Hello!
I am getting the parts together for a tower server build. I plan on running Jellyfin, maybe dive into arrs and nextcloud for 2 users total, wireguard only for external access as it’s not the main focus for now.
Situation: if I have access to refurb/used 4TB enterprise HDDs at the same price as 1.9ish TB enterprise SSDs.
I’d take lower capacity as it is not that big of a concern for me rn. I want to have somewhat redundant storage of my documents, photos, but otherwise it’s not gonna be a giant media vault overflowing with movies.
Question: In terms of noise, shipping concerns and longevity, would you go with SSDs instead of HDDs? Is it lower maintenance?
I can of course buy spinners later if I find flash only to be restricting in any way, and add to the rig as needed.
Speed would not be an issue in any case. This is for TrueNAS scale, so zfs. I am planning to buy 3-4 disks now, and add more if needed in 6 months time or later.
I am eager to hear others opininons on this. Thanks!
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I personally have used the cheap ssd prices this year to buy a 4 TB ssd for my NAS. Reasons for this decision include physical space, energy consumption and noise.
However, the backup for my NAS is on a HDD.
My home server is equipped with SSDs. There’s a couple of reasons for that. The 2 main ones are Speed and Energy Consumption.
My server is placed in a different room of the house, so I’m not bothered with noise, but if it was in in my office, noise would be another reason to get the SSDs.
The only upside to HDDs is probably the GiB/$ you get. Otherwise SSDs are just as good or better these days.
I have 4 spinny disks in my NAS. The tile the server is sitting on makes more noise than the drives. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Failure rates for sdd are better than hdd but generally not by a lot. I’ve read that hdds can have a higher “crib death” where new drives have a higher failure rate, but after like a year they are solid. Unless you’re buying thousands of drives you’re unlikely to notice though.
I’ve never heard of “noise” being an issue for an hdd - especially if you have it in any sort of enclosure. If you’re not sitting right next to it you shouldn’t notice.
The biggest differences are performance and cost. If you want speed go ssd. If you want cheap go hdd.
My desktop systems run sdd where performance really matters to me. I get hdds for my file server where I want bulk storage.
I’ve never heard of “noise” being an issue for an hdd - especially if you have it in any sort of enclosure. If you’re not sitting right next to it you shouldn’t notice.
No. I can’t stand the noise of HDDs.
The noise is only an issue because of how small my appartment is. I can’t really isolate noise in here. I would think it also depends on which drives I get. I read that some are louder than others.
Ah - this is true it can depend on the drive. The biggest variation tends to be in the loudness of the ‘clicking’ as the head moves. Older SCSI drives were (in)famous for how loud that could be. For the most part it’s a light hum of the motor. In my systems the case fan’s are much louder though. I suppose it’s a personal preference.
It’s generally at the “whisper” level or lower. But thinking about it being in my living room I could see it potentially being an annoyance compared to a silent drive. Depending on where it is, how enclosed it is, etc.
I have very recently acquired 4x18TB Seagate Exos drives for a fresh server. I parked them in an old case I had lying around where i was barely able to secure them all with screws, and cooling was especially problematic. Noise was horrible. standby noise was already audbile in the entire room. and when writing data while parity calculations were running, you could hear it in the entire apartment. The noise travelled through the wooden floor into every other room.
I have now moved the server and the drives into the fractal define 7 case. the drives rest on specially made rubber bearings that came with the case. the sides are noise isolated. the system is running with 6 fans total, 3 of which are 120mm corsair fans repurposed, and 3 are 140mm from the define 7. the server is now close to noiseless. vibrations do not rattle the case as with the old one. the rubber bearings isolate most of the vibration anyways. all that is left is a bit of head clacking, which gets isolated away from the case sides.
long story short: the drives are only half the story. you need a proper enclosure that is noise isolated. the define 7 is comparatively huge, but it gives you immense room to grow and was truly a godsent regarding noise.
My home server is a NUC inside an Akasa Turing fanless case with an 8TB Samsung 870 QVO SSD for my file shares. Works great and it’s completely silent.
It should go without saying that routine, off-site backups are an important element of server administration, regardless of drive type. Mine are completed monthly, and critical data (docs, keepass databases, etc.) is also synced across multiple devices using Syncthing.
I don’t plan to neglect backups. Currently I use Syncthing as well, but only between non-redundant storage locations, so I have duplicates. Like phone pushes photos to pc or laptop, those sync them between each other. Important docs that I can’t lose are also on all 3 devices.
And I plan to keep the local storage of mission critical data around on some clients at least. I just want to have a central, more robust, redundant system where one or 2 disks can fail without my data being gone or corrupted.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV) RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
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