Does the form factor between 3.5 and 2.5 matter in a NAS server?
Been finding some good deals on 2.5 disks lately, but have never bought one before. Have a couple of 3.5 disks on the other hand in my Unraid server. Wondering how much it matters wether I get a 2.5 or not? What form factor do you prefer/usually go for?
Probably best to go with something in the 3.5" line, unless you’re going _enterprise$ 2.5" (which are entirely different birds than consumer drives)
Whatever you get for your NAS, make sure it’s CMR and not SMR. SMR drives do not perform well in NAS arrays.
Many years ago I for some low cost 2.5" Barracuda for my servers only to find out years after I bought them that they were SMR and that may have been a contributing factor to them not being as fast as I expected.
TLDR: Read the datasheet
Whatever you get for your NAS, make sure it’s CMR and not SMR. SMR drives do not perform well in NAS arrays.
I just want to follow this up and stress how important it is. This isn’t “oh, it kinda sucks but you can tolerate it” territory. It’s actually unusable. I inherited a Synology NAS at my current job which is used for backup storage, and my job was to figure out why it wasn’t working anymore. After investigation, I found out the guy before me populated it with cheapo SMR drives, and after a certain point they just become actually unusable due to the ripple effect of rewrites. I tried to format the array of five 6TB drives and it estimated it would take 30 days. After leaving it running for several days, I realized it wasn’t joking.
Do not buy SMR drives for any parity RAID usage, ever.
Sips'
computergeek125
Solar Bear