[poofyhairguy]

This comment is simply not true.

It is VERY true. With hard drive manufacturing the the failure rate is pretty much luck of the draw- there are good batches and bad batches. There is no way to know what you got until it is in use, ESPECIALLY with consumer drives.That is a completely different situation than SANs, or anything enterprise.

Most media NAS systems have some level of parity protection- a disk or two. If you mix and match your drives and you hit a bad batch on one of them then the parity has you covered. If a few or all of your drives are from the same bad batch you VERY quickly get past your level of parity protection which means no RAID rebuilding. It means raid failure. The warranty on the drive doesn't cover lost data, that is a problem you have to then deal with.

Telling people the answer to that is to "make a backup" of their mediaserver is quite frankly ridiculous. The whole point of a mediaserver is a device that serves large files, that is why we lean towards RAID 5/6 or Unraid instead of RAID 1 or 10- space is a premium. The backup to a mediaserver is another mediaserver. I have two, but most people won't do that.

I am not discounting your knowledge or experience smoothrunnings, but this isn't your world. You are used to enterprise level hardware driving servers that need 99% uptime for an essential business purposes. That is not what we are doing. What we are doing is building HUGE servers, spacewise, that need "good enough" uptime on budgets that wouldn't even buy the cabling needed for an enterprise setup.

Basically you are used to the NASA way of doing it, and I am more looking at the Space X way of doing it. If I was running a business I would do it your way, to entertain the family my way is more economical.

I mean you are 100% correct that if you just buy enterprise drives, or SANs, or something else with a real pricetag as part of that hopefully you don't have to deal with a batch lottery. But if you want to throw together a shoe-string mediaserver with more space than most business servers have for a fraction of the cost then you must do EVERYTHING you can do avoid problems. Hence my advice of mixing batches, that I learned the hard way.

I mean my way works- I have over 50TB of space in my servers and they have run since 2010. People who think like I do are the main participants in this hobby.