Hello!
I am getting the parts together for a tower server build. I plan on running Jellyfin, maybe dive into arrs and nextcloud for 2 users total, wireguard only for external access as it’s not the main focus for now.
Situation: if I have access to refurb/used 4TB enterprise HDDs at the same price as 1.9ish TB enterprise SSDs.
I’d take lower capacity as it is not that big of a concern for me rn. I want to have somewhat redundant storage of my documents, photos, but otherwise it’s not gonna be a giant media vault overflowing with movies.
Question: In terms of noise, shipping concerns and longevity, would you go with SSDs instead of HDDs? Is it lower maintenance?
I can of course buy spinners later if I find flash only to be restricting in any way, and add to the rig as needed.
Speed would not be an issue in any case. This is for TrueNAS scale, so zfs. I am planning to buy 3-4 disks now, and add more if needed in 6 months time or later.
I am eager to hear others opininons on this. Thanks!
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My home server is equipped with SSDs. There’s a couple of reasons for that. The 2 main ones are Speed and Energy Consumption.
My server is placed in a different room of the house, so I’m not bothered with noise, but if it was in in my office, noise would be another reason to get the SSDs.
The only upside to HDDs is probably the GiB/$ you get. Otherwise SSDs are just as good or better these days.
My tower server is put away behind a wooden door. It has 1 fan that’s inaudible because it’s large and it runs slow, and it has 5 HDDs. I can’t hear them spinning. All I can hear through the door is the clicking of the HDDs’ heads, and only when it’s quiet around.
I would go with HDDs again. Cheaper per TB and Ionger life.
HDDs have a longer lifespan?
Failure rates for sdd are better than hdd but generally not by a lot. I’ve read that hdds can have a higher “crib death” where new drives have a higher failure rate, but after like a year they are solid. Unless you’re buying thousands of drives you’re unlikely to notice though.
I’ve never heard of “noise” being an issue for an hdd - especially if you have it in any sort of enclosure. If you’re not sitting right next to it you shouldn’t notice.
The biggest differences are performance and cost. If you want speed go ssd. If you want cheap go hdd.
My desktop systems run ssd where performance really matters to me. I get hdds for my file server where I want bulk storage.
The noise is only an issue because of how small my appartment is. I can’t really isolate noise in here. I would think it also depends on which drives I get. I read that some are louder than others.
Ah - this is true it can depend on the drive. The biggest variation tends to be in the loudness of the ‘clicking’ as the head moves. Older SCSI drives were (in)famous for how loud that could be. For the most part it’s a light hum of the motor. In my systems the case fan’s are much louder though. I suppose it’s a personal preference.
It’s generally at the “whisper” level or lower. But thinking about it being in my living room I could see it potentially being an annoyance compared to a silent drive. Depending on where it is, how enclosed it is, etc.
I have very recently acquired 4x18TB Seagate Exos drives for a fresh server. I parked them in an old case I had lying around where i was barely able to secure them all with screws, and cooling was especially problematic. Noise was horrible. standby noise was already audbile in the entire room. and when writing data while parity calculations were running, you could hear it in the entire apartment. The noise travelled through the wooden floor into every other room.
I have now moved the server and the drives into the fractal define 7 case. the drives rest on specially made rubber bearings that came with the case. the sides are noise isolated. the system is running with 6 fans total, 3 of which are 120mm corsair fans repurposed, and 3 are 140mm from the define 7. the server is now close to noiseless. vibrations do not rattle the case as with the old one. the rubber bearings isolate most of the vibration anyways. all that is left is a bit of head clacking, which gets isolated away from the case sides.
long story short: the drives are only half the story. you need a proper enclosure that is noise isolated. the define 7 is comparatively huge, but it gives you immense room to grow and was truly a godsent regarding noise.
Thanks for the insights on the case and drives!
I have an old Silverstone case with about 6 of the old style 3,5" drive mounts and 3x5,25" bay. Originally I had a Samsung 1TB drive in it (which is still kicking around somehow pulling torrent drive duty) I remember it being louder in that case then in my new one. So I’ll have to test it out. If i can get my hands on some rubber bearings and if they help any at all.
I am not planning to go that big on storage for now tho. It sounds like serious work. I am doing this so I can be more comfortable. Aside from updates, I want to dial it in once and forget it unless I need to touch it.
Since you’re going to go with 4TB drives, they may already make less noise just based on that. At these lower capacities (would have been an insane thing to call 4TB drives a couple years ago lol) they’re built differently.
If you’re not gonna use a “proper sound isolated case”, let me share these two ressources for custom sound dampening cases: https://silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=70364
https://silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=8240&sid=d238d6b11e22a2ee94bdd902078aa1ecBoth taught me a handful of things about what I can do beyond buying an isolated case to reduce noise output. Maybe they will be of help to you too. Best of luck!
