Best bang for your buck NAS HDD

[SimonMac]

I've got an Unraid with mainly WD drives at the moment, 5 x 8TB and a few 1-2tb drives but hitting 74% utilisation so looking to proactively upgrade the two parity drives before using those 8tb's to replace some of the smaller drives and then slowly replacing all the drives with bigger drives, so even if they are all the same manufacture the purchases will be staggered so they are not all the same batch

[Dorkeaux]

I've got an Unraid with mainly WD drives at the moment, 5 x 8TB and a few 1-2tb drives but hitting 74% utilisation so looking to proactively upgrade the two parity drives before using those 8tb's to replace some of the smaller drives and then slowly replacing all the drives with bigger drives, so even if they are all the same manufacture the purchases will be staggered so they are not all the same batch

Your use case is becoming more clear.
I think Unraid is a solid choice for home use, good on you for not cheaping out.
It makes good use of different-sized disks (as you know). Most traditional RAID schemes truncate the disk sizes to match the smallest drive in the pool.

Regarding performance, I read that Unraid can have relatively slow parity checks. I don't worry too much about that at home as long as I can stream a movie without interruption. It's usually my NAS hardware, rendering or network speeds that is the limiting factor in my house anyway.

What is a little more concerning is that losing the parity drive and one other will result in data loss.
Not a huge risk, but were it me I'd go to some effort to vary the drive brands.

How do you find it to use?

[eek]

I've got an Unraid with mainly WD drives at the moment, 5 x 8TB and a few 1-2tb drives but hitting 74% utilisation so looking to proactively upgrade the two parity drives before using those 8tb's to replace some of the smaller drives and then slowly replacing all the drives with bigger drives, so even if they are all the same manufacture the purchases will be staggered so they are not all the same batch

So you need 1 bigger disk now for parity 1, then a rebuild at which point you can adding old that 8tb drive for additional storage.
You can then add a second parity drive late (same size as parity 1) before adding that old 8tb drive for even more storage.

I would go for the 16gb Toshiba on that basis...

[SimonMac]

Your use case is becoming more clear.
I think Unraid is a solid choice for home use, good on you for not cheaping out.
It makes good use of different-sized disks (as you know). Most traditional RAID schemes truncate the disk sizes to match the smallest drive in the pool.

Regarding performance, I read that Unraid can have relatively slow parity checks. I don't worry too much about that at home as long as I can stream a movie without interruption. It's usually my NAS hardware, rendering or network speeds that is the limiting factor in my house anyway.

What is a little more concerning is that losing the parity drive and one other will result in data loss.
Not a huge risk, but were it me I'd go to some effort to vary the drive brands.

How do you find it to use?

it’s RAID six so i have two parity drives, I don’t want tempt fate to prove my thinking but it means I can lose two drives without loss of data.

Overall I like Unraid; I have a mix of a few VMs and a half a dozen dockers. Seems pretty reliable but not sure if that’s the hardware of the software, or a combination of the two but it’s easy to use and seems to just work.

[SimonMac]

So you need 1 bigger disk now for parity 1, then a rebuild at which point you can adding old that 8tb drive for additional storage.
You can then add a second parity drive late (same size as parity 1) before adding that old 8tb drive for even more storage.

I would go for the 16gb Toshiba on that basis...

You just repeated back to me what I already knew, have you thought about being a consultant?

[eek]

You just repeated back to me what I already knew, have you thought about being a consultant?

Not quite I was reporting the steps needed to do it while retaining some redundancy - basically don't replace 2 drives together you need to do it one at a time...

but hey I've only been there and utterly screwed up the rebuild of a parity disk and lost some data so what do I know.