Anything useful to do with a single drive?

[chravis]

I have recently built my first little FreeNAS system from a new Dell T30. The T30 came with a 1TB drive, which I swapped out for 2 4TB drives that I have mirrored. I have 2 free drive bays. Everything is working great so far.

I'm wondering if there is anything useful that I can do with the 1TB drive that I have sitting in the closet now? I don't know that I'd be able to put this drive through all the proper testing because I don't have a spare server or anything. My server is pretty basic and just stores personal documents, ripped movies, home movies, photos, music, and runs the Plex and MineOS plugins. I don't actually need to do anything else, I just hate to have wasted hardware in the closet.

And related (and not originally going to be part of this question, but oh well) I was apparently subjected to an Amazon Brushing scam (google it) and received 2 10TB WD Purple drives (WD Purple 10TB Surveillance Hard Drive - 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD101PURZ) on my doorstep that I did not order (but addressed to me). From what I can gather, and after calling Amazon, these drives are now mine even though I didn't order them. There isn't a ton of discussion about Purple drives in these forums, but there is at least one thread that I read through and there is mixed consensus about how useful they are in a FreeNAS system. I don't know all the differences between types of drives, but apparently these are meant for storing surveillance footage. Any suggestions on what I should do with these drives?

 

[danb35]

I don't know that I'd be able to put this drive through all the proper testing because I don't have a spare server or anything.

Do you have a spare drive bay in your server? If so, you could install the drive and run it through the testing. You could even create a single-disk pool for data that isn't very important. Or, alternatively, just use it in a desktop machine.

 

[lopr]

about the WD purple: their firmware is optimized for continuous writes, they are perfectly fine for use with ZFS if you don't mind some (probably minor) potential performance loss on random IO. the problem is only the other way round: if you don't use "purple" drives on systems with high sequential/continous writes you are more likely to suffer from video dropouts.

 

[melloa]

I have 2 free drive bays.

2 10TB WD Purple drives (WD Purple 10TB Surveillance Hard Drive

Use those in mirror ... you can run all tests on your empty bays before putting them in production, assuming all it connected to SATA ports or a HBA, you have direct access to the single drive for burning it in.