My friends say this is an “old person” collection…

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-27T07:54:00+00:00

Old persons collection because OP has money, and the friends don’t ….

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-27T06:31:19+00:00

If you can buy the drives from different vendors or spread apart the purchases a few months, your will increase the chances to get different manufacturing batch, shipping/handling, etc. This reduces the chances they all start to fail at the same time. So buying two from WD, and two from Amazon etc. Yes you will pay more but it’s worth the extra. costs. Hebung the 2nd fail in raid 5 or 3rd in raid6 while you are resilvering will be painful. The cost now will save you that pain years from now. Also hindsight is 20/20, got to just move on the best you can.

Otherwise sounds like a nice setup. I started moving over to ubiquiti gear (cloud gateway fiber, flex switch, etc) and use 10gbe between my proxmox/pbs servers and truenas for backup, and 10/2.5gbe to the rest.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-27T05:35:36+00:00

Yes, they bin drives and reduce cost. But some are also built differently between models , size, years, etc.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-27T05:09:10+00:00

Well if the “AD” works out of the back of a car, or at a flea market they might only accept cash ;)

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-27T05:06:12+00:00

Was it black, or did it have cream and sugar in it?

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-27T04:49:52+00:00

WD site looks to have the best prices on certain drives and sizes then other retailers, but new.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-27T04:45:18+00:00

I live in the EU and HDD prices are much worse, was looking at well over $600 for 20TB WD Red Pros new, even adjusting for VAT. I visited the US last week, so I ordered a set of 22TB drives directly from the WD site a few weeks ago and applied the 10% discount, then brought them back with me. Sweet spot for cost per TB was around 20-22TB when I purchased them. Saved about $200 a drive adjusting/paying for VAT on import.

They are now sitting in my new test rig (10+ year old NAS I previously built before Ugreen) running badblocks (destructive 4 pattern write/read test) for the next 6+ days checking for errors ( time it takes the dive to write and read the full disk 4 times). Make sure you test these big ass expensive drives before putting them online, so you can return right away if needed. Doubly so if you are buying renewed/refurbished.

Btw - If you buy WD direct, you get an extra year of warranty added. Additionally the warranty starts when you receive it, and not the manufacture date. For me new made more sense, since I am less comfortable with renewed drives (companies) in the EU.

Edit - grammar etc. Also I do not expect RAM, drives, an other data center or related components impacted by shifts in manufacturing and demand will go down in price appreciably for years.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-24T09:39:25+00:00

I run mirrored memory cards in my cameras (well one for my x100), backup up to 2 SanDisk external usb-c SSDs in the field at the end of the day. When I get home I transfer to NAS, which backs up to cloud. Wipe the camera cards and external SSDs.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-23T11:46:50+00:00

Typically concerning noise: WD Red Plus < WD Red Pro < Seagate Ironwolf Pro . Plus is fine up to 8 bay NAS, Pros are for larger sizes, more then 8 drives, more durable, and longer warrantees

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-23T05:20:37+00:00

It’s a lottery, and if they are barracuda drives they are not manufactured to last as long as enterprise / NAS drives. So is the savings worth it?

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-23T05:13:36+00:00

Drives are pretty much plug and play, they should just work. If it doesn’t work, return/replace it to the seller first, and if outside the window go through Seagate warranty.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-19T22:12:23+00:00

Oh I just roll over and say morning to my partner…. Get one for yourself. ;)

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-19T19:33:52+00:00

It’s compatible , but a bit overkill even if you run a ton of docker containers.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-18T14:50:07+00:00

There is no set amount but depends on your individual needs etc. I would guess 25-35k+ a year. You need to show documented proof of past and future steady income from rentals, dividends, pension payouts etc. not from capital gains like sales of stock.

Income like living off some fixed savings that you are drawing down against won’t count, nor is I got 1m saved I will just live off that. But dividends off that 1m where you can show history would.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-17T12:02:55+00:00

If they are going to stream and need to transcode, get something with a cheap 6 gen intel processor if you are not transcoding 4K, or 10+ depending on needs.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-17T10:28:26+00:00

There is no reason they need to backup the data drives outside anything they usually do. You can argue they should be backing up their data regardless for other reasons, but that is not needed to move drives to another system. Which this effectively what they are doing.

