The title says basically everything but let me elaborate.
Given the recent news about the sold out of harddrives for the current year and possibly also the next years (tomshardware article) I try to buy the HDDs I want to use for the next few years earlier than expected.
I am on a really tight budget so I really don’t want to overspend. I have an old tower PC laying around which I would like to turn into a DIY NAS probably with TrueNAS Scale.
I don’t expect high loads, it will only be 1-2 users with medium writing and reading.
In this article from howtogeek the author talks about the differences and I get it, but a lot of the people commenting seem to be in a similar position as I am. Not really a lot of read-write load, only a few users, and many argue computing HDDs are fine for this use case.
Possibilites I came up with until now:
- Buy two pricey Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red HDDs and put them in RAID1
- Buy three cheaper Seagate Barracuda or WD Blue and put two in RAID1 and keep one as a backup if (or should I say when?) one of the used drives fails.
I am thankful for every comment or experience you might have with this topic!
I think this stuff sort of depends on how often you upgrade drives. I bought 2 4TB drives in 2015 running in a ZFS mirror, spinning 24/7 as I had heard that the hardest time on a spinning disk is the initial spin up from cold boot, or sleep. (I’m not sure is this if true anymore, but I had disabled sleep on the drives, regardless)
5 years later, I bought 2 10TB drives to upgrade my storage capacity, and relocated the 4TB mirror to media content, and stuff that was replaceable if the drives failed, so I didn’t need to really back it up.
Juuust now, at the end of 2025, 1 of the initial 4 TB drives failed and now my ‘old’ ZFS mirror is in a degraded state running on 1 drive, but the drive that failed lasted 10 years.
I bet the average home lab or self hoster is probably upgrading and replacing their drives with higher capacity more often than 10 years, so they probably would never actually see a drive fail in real life use.
Yes, these are also exactly my thoughts (& also why it’s prob fine to recommend lightly used derives - but maybe not 10 year old drives).