I have very recently acquired 4x18TB Seagate…
There’s your first problem.
I know, people like to call them noisy. I’m sure they are, but I have no point of reference. I’ve never interacted with 18TB drives before. And as I’ve written in the comment, with the Define 7 I’m having absolutely zero noise issues. The maximum noise I am able to get out of the drives is when writing during parity calculations, and this scenario now causes near zero audible noise. I am wonderfully happy with what I have.
Not noise; their failure rate was HORRIBLE for a while, then there was the firmware debacle that bricked drives, and then there was when they dropped their warranty from 5 years to 3 years to 1 year……
WD Red are the quieter you can find and they can spin down if you configure them to do so. Seagate Exos drives are the most loud and annoying drives you can get, they won’t also spin down no matter what you set their config to.
I have a bunch of WD HDDs (9) in my Fractal Design Define R7 case sitting on top of my desk, about 2ft away at ear level, and can barely hear them. If anything the hum of the fans is what I can hear most (though still quiet). I have a security camera NVR with a little 40mm fan 12ft away on top of a high shelf in my office and I can hear it over my server by quite a large margin.
Even if rebuilding it today, I’d go for HDDs as you can’t buy 12, 14, 18TB, etc SSDs for a couple hundred bucks and you won’t really gain any benefit using SSD over HDD as reading large movie files from a disk isn’t going to saturate the drive cache and you won’t be dealing with random seeking.
You said you might upgrade all the drives in the future but how (2nd NAS?) and what will you do with the old ones? 4x4TB is going to fill up pretty fast especially when you’re first starting out and eager to add new titles.
Failure rates for sdd are better than hdd
I’m curious on where did you find this. Maybe they have lower DOA rates and decreased chances to fail in the first year, but SSDs have a limited usage lifetime / limited writes, so even if they don’t fail quickly, they wear out over time and at first they have degraded performance, but finally succumb in 5 years or less, even when lightly used (as in as OS drives).
To avoid DOA / first year issues with HDDs, just have the patience to fully scan them before using with a good disk testing app.
Backblaze and other “bulk storage providers” tend to release reports every-now-and-then about the lifetime of their drives (it’s important for them to understand the costs). Here’s one such Backblaze Report.
At this point we can reasonably claim that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs, at least when used as boot drives in our environment.
Holy shit, I stand corrected, those graphs speak for themselves. Bookmarked for future stats.
LE: Well, there’s also the section about average age of failure in their newest report: 2 years and 7 months for HDDs, 14 months for SSDs.
Yeah there are a lot of ways to cut the data. Average age of failure doesn’t mean more things fail, just that if they do fail they’re likely to be around that age.
In general the reliability seems to be “close enough” between the two that it won’t matter for a home user who doesn’t have 10,000 storage units running in a server room. 😀
The write cycles shouldn’t really be an issue for a home NAS because you’re not erasing and rewriting over and over. For commercial projects, where logs, security video, or rotating data needs to be stored and erased hundreds of thousands of times.
True, but it depends from person to person and it counts if you have a small or big drive, how often you watch and rotate your media, how large the media is. If you only have a 1TB SSD, and often download and watch blue-ray quality, 20 movies will fill it. It won’t be long until the same blocks get erased, no matter how much the SSDs firmware tries to spread the usage and avoid reusing the same blocks.
Anyway, my point is, aside from noise and lower power consumption advantages, I wouldn’t use SSDs for a NAS, I regard them as consumables. Speed isn’t really an issue in HDDs.
Good point, but let’s say you download 20 new movies, meaning rewrite to every block on the drive each week. That’s barely 1,000 write cycles a year, and we’re still talking about a hundred thousand write cycles, which would take 100 years. Even if you start seeing bad blocks at 10,000 write cycles, by the time the drives are wearing out, the cost of replacement drives should be considerably lower.
Would you suggest some good testing app? I just use crystal disk info to see the stats. Never ran a test as such.
I use Hard Disk Sentinel, it’s not free, but it also monitors drives in Windows so you have an early warning at the first sign of issues. Also logs historic data (writes, temperature, etc) and displays them as graphs.
even consumer SSDs have around 1500 TBW (Terrabytes written) per TB until warrenty excludes any failure
which means you could write for example every day for 10 years 400 GB on a 1 TB SSD
this is already a very low estimate, most SSDs do betteranyway OP mentioned enterprise SSDs which can write 1.0x or 2.0x it’s own size every day for 10 years
I’ve never heard of “noise” being an issue for an hdd - especially if you have it in any sort of enclosure. If you’re not sitting right next to it you shouldn’t notice.
