Quite the opposite. Use drives from as many different manufacturers as you can, especially when buying them at the same time. You want to avoid similar lifecycles and similar potential fabrication defects as much as possible, because those things increase the likelihood that they will fall close to each other - particularly with the stress of rebuilding the first one that failed.
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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You can use different manufacturers, just make sure they are the SAME size and speed. You can also get the same ones from the same vendor, just from different online shops to try and offset getting a bad batch.
I always thought you're supposed to buy similar drives so the performance is better for some reason (I guess the same logic as when picking RAM?) but this thread is changing my mind, I guess it doesn't matter after all👀
I heard the reverse, so they don't fail at the same time.
that's also what we did in the early 2000s when building servers. today i don't think it realy matters. i haven't had a failed drive for about 10 years and only needed to swap them out because of the capacity...
I actually thought about that quite a bit, back in the day hard drives were made of sugar-glass. Remember the desk-star? Hrm, the death star. Do anything? It breaks. Do nothing? 15% fail rate anyways (or so I remember).
Today I have a 3TB + 2TB (one backs up mostly the other) drives in my NAS (WD, black maybeee) and I think they are 10y plus ... I'm not using it as a real backup but I still think I should switch out one. But then again, the Synology is so old too...
I've heard about that newer Linux file system, "M" or "L" something where you just add drives and it sorts stuff out itself, maybe I should check that out...
ram matters because the CPU will use the worse speeds and worse timings of all the sticks, drive reads and rights are buffered so it doesn't really matter
Just make sure your RAM has the same timings. Its not a big deal if you have two sticks of each brand
Hardware or software (BTFRS, ZFS etc...) RAID?
Software
It probably doesn't matter in most cases, especially software RAID. I've had proprietary storage system vendors recommending being very careful about identical disks but that could just be salesman crap.
^this. but I'll go even further, do you @[email protected] really need RAID? How much date are you planning to write every day?
In some case, like a typical home users with a few writes per day or even week simply having a second disk that is updated every day with rsync may be a better choice. Consider that if you're two mechanical disks spinning 24h7 they'll most likely fail at the same time (or during a RAID rebuild) and you'll end up loosing all your data. Simply having one active disk (shared on the network and spinning) and the other spun down and only turned on once a day with a cron rsync job mean your second disk will last a LOT longer and you'll be safer.
Right up until that job to turn the other drive and run the backup stops and then you don’t realize it until 17 months later.
Either way, RAID ain’t a backup, but it makes losing a drive easier.
If you don't setup and monitor things properly everything fails and keep going in an unpredictable state - even a software RAID.
If you haven't looked into it, and if you already have the disks of varying capacity, check out JBOD. You will have to configure a system for backups however as you wont have parity like raid1
Raid is not a backup...
I'm aware, but raid 1 is mirroring which is redundancy, a jbod offers no redundancy so a backup would be even more crucial to protecting from data loss. Also i never said raid is a backup.
JBOD via mergerfs and snapraid on top for parity is a possible solution.
That's a solution i never knew existed, that's cool as hell.
Any performance hit for that config, I've never heard of that setup before.
Don't know myself as I have no use case for that setup, but it is a well known setup since several years. If teh performance was bad it wouldn't be recommended as an alternative as often.
Can't you just format jbod with zfs or some other raid solution? I'm sure it depends on hardware but it shouldn't be rocket science
As long as they're mostly the same. For example on many controllers no mixing SSDs with HDDs.
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 |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #328 for this sub, first seen 2nd Dec 2023, 20:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I usually find the cheapest drives and buy multiple of those, but you should be able to assemble a RAID out of different disks, though you'll be limited to the space of the smallest one in the mirror set.
Also make sure that your RAID systems supports this.
Okay. Where do you buy the disks?
Ebay. If you're outside the US, you'll probably be better off with a more local site.
ebay is very international, and is also by far the greatest site for second-hand stuff in most European countries. I normally buy my used drives there.
I would strongly recommend that you get the same drive. It doesn't make any sense not too