G+_Stuart Dodds Posted March 4, 2016 Share Posted March 4, 2016 Hi everyone, I have a question about which HDD to buy for my home server storage. My current setup is a small PC sitting under my TV, running a lite version of ubuntu which acts as a HTPC, home file server and general NAS. I currently have 3x 1Tb HDDs in the box, one for multimedia (music/movies), one for family documents (photos, docs etc..) and one for backup (which basically clones the documents drive with rsync). As this is running at home it is quite important to me that I can shut off the HDDs when they are not in use to save power...as well as the noise of 3 HDDs spinning for 24 hours a day in our main living area would certainly be quite noticable. Therefore I use hdparm to spin down the drives when they are not in use. So...what I have noticed when looking at (NAS) HDDs is that they are designed to be "always on" and that spinning the drive up and down at least once a day, every day would actually cause damage to the drive. So my question is, should I actually be looking at NAS drives? Would it be better to go for a drive which is designed to be turned off and on multiple times a day...is that just a regular drive? Could somebody make any recommendations for this setup? Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Posted March 4, 2016 Share Posted March 4, 2016 WD Green if you want them to spin up/down WD Red if you'll be running them in a RAID Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Keith Mallett Posted March 4, 2016 Share Posted March 4, 2016 For your case I would suggest WD Green, they are the better choice for the buck! I have all four colours (Yellow, Red, Black and Green) in my home lab and I see the best day to day performance from the green. NAS are always controllers on but spin up the drives when access is needed, this is why some of the older ones with no cache had a high latency on the first I/O's but were fine once the drives were running. For what you are doing the green drives will be fine. You are also limited on the bandwidth of your nic on the nas. A 100 meg nic cannot pass as much info as a 1 gig nic (provided the rest of your network is all 1 gig) so they drives won't work as hard. Check Amazon for sales. There has been some really good prices on WD Green lately. Good luck! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Stuart Dodds Posted March 4, 2016 Author Share Posted March 4, 2016 Thank you Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ and Keith Mallett for the replies! I was thinking about going for the (4Tb) HGST Deskstar NAS hdd, but I saw that a feature of that drive is 24 hour continuous usage and I was concerned that spinning it up and down at least once every day (to do the backup alone) would damage the drive itself, as perhaps it is not designed for that kind of usage. As both of you recommended the WD Green I will definitely go for one or two of them to increase the storage of my NAS. Thanks again! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Jason Marsh Posted March 4, 2016 Share Posted March 4, 2016 Depending on how much data you're hoarding, you may rather eliminate mechanical drives altogether. SSD prices are on a downward trend, and they are noiseless. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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