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[Manfred]

The large capacity drives > 12 TB liked to be always on and many are optimized for NAS use.

Which Hardware Drives to choose for Workstation Use and which drives >12 TB (WD Gold or WD Red Pro or Seagate) are reliable and create not to much noise?

Is it better to have 3x16 TB or 2 x 22 TB (the 4 TB difference is not so important)?

[zybex]

I have a 3x16 GB RAID5 with Toshiba MG08ACA16TE drives and I'm very happy with them. It's true they are in an always-on NAS, 20.000 power-on hours with just 5 power cycles so far. I believe they would do just fine on a non-NAS setting too, but I have no data on that. The r/DataHoarder forum is a really good place to ask about this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/

Helium-filled drives tend to always have the same standby noise level at the same capacity - it just depends on the number of platters inside them (density), which is similar for any given disk size across brands. Actuator noise is much more annoying and brand-specific - I find I really dislike the WD and Seagate head-moving noises, it can be extremely clicky.

Avoid cheap SMR drives (shingled magnetic recording), must be CMR. I think most drives at these higher capacities are CMR, after the last WD fiasco that resulted in a class action lawsuit...

Assuming you want to do RAID:
- with 2x22TB you'll have a RAID1 with 22 TB available capacity; 1 disk can fail without data loss
- with 3x16TB you'll have a RAID5 with 32 TB available capacity; 1 disk can fail without data loss

If not using RAID (why?), then I'd go for fewer drives - less heat, less noise.

[jmone]

Whatever is on Sale at the time you need one in the capacity you want.

- I've dozens of drives running currently (and have gone through 100's)
- There are the "odd" models that tend to fail, but I've not seen this problem for 10 years, and keep in mind we tend to write once, read many for media files.
- I've not seen a SMR drive for ages and there is a reason.  They are terrible for large file write performance.
- I hate RAID for our use.  It's not what you think it is.  It is designed for uninterrupted uptime should a disk fail (primary for corporate services).  It is not a backup.  It provides no protection from unintended Adds/Moves/Deletes/Fire/Theft etc.  Go JBOD (I use Stablebit's Drive Pool) and I have two "Pools".  My "Main" and a "Backup" pool.  You can also use any mix of disk sizes and types.  As I need more space on my "Main" pool over time, I swap the oldest drive for a new larger drive, and add that older drive to my "Backup" pool.  If a disk fails (which it has not yet), then I'd push in a new drive and just copy back from the "Backup" the missing files.  When backing up from the "Main" to the "Backup" pool (which is on a different PC in the basement), I use FreeFileSync to first preview the changes before the commit.  I do this backup manually and only as I've made significant changes to the main pool. 

[zybex]

Agree with JMone, good strategy. But if you also prize uptime, then RAID + Backup is nice.
Drivepool is a good product, but it still means half of your capacity goes into the backup pool.
 
SMR is still here, article from today:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2024/10/19/western-digital-introduces-32tb-smr-data-center-hdd-using-11-disks/

[jmone]

Interesting.... maybe I was thinking of Shingled drives?  They had a small amount "normal" clusters to cache the writes then in the background moved them to the slower sectors.  I had a bunch of 12TB??  drives using this.  Terrible for large media writes (fine on reads). 

On the RAID vs JBOD.  I've lost the odd drive in my time and it does not take down the JBOD pools, just those files are inaccessible till you restore them from backup.  On the RAID front I've lost an entire array.  Had to re-rip all my discs.  Took a month.  Now that is downtime.  I'll never run without a backup ever again. 

[zybex]

SMR = Shingled Magnetic Recording. Overlaid tracks. Good for write-once, read-many times, but it's really a pain if for some reason you need to restore a multi-TB backup or something like that.

Yes, RAID is not backup.

[jmone]

Yeah - that them!  Avoid for what we need. 

[Manfred]

First Thank You for your responses!

Currently I have 8 (2+2+4) TB Sata SSD in the Workstation and 38 TB SATA HDD (Movies & Series) + 8 TB for Bakup in Win 10 based File Server (not able to upgrade to Win 11). File Server has only Movies & Series. Documents, Images, Audio & Video: Music are on the Workstation.

I don't use RAID but regular local and Acronis Cloud Backups (Documents & Images).

The question for me was to add 2x22 or 3x16 TB to the Workstation and add a NAS for Backup or
replace the File Server with a NAS for storing Movies & Series and a additional disk for Backup the Workstation.

I have no experience using drives > 12 TB in a Workstaion (can you shut down the Workstation with 7x24 drives - they want to be always on ?).

So the key question is : Workstation + New Fileserver for Movies & Series or Workstation with large disks + NAS for Backup?

[jmone]

There is nothing fundamentally different in regard to what capacity the HDD are.  My "Main Pool" sits in my everyday Windows PC that is always on, but you can setup the power saving options to spin the drives down when not in use.  I've got solid state for the OS, video editing etc, but all the media is consolidated onto one pool the comprises of various HDD.  The backup pool is all HDD (well each one does have a solid state fast 1tb drive that acts as a "buffer" for quick file transfers, but I've got them connected over 10Gbs, and this is entirely optional).

PS - great to see you do backups!

[zybex]

NAS drives can be shut down just as often as the "normal" ones, it's just that they're also rated for continuous 24/7 operation whereas the regular ones are not. The differences are most likely just firmware and possibly some better materials in the RW head to withstand heavier use. NAS-rated drives can fail just like any other drive - keep in mind that the vast majority of fails occurs during power up/down, that's no different for these.

Personally I think using a NAS for backup is a waste. It's designed to be up 24/7, and that's really not needed for a backup system. If you do get a NAS, make sure it has a separate SSD/M2 slot for the OS or else it may prevent the disks from sleeping/spinning down (looking at you, cheap QNAP! Damn OS wakes up all disks every few minutes just to write something to the logs because the OS in also in a RAID5 partition, almost impossible to tame)

So for me, NAS for all media and extra disk(s) for backups. You could also run MC Server on some NAS with a container, but I personally don't have experience with that. I use a NUC attached to the 4K TV as the MC server.

Win11 on unsupported PCs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug__CVQQQsc

[Manfred]

What I like to have storage in the workstation: Tagging is much faster as over the network. I had some changes to all Movies & Series - a took a few hours (1gbit network).

[zybex]

True. Though most NAS units with SSD support can use the SSD for write-cache, immensely speeding up such operations.