Best bang for the buck hard drives?

[Thirdgen89GTA]

Been looking around a bit. NAS is at roughly 75% usage, so its time to start investigating into either expanding, or building a new NAS and selling the old.

So far the best bang for the buck seems to be the Toshiba X300 4TB drives. They are around $114, which is about 35GB/$.

The 5TB drives are about 33GB/$, and the 6TB about 30GB/$.

There are a few guys on the FreeNAS forums who have good reports on these drives, other than them being a bit noisier than others during seek.

Its not desktop enterprise class drive, but as soon as you attach enterprise to the name of a drive it usually doubles its price even if it doesn't double its reliability.

I'm not really ready to buy, but I tend to look at drive costs every 6 months or so.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B013JPLKQK/?tag=tcg21-20

Click to read more...

 

[muskie]

Just buy this.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01B6BN1CU/?tag=tcg21-20

It is designed for user replaceable drives so they can be removed without voiding the warranty. The shell can be used as a good backup target as well.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

Just buy this.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01B6BN1CU/?tag=tcg21-20

It is designed for user replaceable drives so they can be removed without voiding the warranty. The shell can be used as a good backup target as well.

I'll never trust those. Plus they are crap on CPU power, so can't do anywhere near the things my FreeNAS can.

And that 16TB is really just two 8TB drives in Raid-0. So one drive goes boom, there goes the entire 16TB volume.

I like redundancy in my data.

 

[muskie]

I'll never trust those. Plus they are crap on CPU power, so can't do anywhere near the things my FreeNAS can.

And that 16TB is really just two 8TB drives in Raid-0. So one drive goes boom, there goes the entire 16TB volume.

I like redundancy in my data.

If you read my comment I was saying buy it for the 8tb drives.

Not use the unit as is. They are about $100 per drive cheaper to buy in that. It is designed to remove the drives.

They are 2 8TB WD Red drives which are designed for 24 hour NAS use.

Edit: Sorry I re-read it and I didn't make that clear.

 

[muskie]

I should also mention that you can get about $50 for those chassis off ebay. So you'd be getting two NAS grade 2 8TB drives for $450 which comes out to under $30 per TB

 

[muskie]

Last post I swear. Also remember that Toshiba RMA process is horrendous. They give you a gift card to their store for the price you paid for the drive. So if the drive goes up in price you can't actually replace it.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

I did not realize they were Reds. I thought they would be crappiest desktop line drives.

Still, to get what I want I'd have to lay out $1500 cash to get 6 8TB drives.

And i'm not sure what I could get for my current 20TB NAS. Used NAS is an oddball market. Very niche. Few people understand why they cost so much, and those that do, will probably just build their own.

 

[muskie]

I did not realize they were Reds. I thought they would be crappiest desktop line drives.

Still, to get what I want I'd have to lay out $1500 cash to get 6 8TB drives.

And i'm not sure what I could get for my current 20TB NAS. Used NAS is an oddball market. Very niche. Few people understand why they cost so much, and those that do, will probably just build their own.

Another option you could do and utilize your 20TB is to look into something like UnRAID or other drive pooling solution. I'm currently running FreeNAS but thinking of moving to something like that because of what you are describing above. The cost to expand is too great. I can add drives as needed and grow my capacity. At the end of the day I have maybe 3 concurrent users and it is primarily a media server. Doesn't need to be enterprise performance.

I don't utilize Jails as I have a separate Plex VM running on my VMWare host (FreeNAS is virtual as well with LSI HBA Passthrough to my external DAS) so I can scale resources as needed and not have to run multiple machines in my lab.

Anyway, something like UnRAID would allow you to add drives ad-hoc and still benefit from SSD Caching and Dual Parity drives. Jails are going away in FreeNAS 10 anyway in favor of Docker support.

If I were in your shoes (kind of am and this is my current plan) I'd go unRAID and get two 6-8 TB drives and start moving my pool over. You can configure parity after the fact so I should be able to move my entire pool over with two - three drives and start breaking down my FreeNAS pool. Then I can expand and let it calculate parity. If I lose a disk in UnRAID and parity fails it is still just an EXT4 filesystem with ENTIRE files not bits like a traditional RAID or FreeNAS. So even losing one disc and not being able to recover you don't lose everything.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

BTRFS is nowhere near ready for prime-time compared to ZFS. Its promising the Moon, but its not there yet. ZFS doesn't promise as much, but its super reliable.

