Hello, I’m relatively new to self-hosting and recently started using Unraid, which I find fantastic! I’m now considering upgrading my storage capacity by purchasing either an 8TB or 10TB hard drive. I’m exploring both new and used options to find the best deal. However, I’ve noticed that prices vary based on the specific category of hard drive (e.g., Seagate’s IronWolf for NAS or Firecuda for gaming). I’m unsure about the significance of these different categories. Would using a gaming or surveillance hard drive impact the performance of my NAS setup?
Thanks for any tips and clarifications! 🌻
Yeah, you don’t want a surveillance drive. They are optimized for continuous writes, not random IO.
It’s probably worth familiarizing yourself with the difference between CMR and SMR drives.
If you expect this to keep growing, it might make sense to switch to SAS now - then you can find some really cheap enterprise class drives on ebay that will perform a bit better in this type of configuration. You’d just need a cheap HBA (like a 9211-8i) and a couple breakout cables. You can use SATA drives with a SAS HBA, but not the other way around.
10000RPM SAS drives are noisy (and expensive), something to keep in mind. If I needed this kind of performance I would probably go full SSD.
Thanks for the tips! I dought I’ll be going higher that 50TB at max. Would SAS still be nessecary for that you reccon?
Definitely isn’t necessary, but if you search for ‘3.5" SAS lot’ on ebay you might find all the drives you’ll need to get to 50TB for the price of a couple new SATA drives.
I live in Scandinavia so ebay isn’t much of an option for us really. Also prefer to use lesser big-corp when buying tech, while more expensive usually worth it due to better warranty and customer service. But thanks for the suggestion nonetheless!