this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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How bad of an idea is it to use computing HDDs in a DIY NAS? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 day 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:

  1. Buy two pricey Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red HDDs and put them in RAID1
  2. 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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[–] MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I have Seagate Barracuda drives in my NAS because I didn't know about CMR vs SMR before I bought them.

2 of them are backups, the other spins all the time. The bulk of my storage is video files with infrequent adding of new stuff. The active drive has qBittorrent seeding from it 24/7 so it can be a bit noisy.

Other than that, you'll see lower transfer speeds from SMR drives but nothing to worry about if it's small writes or infrequent copying of large video files. It also takes an age to run a long SMART self test - 18hrs on an 8TB HDD that is 75% full (this'll get worse as it gets closer to full).

So SMR drives aren't ideal but they'll do the job for a "write once, read many times" style of storage. I wouldn't buy them at all for a RAID setup. If you can, you'd be better buying refurbished enterprise drives but I have no idea what availability there'll be where you are.