I'm currently running FreeNAS 10 and jails are alive and well in it. They are a bit slow to update the plugin jails compared to just building a generic jail though.

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

2 drives and RAID 1....plenty for home use with redundancy.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

2 drives and RAID 1....plenty for home use with redundancy.

I like my uncompressed bluray rips for quality, and want to store more that way. Plus even compressed 4K's are going to suck up 20-30GB each for excellent quality. Uncompressed 4K blurays use around 80-100GB each. I won't be able to store then uncompressed for a long time, probably 5-7 years down the road so storage can scale up.

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

except those are all compressed from the beginning....

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

except those are all compressed from the beginning....

At a MUCH reduced level than any streaming service.

The average bluray has a bit rate of 25-40Mbits.

4K bluray bit-rates can go as high as 130Mbits from what I've seen.

Netflix's 4K streaming service runs around 18Mbits. And their 1080P bit-rates are around 12Mbits.

The difference between a 12Mbit version of a 30Mbit bluray is HUGE.

Some movies I don't care and will compress with a RF of around 16-18. But some I keep in the native bluray format and you CAN tell a difference. The shadow detail is huge, and the fine details like skin imperfections stand out.

Some movies do compress extremely well with a very minor visual loss, and a huge decrease in bitrate. But some movies do not. Those that do not, I leave native. If that means they suck up 42GB on my NAS, then they suck up 42GB.

And for those I'm compressing I'm already using H.265 with 10Bit encoding. So I'm using the best and most CPU intensive encoder publicly available right now to get the best compression efficiency. Most of my H265 to H264 comparisons end ups with the H265 being half the size of the H264 file. It costs me more CPU time to do, but its worth it. The NAS has enough power to transcode on the fly to any client, or just pass it along natively without doing a thing.

At home, it plays everything natively. I have PLEX registered as a application in my Steam library. So I just turn my GamePC on, and start Plex. And it passes all files through natively without doing anything to them. But on the go it will transcode for my phone if I want.

Its all about maintaining maximum quality with maximum flexibility. I have to make some sacrifices. 25% of my movies take up 75% of my space.

 

[muskie]

BTRFS is nowhere near ready for prime-time compared to ZFS. Its promising the Moon, but its not there yet. ZFS doesn't promise as much, but its super reliable.

I'm currently running FreeNAS 10 and jails are alive and well in it. They are a bit slow to update the plugin jails compared to just building a generic jail though.

Ok Just giving you ideas. As far as BTRFS on UnRAID it is just for the caching side (Mirroring and Striping) and that portion of BTRFS has been vetted and is ready for prime time IMO. I agree that RAID 5/6 is not and is not to be trusted on BTRFS.

IIRC you aren't even running ECC RAM in your FreeNAS setup per recommendations since you are running an i7. There is potential there for a whole slew of problems (I believe some of it is blow out of proportion) but the threat still exists if you are truly reliant on it from a data integrity standpoint.

If you truly want to stick with FreeNAS then maybe look into creating another pool with Mirrors. Much easier to expand if you don't want to spend $1500 on drives.

But they way I look at it to get 24TB-32TB (Usable) worth of new disks you are probably looking at spending at least $1200 for NAS grade drives. At least going with 8TB you can lower your cost per TB and not have to grow for a long time.

Reuse your old drives as a backup target offsite for the stuff you really care about.

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

Yeah I wasn't comparing streaming vs physical media. Streaming has a long way to go in terms of uncompressed data. Everything streamed has loss.

I was just saying that it still isn't the "raw video/audio" as it was made but you are correct in that it is the closest you can get to it currently

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

At home, it plays everything natively. I have PLEX registered as a application in my Steam library. So I just turn my GamePC on, and start Plex. And it passes all files through natively without doing anything to them. But on the go it will transcode for my phone if I want.

Can you expand more on this? what do you mean "registered as an application" in Steam?

I just use plex through chrome on a local LAN but if there is a better way to stream locally then that would be good to know.

 

[muskie]

**Please don't read into the following question as it is just a clarification and not a knock or attack against any possible moral implications**

Are you truly ripping these from UDH Blu-Ray or original Blu-Ray as a source? Because if you are converting H.264 rips from torrents/usenet to H.265 that is not optimal. The benefits in quality and streaming are truly only there if you start with the original source.

I looked into converting all my media to H.265 to save space, but my straight DVD rips (remux to MKV) it just didn't make sense. And the high bitrate shows I get through Usenet are already compressed so converting to H.265 doesn't make sense either.

