Hardrives newbie question

[kelso]

Hi Folks

 

I am about to set up my helios64 nas on an imac mini m1 or an older intel imac mini. Buying the NAS was risky for me as I am a newbie to Linux. Nevertheless fortune favours the brave and all that.

 

 

I am having difficulty finding the optimal set up of my helios64 NAS

 

Do I buy a m.2 sata ssd and 4 western digital red pro hard drives?

 

Do the hard drives have to be identical?

 

Assuming I am buying 

Western Digital WD Red Pro NAS 4TB HDD, WD4003FFBX

whats the best m.2 sata to pair up with these?

 

I do have the 2.5 inch adapter.

 

 

[Werner]

What do you need a ssd for?

 

1 hour ago, kelso said:

Do the hard drives have to be identical?

Only if you plan to play with raid levels it is highly recommended to use identical drives.

[clostro]

@kelsoAny SSD will be fast enough for the network or USB speeds of this device. If you are buying new you can pick WD red, Samsung Evo, Sandisk Ultra/Extreme, Seagate firepro (?) ... just stay away from little or no known brands. You can check the models you picked and compare them here - https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/

They are getting a well deserved grilling for their CPU comparisons but I think their SSD data is good enough. I would be looking for the best 'Mixed' value for performance for use in this device, as the network and USB speeds are capping the max read or write speed anyhow.

 

Western Digitals you picked use CMR, which is supposedly much better than SMR, can take a look at this table if you have to pick other models. https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/

 

One suggestion before you put any critical data into those brand new disks- Run 'smart' tests on each drive, long tests. Should take about 10 hours I think. 

 

One of my brand new Seagates couldn't complete a test at first run and had to be replaced. Now I'm on edge and running nightly borg backups to an older NAS because the other disks are from the same series. Call me paranoid but I usually stagger HDD purchases by a few days in between, and/or order from different stores to avoid having them from the same production batch, couldn't do that this time around.

 

 

@WernerI use 4 4TB Seagate NAS drives, whatever their branding was.. And an old 240GB Sandisk Extreme SSD for Raid caching. LVM Raid 5 + dm-cache(read and write, writeback, smq). It ain't bad. SSD really picks up the slack of the spinning rust especially when you are pushing random writes to the device, and the smq is pretty smart at read caching for hot files.