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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[–] eleitl@lemmy.zip 11 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Use zfs. Use RAID-suitable (TLER) drives which limit retries before reporting failure. Use stripe over mirror pools (RAID10 equivalent). Buy a spare in advance. Hot spares are immediately starting rebuilding after failure. Scrub regularly (crontab). Always remember: RAID is not a backup.

[–] theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I think there are too many technical words I don't understand yet in this comment, but thanks nonetheless. One I want to ask specifically tough, is a hot spare a disk mirrored every now and then or what do you mean by that?

[–] eleitl@lemmy.zip 3 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

I can explain in more detail later.

A hot spare is a spinning disk that is known to the system and is automatically added to a RAID/pool when a disk there fails, and then triggers rebuild/resilvering of the RAID.

A cold spare is a disk added manually by the user.

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

So if you can use a hot spare is mainly depentend on the OS you use I suppose?

[–] eleitl@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 hours ago

Hardware RAID host adapters can handle hot spares OS-agnostically, but for zfs these days it means Linux or *BSD. For a NAS I would go with a BSD distro, for hyperconverged Proxmox on top of Debian.