Thanks, I was leaning toward giving the Red NAS drives a shot, but went with two WD Blue drives, they were on sale really cheap. I noticed some manufacturers don't even make 1 TB anymore, which is actually what I'd prefer to stick with. RAID drives with 3 - 4 TB give me the impression there is a little more room for failure on a RAID, that, and it's more than I need. I've used green drives when handed them to me at a previous job for a NAS, they actually did okay for about a year of large (images) being archived on them, then one of four started relocating sectors like crazy. I wouldn't rule the greens out with spares on hand for a home NAS. I've seen the studies about Seagate. I must of lucked out before they went south, the first two I have still have their 5 year warranty and no issues popping up in SMART yet (I think they are about 4 years old now). Backing up the old raid to an external. With the amount of backups I have, if I do decide to try zfs before the sticking with a Linux software raid I'll post the experience here. Thanks again for all the great suggestions, -- Jeremy MountainJohnson Jeremy.MountainJohnson at gmail.com On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 1:55 PM, <tclug at freakzilla.com> wrote: > I've been using WD Red drives in my arrays for a few years now. Had one > (out of like 16) go bad after a year or so, WD replaced it with no hassle > at all. > > I would recommend buying at least 1 extra drive per array, so you have a > hot-spare. > > > On Mon, 1 Dec 2014, Dan Armbrust wrote: > > On 11/29/2014 09:06 AM, Jeremy MountainJohnson wrote: >> >>> Based on a lot of recent tests, I'll probably go with Western Digital >>> drives for the cost savings and longevity, unless anyone has other >>> suggestions? >>> >>> >> Based on the pile of dead drives laying on my desk right now (and the >> links below), avoid Seagate like the plague. Unless you really like >> swapping disks all the time. >> I tried out a WD "Green" drive for an application where performance >> didn't matter as well (offline storage in a fire safe, with monthly >> updates), because >> it was cheap - and it was junk too. It literally worked 3 times, before >> failed entirely. >> >> Higher end WD is probably better - but lately, I've been spending the >> extra $ for Hitachi / HGST drives for systems where I don't want to deal >> with drive failures: >> >> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/ >> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability- >> update-september-2014/ >> >> WD now owns the Hitachi drive line, but they don't seem to have ruined it >> yet. >> >> As far as disk size... 2 or 3 TB isn't that much higher than 1 TB these >> days.... especially if you go with the cheapest drives, and just deal with >> the inevitable failures. >> >> Depending on how the numbers shake out, however, you might come out ahead >> just running 3 6TB drives in a mirror config, rather than 5 smaller drives >> in a different RAID config to get your 2 drive fail-safety. Another nice >> aspect of a simple mirror setup, is you can pull a drive and read it, >> without needing the RAID config. >> >> Dan >> _______________________________________________ >> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >> >> _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20141201/2971dd5a/attachment.html>