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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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[–] Clearwater@lemmy.world 8 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

In my experience, all that truly matters is that the drive is on the right recording technology (CMR, SMR, and maybe someday HAMR will be in the hands of us consumer plebs).

There are two reasons to care:

  1. SMR has horrible write speeds. Data can read off the drive at the same speed as a CMR drive, but writes will be unbelievably slow.
  2. More importantly, for some reason or another (I assume the write speed), SMR drives might get rejected by ZFS. There was some pretty loud talk about it several years ago, but I haven't heard much since and do not know if this is still true (I assume it is).

If your use case involves only ever writing a small amount of data, point 1 doesn't matter very much. If you're using software which doesn't care about CMR/SMR, point 2 doesn't matter very much.

If either point 1 or 2 matter to you, then you should go with CMR drives. If neither matter, you may go with SMR drives if you so chose.

PS: Both WD Blues and Seagate Barracudas are (often) CMR. Seagate consult this page: https://www.seagate.com/products/cmr-smr-list/. WD lists SMR/CMR on their website when you look up the part number.

In my home NAS, I use ZFS and have ran all sorts of drives through it. It's ran old consumer drives I've pulled out of scrap hardware, it's ran NAS-grade drives, and it's ran enterprise-grade drives... And since they're all CMR, I can't say there was much if any difference at all.

The only difference between the tiers that I find interesting/useful is the number of metrics you can pull off the drive. The fancier ones spit more metrics which could help you detect signs of failure earlier, but that requires knowing what to look for.

So at the end of the day, as long as the drive's recording technology works with your software, you're fine.

RE: External drives (seen in a comment)

External drives can be a great way to get disks for cheap, however they are loot boxes. What drive you get inside of them depends on the capacity, the manufacturer, and pure luck. You can generally look up the model number and see what people have said is inside, then hope you get whatever they got. (Generally, manufacturers don't often change what they put in there, but they do change over time.)

[–] sockenklaus@sh.itjust.works 4 points 16 hours 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 3 hours 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).

[–] theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz 1 points 14 hours ago

Thanks a lot for this elaboration!

Unfortunately, like mentioned in another comment below, Barracudas are now mostly SMR. And I didn't find offers for Barracudas Pro which should be CMR.

Anyways, I will most probably buy some smaller CMR drives. Take a bit more money in the hand now, lay out a proper backup strategy and only store data which can not be easily re-downloaded and I should be good.