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! 🌻

  • jetAEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    It depends what your parameters are. For spinning hard disks, you want to look at total power cycles, and mean time between failures. More enterprise drives have very long mean time between failures

    In fact for spinnig hard disks, turning on can be on a likely failure mode, so there’s machines out there if you power off there’s a good chance they won’t come back on in the enterprise data centers

    Your solid state hard disks, you want to look at meantime between failures, but also total write volume. Enterprise discs tend to have much much much much much much greater write capacity

    So all of these trade-offs cost money, if you’re looking at archival, where you write the data only once, then you can go with a disk that has a low total write volume