Been finding some good deals on 2.5 disks lately, but have never bought one before. Have a couple of 3.5 disks on the other hand in my Unraid server. Wondering how much it matters wether I get a 2.5 or not? What form factor do you prefer/usually go for?
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Power-consumption.
Also, the vibration produced by the 2.5" drives is less, but they’re more-sensitive to it, to begin with.
I’d not even consider spinning-platter drives, nowadays, though:
SATA SSD’s for a NAS strike me as being the sanest choice.
Samsung what are those called, Evo drives?
excellently-high MTBF, ultra-short ( compared with rotating-platters ) seek-time ( literally orders-of-magnitude quicker ), etc.
I don’t know of ANY reason to go with spinning-platters, nowadays.
( & I’m saying that as a guy stupid-enough to have not realized this in time, & who spent money on such a thing, when SSD’s really were the answer )
Cost? I bought 3x 8TB Ironwolf drives for £115. That’d cost about £1.5k in SSDs.
Running ZFS on consumer SSDs is absolute no go, you need datacenter-rated ones for power loss protection. Price goes brrrrt €€€€€
I too had an idea for a ssd-only pool, but I scaled it back and only use it for VMs / DBs. Everything else is on spinning rust, 2 disks in mirror with regular snapshots and off-site backup.
Now if you don’t care about your data, you can just spin up whatever you want in a 120€ 2TB ssd. And then cry once it starts failing under average load.
Edit: having no power loss protection with ZFS has an enormous (negative) impact on performance and tanks your IOPS.
I don’t know of ANY reason to go with spinning-platters, nowadays.
Price per terabyte is lower on HDDs. For bulk storage they are currently the best path. SSDs are catching up though, and there are cases where a SSD based NAS does make sense. But most folks at home don’t have the network capability to fully utilize their speed. Network becomes the bottleneck.
