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Comment by tachion | Hacker News Reader

Get yourself Avoton motherboard, buy as many WD Green/Red drives that have best cost/space ratio as your chosen enclosure and budget can handle, install FreeNAS, enjoy ;)

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If you're going to put WD Greens in a FreeNAS, run wdidle to increase or disable the idle spin down timer in the drive first.

How commonly do WD Greens actually fail? I'm either strangely lucky, or the whole unreliable WD Greens thing is way overblown because I've been using three 1TB ones without incident for 5 years now..

It's actually hard to say. You might be very lucky, someone else might be very unlucky. Generally, RAID was 'invented' to operate on cheap, commodity hardware, where the failure rate might be high. When it comes to data, most reliable one you can find (mostly due to its probe size and lack of competitive reports of similar size) are Backblaze's drives reliability reports.

Exactly, thats why I switched to HGST. They really seem to be a cut above the rest.

I've exclusively purchased WD drives - and most of them are green. I have ten 2TB drives and two 5TB drives. 0 failures.

However from the IRC channels I frequent - many people have had one or two die over the years. So I consider myself lucky.

I had a 1TB WD Green drive that failed. Also had another failure with 320GB USB WD Passport.

Probably just bad luck, but I don't feel like buying another WD drive.

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