Needing some help on drives

[denaba]

I have had a FreeNAS box for some years now; it has grown from just 3TB to now 15TB though not all taken up. Anyways, a drive finally died and I lost the whole thing which is fine because I do backups regularly.

But questions came to mind. I am a home user so I use consumer grade drives, there is no way I can afford a 10k server let alone 3k, plus no space to put some huge rack. That said, reading around forums there are differences in what types of drives to use; starting with manufacturer. In forums I see the following mainly used;

Seagate
Western Digital
Hitachi

So instead of just going out and buying the same drive and doing the whole thing again, I was wondering what people thought of those 6TB drives that are out there?

Another point was that my FreeNAS box is really only used in the evenings so really the FreeNAS is only on about 4 hours of the day. When in use, there is at most two people accessing the FreeNAS box for data at the same time so not much activity. But mostly only one person (computer) accesses the box about 90% of the year. I also read up that the Western Digital Greens are good for this as they spin down when not in use. How do others here in the forum find those drives? Are they really worth it? I read bad reviews as well; to not use these in FreeNAS boxes. So confused here on the Greens

So figuring that this time I can redo my FreeNAS box, I can at least reconfigure the hard drives for more storage. My motherboard has 6 SATA ports to it and currently has 5 x 3TB drive taking up 5 of them. But if I go with 6TB drives I can use only 3 ports and I may not even need to use the RAIDZ factor, I can just use each drive independently for the stored data

So just wondering about the drives of today and what FreeNAS consumer level folks recommend. Thanks

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly, if you don't plan to use redundancy with ZFS, then you shouldn't be using FreeNAS and ZFS.

 

[marbus90]

Seagate 7200rpm Desktop > WD Red 5400rpm NAS according to backblaze.

You don't want drives which are spinning down. only causes wear and tear. keep them running.

Raidz1 is nowadays only a gurantee that you can read all data correctly. if you want protection against disk failure, use raidz2 at least.

 

[denaba]

@cyberjock - yes I know, but my question is about hard drives for consumers

@marbus90 - thank you for the response. Mixed reports out there about those "Greens", but what you said makes sense. I found this website that talks about these "Reds" (going to have to add this site to my lists). Pretty good information.
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_red_nas_hard_drive_review_wd30efrx

Thanks for the responses!

 

[gpsguy]

Given the marginal cost difference between the Reds and Greens, I wouldn't even suggest the latter these days.

If you were using Greens - did you use wdidle on them?


Sent from my phone

 

[denaba]

hello gpsguy. No I don't have any "greens", just wondering since some sites state to use them on FreeNAS. Probably old info when the "greens" came out. The "Reds" seem pretty good for SOHO use as per the website link.

Thanks