Tips on hard drives to purchase for my first build?

[ry601]

Dear all

Introduction: I would like to finally have a NAS in my home. Currently my data (not so important) is spread across different external hard disks and computers. My torrent server box (a small minipc) has a 2TB external hard disk that is always full. Moreover I don't like using USB bus to always on torrent seeding. Important data are documents and are cloud stored.

Between Synology/Qnap and FreeNAS I chose the latter. With less than 230 EUR I bought an old HP tower server with Xeon E3-1240v2 and 32GB ECC RAM, ILO adapter included. It seemed a bargain. It has 4 drive bays. Thanks god there is aliexpress for the cheap trays :)

The questions are, based on your experience:

1. Should I buy 4x4TB and go for RAID-Z2 or buy 2x8TB and go for ZFS Mirror?
   The overall cost is roughly 500 euros (and I'm not happy but I don't see any alternatives)
   I would opt for 2x8TB
2. Seagate or WD? Why?
3. 5400rpm (3yr warranty) or 7200rpm (5yr warranty)?
   Consider my home usage below: I think I don't need such huge throughput. But this is my first NAS thus I prefer to ask to experts :)
4. Less expensive alternatives?
   I read about tweaking WD greens but seems that greens are not produced anymore?
   Thus I assume there are no less expensive alternatives, so I assume buying NAS drives is the only intelligent option.

My Usage (home user passionate about VMs):
File sharing

• downloaded files
• Veeam / FOG backups
• VMs archive

A couple of Virtual machines:

• unifi controller
• torrent box / data hoarding (I like to download Linux/BSD OSes)
• PXE server for booting OSes
• web scraping / data hoarding (just a humble hobby, starting, do not know how much it will take as thoughput)
• maybe a PLEX server, but I am not a movie person. Just for try.
• various test VMs, not always online

Thank you