Homelab

WD Reds are great. I have an IronWolf Pro NAS that's amazing, and it has a 5 year warranty which is nice. It's good to look for something with a large cache if you can find it.

WD Reds in a RAIDZ2 pool on FreeBSD, serving Samba.

I’ve been using Seagate Ironwolf Pro’s but have been slowly migrating to Seagate EXO’s when upgrading.

WD Gold 10TB but I miss the HGST Ultrastar days (before WD got them) HGST added something when they took IBM's disk drive business, but something was lost when WD acquired them.

I'm a noob too, but I can tell you that you need to keep in mind the purpose of your NAS. Ask yourself this: am I storing archives that will probably not be accessed much, or am I hosting a filesharing service or streaming or something else that will need a bigger cache and more RPMs? Also try to prioritize CMR over SMR.

When I built my NAS 3 years ago I bought a used SuperMicro MB, a used Xeon CPU, used ECC RAM, and it's still going strong. My WD Gold drives were new of course, but you can find some good deals on used drives too. Just make sure that you take into account not only the hours on the drive but reads, writes, and stop/starts too. Also look at the seller's rep to see if they have a history of reprogramming the ROM to show a false SMART.

Hopefully you are using SMR ram and a ZFS filesystem. TrueNAS is a great OS that uses openZFS and RAIDZ. If you are using lower-end or used NAS drives then consider using more parity drives than if you were to use new, enterprise quality drives.

Currently using WD red plus drives, once I get some financial freedom to expand probably going to switch to ultra stars or seagates unless I can get a good deal on red pros

I use a 250GB Samsung SDD and an external 1TB WD drive.

I've got some 4Tb SAS drives and a 6tb Seagate ironwolf, need to fill out the 6tb pool but new drives aren't cheap here at the moment. 6tb ironwolfs are $250-300 where I am and not sure I want to risk data with old SAS drives from eBay etc.

WD RED for me. My synology ds213+ has been solid with the same drives for last 8 years and still does the job

I have 4x 10 TB WD reds white label I shucked from WD nas boxes.

I also just picked up 2x 20 TB Seagate EXOS drives new for $200 ish on eBay sold by Newegg because I need to very rapidly find a solution for my 18TB unlimited Google drive that is going away in December.

1x3Tb WD Red atm its been on for 6.5 years accordning to the smart tool.

WD Reds

Second vote for serverpartdeals.com. I got a great deal on some recertified 16TB WD Ultrastar drives - 164.99 each at the time.

Yep, WD Red CMR. I've been running with them exclusively and never had any issues.

A typical drive in my setup: 8 years continuous operation, 0 bad sectors. Rock solid:

https://i.imgur.com/YTTN4uq.png

Still running a pair of HGST DeskStar NAS 7200 drives.

They’ve been solid. It’s a shame you can’t get them anymore.

WD blue drives I believe, got them a couple years ago on sale... Some were from enclosures etc

I've got 3 WD reds with 91,500 hours on them each - that's over 10 years.

A good reminder I should update my backups this weekend.

wd ultrastar helium

8x 4TB WD Reds and the 26x Dell 1TB drives that came with my Google Search Appliance.

I have one pool with 3 6TB WD Red Drives and 1 with 3 6TB WD Black drives.

Get the largest NAS certified drives you can afford.

I use whatever is cheapest at the time of buying. I just make sure they’re not SMR.

If you're gonna build for redundancy, avoid WD Red. They use SMR platters and it doesn't play nice with RAID configs. You'd have to get a WD red plus or red pro to get a CMR drive which actually works in a RAID array. You don't have to worry about accidentally getting an SMR drive with ironwolf though since that whole section is Seagate's branding only uses CMR.

WD Reds

11 x 14TB Seagate EXOS drives in a RAID6 with 2 hot spares. Bought from multiple sites over several years.

I have 2 1tb ssd’s for all my vm’s and stuff.

And then I’m using a single 8TB barracuda for movies and media. It’s surprisingly more space than you think, and I’m just in the habit of deleting stuff after I’m done with it.

Went with the barracuda cuz I didn’t plan on using raid and figured it’d be quieter than the ironwolf.

Got 2 NASes (on site/off site). One has WD Red, the other has Seagate Ironwolf. I want to upgrade them to EXOS drives, but they're running well.

4x 1tb critical mx500 drive. In a 2x2 setup so only 2tb of space in 4 drives. That with asnapshot copy to a 2tb nvme.

Really I’m only using like 500 gigs on my nas.

Mostly it depends on the size of your pool and the type.

