A while ago I got myself an used business desktop to turn into a NAS. Put a couple memory sticks in it, a small SSD to run TrueNAS, filled it to the gills with HDD. Filled to the gills, in this case, means using all 3 of its drive bays and onboard SATA connectors with two 3.5" HGST 4TB drives and one 2.5" Seagate 4TB drive. The drives were all used, the HGST bought on a used server parts website (they now have 9 years of power on time), the Seagate through eBay (and reporting almost no usage time, which of course was false). This is all too high-stakes gambling for this group, so I spared you this story.

A couple weeks ago the Seagate small drive was no longer answering SMART diagnostics. And now it really started crapping out. So I thought I’d be less of a cheapskate and buy a brand new drive. Even spinning drives have gone up in price nowadays with the gestures broadly at everything going on. 2.5" maximum size means I can’t really put a server-grade HDD in, so another “notebook” Seagate BarraCuda is what I got that fit my budget. 5TB this time. Seller seems legit, what I could understand from what smartmontools spat out, it seems kosher. Not like I know what else I could do to check the authenticity of the drive / make sure it’s actually new.

So, conveyance test passed, short test passed, and overnight long SMART test passed too. It’s now re-silvering the RAID.

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    3·
    8 hours ago

    I use 2.5" drives all the time in Small Form Factor Desktops (sounds like what you’re using).

    I even added a 4-sata PCI expansion card in one to run a RAID (Proxmox).

    It’s fine, but as another comment noted just avoid SMR drives when doing this.

    You DON’T need enterprise class drives. Just remember that EVERY drive WILL fail at some point, so setup stuff with that expectation.

    Like my current server is an SFF with a spinning disk drive for data, an SSD for running VMs. I then have an ancient NAS and 2 external drives for data duplication. Not ideal, but I’m fairly well protected against hardware failure this way (data is duplicated to the other drives on a schedule). Most I may lose is a couple days of data, which is trivial.