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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[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

Absolutely correct. I used to maintain vigorous whole disk backups, and made sure my MacBook also had regular Time Machine backups and that kind of thing.

Then I realized there are actually tiers of important data. The most important stuff would be on the order of megabytes (tax documents, my lease, historical records of that stuff, and config files that I’ve built up over time).

Then I have my vacation photos and videos. Family photos. A few gigabytes. That’s not that much in the grand scheme and it’s still easy to back these up to a cloud service for minimal to no cost.

The rest of the data on my computer is easily recoverable or can be reconstructed with minimal effort. The OS install. The games. Media from online. I would not bother backing up this stuff.

Once this stuff is in perspective it’s very easy to devise a backup solution that fits your needs at an appropriate price. Not everyone has usage like mine and maybe their important data is much larger than mine is, but the point is we should think about which of the data is actually important, and not blindly duplicate pointless data.