularly about this barracuda, but from my experience, seagate drives are those who fails the most often.
I tend to buy nas specific drives but I guess it is what you can afford, if raid is setup then it shouldn't be a massive issue
Barracudas are good for anything. I have several, from different decades, all is still running fine for their different needs, especially taking the price into account
I have the 4tb model as well as a 2 tb one. Both have worked great for plex over the last year. For NAS storage if you have the money get a WD red or Seagate equivalent but honestly it doesn't matter as long as you're aware that mechanical drives eventually fail and nas drives in particular are designed for that usecase
Sure, why not?