 

[muskie]

Can you expand more on this? what do you mean "registered as an application" in Steam?

I just use plex through chrome on a local LAN but if there is a better way to stream locally then that would be good to know.

Probably just adds the Plex Home Theater app to the steam list. Steam is basically a app launcher at that point. Then his PC can direct play the movie as it is capable of H.265 decoding rather than transcode from his FreeNAS server.

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

**Please don't read into the following question as it is just a clarification and not a knock or attack against any possible moral implications**

Are you truly ripping these from UDH Blu-Ray or original Blu-Ray as a source? Because if you are converting H.264 rips from torrents/usenet to H.265 that is not optimal. The benefits in quality and streaming are truly only there if you start with the original source.

I looked into converting all my media to H.265 to save space, but my straight DVD rips (remux to MKV) it just didn't make sense. And the high bitrate shows I get through Usenet are already compressed so converting to H.265 doesn't make sense either.

He is using physical blu-rays as a source. Not downloads.

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

Probably just adds the Plex Home Theater app to the steam list. Steam is basically a app launcher at that point. Then his PC can direct play the movie as it is capable of H.265 decoding rather than transcode from his FreeNAS server.

Wouldn't chrome support h.265?

 

[muskie]

Wouldn't chrome support h.265?

From a software level it could but wouldn't be optimal. Some of the newer intel chips (kaby lake) have hardware H.265 decoding to offload from the regular workload of the CPU

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

i'm not fancy enough to have a kaby lake chipset

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

**Please don't read into the following question as it is just a clarification and not a knock or attack against any possible moral implications**

Are you truly ripping these from UDH Blu-Ray or original Blu-Ray as a source? Because if you are converting H.264 rips from torrents/usenet to H.265 that is not optimal. The benefits in quality and streaming are truly only there if you start with the original source.

I looked into converting all my media to H.265 to save space, but my straight DVD rips (remux to MKV) it just didn't make sense. And the high bitrate shows I get through Usenet are already compressed so converting to H.265 doesn't make sense either.

My source are all the BR's I buy off Amazon. Since i don't have Cable TV anymore I saved a ton of money per month. So I buy the movies and TV shows I like and rip them to the NAS. As soon as they started coming out with the 4K/BR/DVD combo packs I started buying them instead of just the regular BR's.

I rip them with MakeMKV to MKV file, then from there I either put them on the NAS directly, or transcode to H265 10bit to save space. I leave standard DVD's alone in native format. If its interlaced or telecined content, I run it through a program to de-interlace or de-telecine it, and re-package the files into M4V. DVD's are so small now that i don't bother compressing them, Whats 2GB vs 4GB when it takes up so little space to begin with.

I buy CD's and rip them lossless so they are as high quality as I can get. I'd have jumped on the SACD, BR-A, or other super high quality formats if there was a decent selection and decent way to import them into iTunes.

I try to do as much as possible without compressing stuff. Its why I only have 4.7TB free on the NAS. Yes, I still have 4.7TB free, but i don't want to fill it up, so I try to keep it around 12TB in use for now.

Can you expand more on this? what do you mean "registered as an application" in Steam?

I just use plex through chrome on a local LAN but if there is a better way to stream locally then that would be good to know.

Probably just adds the Plex Home Theater app to the steam list. Steam is basically a app launcher at that point. Then his PC can direct play the movie as it is capable of H.265 decoding rather than transcode from his FreeNAS server.

Yes, I just added it as a non-steam application which lets me launch it from the Gaming HTPC. The Gaming PC boots right up into Steam BigPicture, and I have a wireless remote for the PC. So it acts just like a set top box as far as using it is concerned. I almost never need to use the KB/Mouse on it.

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

Gotcha . So it's just an interface easily controllable via a controller.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

Gotcha . So it's just an interface easily controllable via a controller.

Yeah, a programmable controller with a cheapo USB IR adapter which is plugged into the front panel on my Game HTPC. I had an old remote that had a D-Pad on it, and I just mapped them to the KB Arrow keys. It wasn't easy to get setup, and it took a few tries to get it to play nice in Steam. But in the end it works.

I'm considering getting one of the Logitech Harmony Remotes, but not quite ready to spend the money on one.

I also have the Microsoft Xbox 360 remote dongle on the Gaming HTPC too. So I can play games with the XB360 controller. I use the XB360 controller for gaming, and navigating while intending to game. And if I'm just going to watch a movie I use the regular IR remote which is just mapped to the KB arrow keys.

Playing through Bioshock: Remastered right now.