No. I can’t stand the noise of HDDs.
That’s fair.
I don’t like the noise
Yes you do
My home server is a NUC inside an Akasa Turing fanless case with an 8TB Samsung 870 QVO SSD for my file shares. Works great and it’s completely silent.
It should go without saying that routine, off-site backups are an important element of server administration, regardless of drive type. Mine are completed monthly, and critical data (docs, keepass databases, etc.) is also synced across multiple devices using Syncthing.
I don’t plan to neglect backups. Currently I use Syncthing as well, but only between non-redundant storage locations, so I have duplicates. Like phone pushes photos to pc or laptop, those sync them between each other. Important docs that I can’t lose are also on all 3 devices.
And I plan to keep the local storage of mission critical data around on some clients at least. I just want to have a central, more robust, redundant system where one or 2 disks can fail without my data being gone or corrupted.
Yeah, it definitely sounds like you’ve got the right approach already. If you can manage your data within the lower storage capacities, I think you’ll appreciate the reduced noise and power consumption of the SSDs.
I have 4 spinny disks in my NAS. The tile the server is sitting on makes more noise than the drives. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
SSD’s will be much quieter and faster but they are also way more expensive.
I have a hp server rack, with 6sas 4tb hdd and 2 sata 800gb ssd (for boot drive only) The main noise maker are clearly the HDD, at least I know when a linux iso is being download from my arr suite! But the HDD don’t make noise 24/7, just sometimes when there is a lot of write.
I’d recommend using a ssd as a cache for the spinnin rust, and another ssd for the boot drive of your OS (I use proxmox btw)
I personally have used the cheap ssd prices this year to buy a 4 TB ssd for my NAS. Reasons for this decision include physical space, energy consumption and noise.
However, the backup for my NAS is on a HDD.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV) RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
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From my experience, SSDs are more prone to failure and have limited writes. They are ment for running the OS, databases for fast access, and games / apps. They are not ment for long time storage and frequent overwrites, like movies, which usually means download, delete and repeat which wears the memory quickly. One uses electric current to short memory cells and switch them from 0 to 1 and viceversa, the other uses a magnetic layer which supports a lot more overwrites on the same bit.
If keeping important data on them, I would use them only in a redundant RAID configuration and/or with frequent backups so I wouldn’t cry if one of them fails. And when they fail, there are no recovery options as with HDDs (even if very expensive, at least you have a chance).
I also wouldn’t touch used server SSDs, their lifetime is already shortened from the start. I had 3 Intel, enterprise-grade SSD changes in our company servers, each after about 3 years - they just wear out. For consumer / home SSDs the typical lifetime is 5 years, but that takes into account minor / “normal” usage, ie. if used as OS disks. And maybe power users could extend that with moving the swap/pagefile and temporary files (ie browser cache, logs, etc) on a spinning disk, but it defeats the purpose of having an SSD for speed in the first place.
If you have media (like movies) in mind, you’ll find sooner than later that you’ll need more space, and with HDDs the price per GB is lower than SSDs.
If you have no issue with 1. noise, 2. speed (any HDD is fast enough for movie playback and are decent for download), 3. concurrent access, or 4. physical shocks from transport, go with HDDs, even used ones.
My two, personal opinion cents.
HDDs wear out too. The liftime of an SSD are just way more deterministic then the lifetime of an HDD. Also reading is way easier on an SSD then on an HDD. (No moving parts and the cells get basically not touched much) SSDs too are meant to overwrite write and read data or do you use a HDD as a data cache?
If noise is a big factor then SSDs are the easiest choice. But they are way more expensive compared to high capacity HDDs(16TB+ are going for less then 15€/TB) When conparing low capacity drives like 4TB then the price for an 4TB SSDs is not too outlandish(still hgher)
An interesting take, and not very popular among the other comments, but I suppose you have your experiences and reasons to say this.
As I mentioned RAID is on the table, no problem with that. It is kind of the point to have a safer, more centralized storage for important stuff, and space for keeping media.
Speed wouldn’t be a concern. Noise is, since my apartment is very small. And reliability over time would be. Especially power cycles, or spin down - spin up events. I figured if I used SSDs, I could leave the whole rig powered on 24/7 But with HDDs I think I would probably need to turn the system off for the night.
Correct me if I am wrong about enterprise grade SSDs, but if I have the power on time and the TBW values for the drives along with the manufacturing date, ones with reasonable combination of those could be bought for a reasonable price. After some testing they could also be trusted. At what point would you expect an SSD like this to last some years in a home server environment? I am not an expert but with some pointers this should be easy to figure out, which is why I am asking.
