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Computer Nerds! NAS Hard Drive Upgrade/Expansion?

Lee

Guild of Calamitous Intent
Joined
May 21, 2020
Member Number
1061
Messages
1,233
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The Natural State
I've got a homebrew FreeNAS setup, it's not relevant to my question, but specs are; low power, quad core, embedded, AsRock Celeron J1900, ITX board, 16 Gb of ram, Corsair HX750 80+ Platinum PSU (overkill) and 4x old refurbished WD Enterprise 1TB hard drives in ZFS.

I've got capacity still, but have a few terabytes of .RAW images to mothball, plus Jewels is complaining about about her iCloud storage being full, so I expect she's got several gigabytes of stuff to cull too. I told her I'd work on it over the holiday break.

There's nothing wrong with the drives, they're old circa 2010-ish drives, they're enterprise drives, so they're a little noisy, but they all function as they should. The NAS box is an old Fractal R4 case, so it does a decent job of mitigating drive noise, and there's room for 4 more 3.5" drives. The tiny ITX board leaves plenty of room to add more drive cages too.

There's the rub though. Hard drives have come a long way in the past ~10 years. I've got room and plenty of power supply to just add another PCIe SATA expansion card and 4x more drives, to expand my storage, but should I? Hard drives engineered and marketed specifically for NAS didn't exist when I bought my WDs back in the day. Should I just pick up 4 or more 4-8 Tb WD Red, Segate Iron Wolf or similar drives and migrate the data to them instead?

The easy button is add more drives to the existing array, but as cheap as storage is today, has me thinking about getting newer larger capacity drives to replace the existing drives.
 
I use reds in my Synology NAS for primary storage and greens for stuff I don't care about (temp storage for video and torrents and whatnot). They are scanned weekly and going on 8+ years never had any signs of failure.

I was looking at new drives the other day as my reds are getting full. You can buy 6tb drives for less than I paid for 2tb back when I bought them. Crazy.
 
I'd wholesale replace them.
They're at MTBF if they've been on 24/7 for 10 years.

you can snapshot your existing data and move it pretty easily.

make sure you back up the system config.
 
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