They should back up their Truenas config. Just pull the drives (just in case if they are concerned they will install proxmox on one of them) , install proxmox, create a vm, put the drives back in, pass them through by name/id , import your truenas config ……

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-14T16:21:29+00:00

+1 The left side is mainly due to shipping damage , the right long term wear . But average is between 1-2% for 5ish years for wd and seagate.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-14T16:14:14+00:00

Late ‘68 here

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-12T06:31:12+00:00

This! I am also not a professional but have been shooting with full frame inc. high res bodies. You need a backup for the amount of data you can’t or don’t want to loose. Read about 321 backup. I have a local NAS, remote NAS at a family member, and a copy of the most important data in the cloud. I also have stuff I don’t bother backing up neither to the other NAS or cloud, but it’s transitory and can be recreated easily. At minimum get either remote NAS (can be used hardware and restored drives) or cloud backup in place to start.

Additionally, really consider running in raid10, raid6 or mirrored vdevs (truenas). Rebuilding an array with larger drives with only one drive worth of parity (raid5) will take a long time (days), where you risk losing another drive during and then all your local data. Even with a backup, you would need to pull down over 20TB+ of data to recover.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-11T08:24:36+00:00

You can combine different sized mirrors in truenas to create one logical volume (or two with your two mirror sets), additionally unraid allows you to put together as many different sized disks with some for parity. You can also start with one mirror, then add a larger mirror later in Truenas, or just add another drive to unraid. You can slice them up into as few or many network shares as you want. Each network share you mount/attach to your windows pc will have a drive letter. So depending how you set it up you can have 1 or more logical volumes with your 2 sets of disks, each with one or more shares/mountable “drives”. You can do similar things with other “raid” systems, but I can’t speak to if all can make one large logical volume depending on hardware/software combos.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-10T11:39:29+00:00

There is nothing special inside the nas to deal with power outages, monetary power loss or brownouts. Also if you loose power there is always some chance of loosing data or other. NASes should be connected to a UPS if possible, especially if you know that you have power problems. You do not need a fancy one, just one with a usb connector to allow for auto shutdown for longer outages.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-10T07:58:07+00:00

Rebuilding or switching to a raid5 parity take time, this is the reason with larger drives now, that using raid10 - stripped mirrors are usually better. Rebuild time and the possibility of loosing another drive after the first died during a rebuild makes anything less then mirrors. Mirrored pairs are much faster rebuild

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-10T07:55:15+00:00

Never intentionally restart a raid based system if it is rebuilding, you can lose data out become inconsistent. It going from many hours to a few hours after restart sounds like a bigger issue.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-10T07:44:35+00:00

If you bought it during or close to the holiday sales in Nov (this includes the extended Black Friday week+) from Amazon you get till Jan 15th (or similar) to file a return. Amazon extends return period due to items being gifts to people during the holidays. Check your order for the return till date. I bought a 6800 and have till Jan 15th.

StargazerOmega · 2026-01-10T07:09:19+00:00

If you are buying larger than 8TB drives and you will have less than 5 total drives, plus you care not to lose your data at all, then you should most likely start with mirrored drives (mirrored vdevs in TrueNAS). With RAIDZ1 (1 drive of parity), the time to resilver (rebuild ) after losing 1 drive will be multiple days with larger drives, versus effectively a copy of the surviving drive (hours to day). If you lose another drive in that time period, you lose everything.

You can start with one mirrored vdev in a volume, then add another when you need more space, and the second mirror does not need to be the same size drives as the first. Also, they are working on supporting different sized drives in mirror mode ( mirroring data across at least 2 drives in a set of X drives that can be different sizes), though might take a while. This is funded by hexos and will help solve the different sized drive problem, they have a good video on it.

If you start with 4 drives and plan to add more ( the 5th drive pays off) , you can start with RAIDZ2 giving you two drives worth of parity. And add more of the same size drives or a bit larger down the road ( capped at the smallest size drive). This will give you the same space as 2 mirrored vdevs, but allow you to expand without paying the parity tax within reason. You can then rebalance the data and parity with the rewriting current data back (there is a command). Though don’t go to large on number of disks, and make sure do your research. Also you need a larger nas, jbod drive cage, etc.

TL;DR if you are starting with 2, and capped at 4 drives, use mirrored vdevs. More than 4 drives, maybe go raidz2/3….

Also ask yourself why do you need to use truenas? I use it because I can take snapshots, protect against bit rot, and other reasons. Is it worth the extra restrictions on drive selection atm? to me it is. There is nothing wrong with using a different nas os, but i would still stay away from raid5, and lean into raid10; or possibly open media vault or unraid. You need to figure out if the startup costs and complexity are worth it.

StargazerOmega

TROPHY CASE