Ive been wanting to get proper storage for my lil server running nextcloud and a couple other things, but nc is the main concern. Its currently running on an old ssd ive had laying around so i would want a more reliable longer term solution.
So thinking of a raid1 (mirror) hdd setup, with two 5400rpm 8tb drives, bringing the choices down to ironwolf or wd red plus, which both are in the same price range.
Im currently biased towards the ironwolfs because they are slightly cheaper and have a cool print on them, but from reddit threads ive seen that wd drives are generally quieter, which currently is a concern since the server is in my bedroom.
Does anyone have experience with these two drives and or know better solutions?
Oh and for the os, being a simple linux server, is it generally fine to have that on a separate drive, an ssd in this case?
Thanks! :3
That actually sounds really smart, but can that cause issues with the raid controller, since the drives will act slightly differently?
I have that exact same setup but with 4 TB disks on zfs in mirrored mode. Have not noticed any performance issues in my home lab setup mainly being used for immich and media serving. I had purposely chosen disks of different brands specifically for this reason. My vote goes to this setup.
ZFS, btrfs, and other software RAID solutions can use mixed drives w/o much issue as long as you make sure that the capacities match or that you set the array up with the smallest disk size in mind.
Do not use hardware raid controllers. They provide no meaningful performance benefit over software raid and make data recovery much more difficultm(if not impossible) in the event of hardware failure.
Not to advertise but that’s one of the reasons I haven’t moved from synology. They have some special sauce version of raid that allows different drives and sizes without any fuss. I’m mostly attached to the UI but it’s nice to know for when one drive dies, I don’t have to match it or anything.
What happens if the NAS dies though? What does recovery look like?
Is it possible to recover the data from the drives without Synology’s OS? If so what is that process and how difficult is it to do correctly?
I know that with ZFS, recovery is independent of vendor OS and/or hardware, so if the hardware dies you can just throw the drives into any COTS system with enough ports, but I’m genuinely unsure if that is the case for Synology or not.
If the nas dies but the drives are fine, I just grab a new (synology) nas and stick the drives in. The OS will see that it’s in a new model, and start the process of migration (anything that needs changing, enabling, or disabling vs the prior unit, hardware and software capabilities, etc). It’s super easy; I’ve done it myself when I upgraded units a few years ago. If the drives die I have local and remote backups.
I believe it is possible to extract data with a standard Linux system, though it’s been several years since I looked into it. I don’t run raid on my usual machines (well, I have a wd black pcie card with 2x nvme drives running in raid0 on a hw raid chip onboard, but the system is oblivious and thus so am I), so I’d have to do research again if such a situation occurred. I’m not planning on moving away from syno so currently the hypothetical would end up just buying a new unit and being done with it.