[Draghmar]

WD Re are the best value/performance when we talk about RAID. But I'm using WD Black 1TB in RAID 1 at the moment and have no problem at all. And they're working 24/7 for few years. Now I'm going to expand my RAID to 1+0 with additional 2x1TB.

[Harro]

Here is a link for some info about reliability of drives. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-driv...y-q4-2015/
With that info I have been replacing my mix of 2TB drives with the 4TB HGST drives. Looks to be a solid performer over the long run.

[aptalca]

Stay away from the WD Green, Blue, Black, and Purple drives. They are not designed for RAID.

Unless the op is talking about nas software like unraid. Those drives are perfect for that as unraid (as the name implies) does not use traditional raid.

I have read about unRAID. The amount of read and write activity on such a setup is very high like traditional RAID. Not only the that, on some set-ups it uses one or more of the disks as parity disks which will be hammered with read and write operations.

I would still use server/NAS grade drives in such a set-up.

Unraid uses a cache drive/pool (btrfs raid 1, ssd recommended) so the writes go on the cache drive/s (much faster due to no parity and potentially ssds) and at night, a mover script moves the data from the cache drive/s to the array. That way, the parity is only written to once a day. But unraid presents the data on the cache drive as part of the array data so for the user, through smb or nfs, the whole caching process is invisible.

I believe most wear and tear on raid drives is because of striping, because every time something is written to the array, it gets split up and writes occur on all the drives. Unraid does not do striping. It's just JBOD (span) with a single (dual in beta) parity. In fact, it groups certain files and folders (user customized based on folder structure) so all files in that folder get written to the same disk. For instance a movie file, its metadata and subtitles all exist on the same disk so only that disk is woken up when you play that file (also user customizable, I leave my drives spinning all the time).

If you check in the unraid forums you'll see that most folks are using and recommending consumer drives. Now that I think of it, I don't remember seeing anyone recommending more expensive raid drives. WD Reds are highly recommended mainly due to their 5 year warranty. I use a mixture of all types of consumer, greens, barracudas, blues, a spinpoint and an hgst. I even have a 1tb with power on hours over 10 years spinning non-stop. My only rules are to stagger the drive purchases (no multiples from the same batch) and keep a warm spare (precleared and connected) in case one dies so you can quickly rebuild the new drive

Oh and one of the cool things about unraid is that a long time community member created a script called preclear, which stresses, tests and clears (fill with zeros) the drive. It is recommended to preclear each new drive 3 times before adding to array to make sure it is not defective. It saved my butt once and I exchanged the drive right away within the 15 day period and got a new drive rather than a refurbished one through an rma

[Draghmar]

Here is a link for some info about reliability of drives. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-driv...y-q4-2015/
With that info I have been replacing my mix of 2TB drives with the 4TB HGST drives. Looks to be a solid performer over the long run.

Stats like that can be very misleading because different models can behave very differently. I've seen analysis like that where Seagate was worst one and WD was at the second place. But HGST wins most of the time.

[teki4u]

I have read about unRAID. The amount of read and write activity on such a setup is very high like traditional RAID. Not only the that, on some set-ups it uses one or more of the disks as parity disks which will be hammered with read and write operations.

I would still use server/NAS grade drives in such a set-up.

True and I think OP should follow "best practices" plus with this kind of setups you cannot be cheapo.

[J876]

This is a a very interesting thread and a very good discussion.

[Qtrmeg]

I'm a little late to respond here but I am using both WD Reds & HGST NAS drives, and the HGST drives run WAY hotter than the WD Reds. Spun up they are running close to 50 while the Reds barely reach 40.

This is the build if you want to see the specific parts >>>
http://pcpartpicker.com/user/Qtrmeg/saved/#view=t23ypg

I've had zero problems with any of them and this NAS has pretty much been running 24/7 for over two years, and about a year w/ the HGST's.

About Unraid, 2 things. I thought the parity drive would be used the most but it usually isn't. It only runs when you change something.

Unraid is nice because you can use any drive you have laying around for the data drives. You will lose any info on them when you add them to the array, but that is easy enough to get around.