My TL;DR is that enterprise drives are likely overkill and aren't worth the extra cost (yes I can construct a cornercase where they prevent data loss but you'd need it to happen on multiple disks simultaneously, if you're that worried spend the money on extra backup!). Anything marked RAID or NAS is fine. Don't put anything designed to save energy into a NAS (eg: WD greens).

I'm shocked there's not more people here shucking external drives. https://shucks.top/

+1 for Seagate Exos. Same or better than ironwolf and sometimes cheaper. 20TB for $280 is pretty darn good from newegg for data density.

I've got 10 12tb Seagate EXOS drives in operation right now and have also run small capacity (2-4tb) WD Red and blue and Seagate Barracuda drives. For ssds I run Samsung 870 evos.

I use several Toshiba MG07/08 in 14 TB. Datacenter drives, CMR, Helium filled, not noisy, 5 year warranty, fast, often relatively cheap.

I bought 20+ Recertified Class Western Digital WDC H530 14tb's for 126.99$ each from serverpartsdeals.com over the last six months. Comes with a 2 year warranty, which is about what you would expect a drive to have anyways.

I also have a dozen Ironwolf 12tb's (no pro) which have 3yr warranty, but still, if I had new about the recertified drives then I would've been all over those.

Really its about how much space do you need, how many SATA slots can you fill, and your use for them.

Toshiba N300 / Seagate Exos / Seagate Ironwolf

Working Network Accessible Storage is done by a Virtualized TrueNAS Instance on my ProxMox Host with all Services attached to it through internal networking arrangements or direct access through MountPoints in LXC

The TrueNAS currently has 4TB SSD Storage

Then there's the backup NAS with 12TB HDD Storage for slow Media Storage and Backup of working NAS files.

My Media Streaming is attached to the 12TB NAS while Nextcloud is attached to both, for example.

Been using Toshiba enterprise disks, specifically the 'cloud scale' product lines such as Toshiba MG09

Decent priced, good quality.

None of them have failed me yet.

Synology DS414 with 4 x WD 6tb Reds.switched it all on on 2016. No issues since.

I've had great experiences with HGST, WD, and Seagate. It's less about the brand, and more about the "production run" and models. Backblaze always has an interesting blog yearly about HD failure stats:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/

Sweet! I was wondering the same thing recently! I have two WD Reds that I bought pre-Covid, but the NAS (2 bay net gear) was an end-of-life super cheap discount and I want a way to keep them running….like, can I wipe net gear and reformat the whole thing? Something I keep meaning to tinker with - but the weekend (for example) I’m likely bed ridden. My body is getting destroyed at my day iob -meh.

Many 1,2TB HGST 2,5" 10k RPM SAS drives For backup some WDs out of external cases

The spinny kind. Until they stop go go spinny and then I get new bigger and sometimes better spinny drives.

I have such a smorgasbord of drives. Bunch of 2.5" firecudas 1-2tb, old 1tb drives, thrift store external, shucked 8tb baracudas, new bare disk 8tb barracuda, 4tb HGST NAS, 8tb Ironwolf and more I'm sure.

FWIW, the Ironwolf is really nice and I wish all my drives were them. File transfer speeds are respectable for spinning rust.

In 2013, I bought 12 4TB HGST. I just got my first drive failure last month and I'm going through the process of replacing them all with Seagate Exos X16 16TB just because I got a good deal.

I, typically, just buy whatever has the best price/performance ratio.

I'm in Europe and seeing your us prices just makes me cry :(

I have a synology 1219+ with western digital ironwolf drives in them. They’ve been totally reliable

I bought a bunch of factory recertified WD 16TB drives for way less than new from serverpartdeals.com.

Is shucking still a thing. That is what I did about 3 years ago

A 42-drive (7x RAIDZ2) system consisting of:

• 36x HGST 4TB NAS drives

• 6x Toshiba N300 4TB drives

The best bit of advice I could give is know what your purpose is.

I needed a storage device, I could have gotten away with 2 external drives and manual labour but instead I got swayed by a QNAP that was a hybrid entertainment centre, virtualisation, docker etc.

I tinker so the amount of times I had to rebuild that NAS means I couldn't reliably use it for storage.

I bought a WD cloud device which I always kept online. That has the drawback of always being available to tinker with.

I just needed a 2 bay NAS and I need it offline.

That's what I have now. The QNAP sits in its box.

Remember that any storage media can fail at any time, for any reason, with or without notice. You can consider Seagate IronWolf Series, WD Red Series or Toshiba N300.