Hello ! I have a custom build NAS currently using 4x6TB hard drives in RAID10. I am looking for a capacity upgrade. My main focus are low power consumption and low noise (the NAS is in my living room / home office).
I can’t seem to find any 5400RPM HDD over 8TB in capacity anywhere. Is there any model with 10, 12 or more TB in existence ? If not, what could be the reasons ?
Don’t do it, is my suggestion. Surveillance disks are optimized for continuous writing performance and not read performance. They mght be SMR version also which can play havoc in a NAS with lots of writes, as it can’t just rewrite one portion without relaying out the shingled overlayed tracks adjacent.
Toshiba has some SMR “Surveillance” models but WD and Seagate afaik are all CMR. It’s pretty dumb to have SMR surveillance drives, the main goal of a surveillance drive is to be able to write the data very fast no matter what.
Normally they’re just regular HDDs with tweaked firmware to make it a bit more lenient towards transient errors so as to not miss out on writing a block due to being overcautious. I’ve never seen any evidence that they’re otherwise optimized for writing over reading. I would have no problem using a surveillance (CMR) drive in a NAS.
The SMR does make sense for surveillance, because it is a constant stream layed down, it is not random write access changing a block in files of various places. This show has talked about their usage. The tolerance on dropping bits to keep going with the stream would worry me in data sensitive applications
https://2.5admins.com/
There are spec sheets, but I have tested myself, brand new Purple Drive out of package and run disk bench marking read/write testing. Writing was steady, read rate was under performing compared to Blacks or Reds.
Surveillance video is not verbatim sensitive, it’s better to get the video on there with bits missing than not at all.
Isn’t it more like those are overperformers?
LOL. I mean depends on the baseline number, so yeah, you would be correct. But the concern would be as you mentioned the Purple drives don’t care (as much) about data loss. Fine for video if you lose a pixel, but bad for mission critical data.