Hello ! I have a custom build NAS currently using 4x6TB hard drives in RAID10. I am looking for a capacity upgrade. My main focus are low power consumption and low noise (the NAS is in my living room / home office).
I can’t seem to find any 5400RPM HDD over 8TB in capacity anywhere. Is there any model with 10, 12 or more TB in existence ? If not, what could be the reasons ?
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It’s a niche of the hard drive market. It persists in “surveillance” HDDs but that’s because they’re optimized for endurance, and low noise is just a side effect.
Not too many people are putting a NAS in their living room.
Thanks, I will look for surveillance types of disks.
Living room is my only option.
Don’t do it, is my suggestion. Surveillance disks are optimized for continuous writing performance and not read performance. They mght be SMR version also which can play havoc in a NAS with lots of writes, as it can’t just rewrite one portion without relaying out the shingled overlayed tracks adjacent.
Toshiba has some SMR “Surveillance” models but WD and Seagate afaik are all CMR. It’s pretty dumb to have SMR surveillance drives, the main goal of a surveillance drive is to be able to write the data very fast no matter what.
Normally they’re just regular HDDs with tweaked firmware to make it a bit more lenient towards transient errors so as to not miss out on writing a block due to being overcautious. I’ve never seen any evidence that they’re otherwise optimized for writing over reading. I would have no problem using a surveillance (CMR) drive in a NAS.
The SMR does make sense for surveillance, because it is a constant stream layed down, it is not random write access changing a block in files of various places. This show has talked about their usage. The tolerance on dropping bits to keep going with the stream would worry me in data sensitive applications
There are spec sheets, but I have tested myself, brand new Purple Drive out of package and run disk bench marking read/write testing. Writing was steady, read rate was under performing compared to Blacks or Reds.
If you go for WD red plus 12TB drives, they are helium filled and less noisy even than the 8TB air versions.
I have one and it is silent when not tracking, but all hard drives have some seeking noise. Mostly because it is irregular so human ears pick it up more than white fan or spinning noise.
Best idea for absolute noise reduction in the same room is getting a good closed case, reinforcing with some foam panels with a direct air path that you can direct through a cupboard cutout for example.
What you are looking for is high capacity SSDs in this situation, but that is pricey.
at some point the stock motors will just evolve and the slow ones wont be available anymore. the supply chain will upgrade even if they dont require speed
I suppose the “low-cost consumer grade” market is now covered by SSDs and the HDD market is moving towards enterprise and enthusiasts only. There is not much market remaining for “lower performance” HDD…
Can’t you just slow them down? I remember doing that with a home theatre PC. I configured it with
hdparmto go to sleep very quickly and not run very fast because the movies I watched didn’t need much throughput.I think constantly changing noise is worse than a slightly louder but constant noise.
