Man even these top tier enterprise drives are now surprisingly affordable, I’ve been looking at building a NAS/home lab for a while now and there seems to be little reason not to use these datacenter drives for it.
Why wouldn't you get the Ironwolf line for NAS drives? They're made for it and also affordable CMR drives.
Also question for data hoarders out here: Is HAMR viable for home NAS? I know SMR isn't because re-slivering or rebuilding is prohibitively slow, but I don't understand the HAMR tradeoffs
At least here in the UK, the enterprise drives are often way cheaper than the NAS drives. They are in theory louder, but in practice as long as you have them in a reasonable case the difference isn't noticable, in my experience.
I have a 10TB exos at home in a silent case with foam, and I can hear the drive from downstairs when it’s transfering data. It’s really loud, I will avoid them in the future.
The Ironwolf Pro 16TB (which is around the sweet spot today in $/tb) is literally only $20 cheaper than the Exos X16. At that point why bother? Just buy the enterprise drive with all of the reliability features.
I went from WD Red plus (SOHO, 5400rpm) to WD and Seagate data center drives because I wanted 18Tb drives and both the Exos and WD data center drives are significantly louder than the Red Plus. I was after density but if anyone really wants a NAS in a home environment, seriously consider consumer/smb drives or going with flash if you value silence.
The head on my X16 was very loud. So much so that you could hear it from across the room (when it was in the PC case). May have been a dodgy unit; not sure, but it packed up roughly 2 years after being installed.
Most mobo's have supported 6Gb/s for the past 5+ years - SATA III was released in 2009. I would be surprised if you have a running motherboard on a not-intentionally-retro computer without SATAIII; My ancient gaming machine (now a fileserver)from 2012 has all ports SATAIII and is capable of achieving those speeds.
