Comment by neilpanchal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilpanchal | Hacker News Reader

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> 4x the 14 TB WD Elements Desktop.

I recommend staying away from SATA drives (huge consumer rush) and look for SAS drives on eBay, particularly HC520 Helium drives from HGST/WD. Need a SAS3008 PCIe adapter ($20) and a SFF-8643 splitter ($30). No backplane is required. Huge lots of decommissioned drives frequently appear. I bought Qty 10* of HC520 (12TB) SAS drives for $1000 about 3 weeks ago, avg age is about 2.5 years, still well within its rated lifetime.

Yea may be some of the stuff is fear mongering and cargo culting. I was told ECC is necessary for ZFS. When the article was written, it was cheap af (2024) to buy ECC RAM so not much consideration was given to it.

-- (*) I have no idea what to do with it. Anyone has any good idea for using 120TB space? I have about 40TB unused bandwidth in the datacenter, may be host a Debian mirror? Donate storage/bandwidth to Internet Archive? Please contact me, appreciate it.

> I bought Qty 10* of HC520 (12TB) SAS drives for $1000 about 3 weeks ago, avg age is about 2.5 years, still well within its rated lifetime.

That's cheap indeed. Enough headroom for some failing disks too. How is the noise and power usage? I didn't look at SAS drives at all, because my impression was that they're very noisy. I can place my NAS in a closed off room, but it's not too far away and I was afraid SAS drives would be audible through the wall. At the same time, the shucked drive I'm using presents itself as an WD Ultrastar, which comes very close to a SAS drive, and isn't very noisy.

> How is the noise and power usage?

I think they're same as SATA drives, just different interface. AFAIK they have the same physical dimensions and same internals.

This reply is exactly right about using enterprise drives (hdd), and ideally SAS. Note the power usage of SAS vs sata for an identical drive make/model is very small sometimes 0.5 W to 1.5 W at idle (idle power draw is what matters for spinning HDD’s as underload it doesn’t increase much and idle is what you’ll be at 98% of the time). Also enterprise SSDs are much better than consumer SSD‘s for ZFS, and be aware that when you get above the 4 TB size SSD drives frequently use more power than HDD drives (i’m mainly referring to enterprise non-consumer level drives as that’s all I run for 100s of disks across many zfs systems over past 15 yrs).

Also something people forget for home nas or figuring out cost for a nas, the power draw of the entire system times your electricity price you then have to multiply this times 2x to 4x times if your climate requires cooling air conditioning of any kind

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