I need some advice here.
I am in the process of building a new (personal) backup machine. I intend to use 8 x 3.5 inch drives with a minimum capacity of 8 TB per drive. These 8 drives will be used to form a single ZFS raidz-2 volume.
The way I indent to use that system is to start it 1 or 2 times a week, run a backup from all my devices, maybe do some additional stuff, like software upgrades, and then shut it down again. So it only runs for a few hours per week. Meaning I don't exactly need 24h-rated drives. However, beyond 8 TB capacity per drive, there doesn't seem to be anything normal/non-enterprise. Which means, if I choose to select larger drives (>8 TB), they will be 24h-rated anyway. And since the system is only running when I do the backups, the noise from the drives or even power consumption is not a very big concern.
In terms of price per TB, these are (currently) my best 3 options:
My main concern here is that I don't know how those enterprise drives, like Seagate Exos X, are going to handle the weekly start/stop cycles (50-100 per year). Is that something I need to consider or be concerned about? Or do these enterprise drives just don't care about that, even since they are supposed to run constantly?
So basically, the question is: Exos or BarraCuda? Can the 24h-rated enterprise drives (Exos X) operate well in this scenario or should I rather stick to the non-enterprise BarraCuda drives?
I am in the process of building a new (personal) backup machine. I intend to use 8 x 3.5 inch drives with a minimum capacity of 8 TB per drive. These 8 drives will be used to form a single ZFS raidz-2 volume.
The way I indent to use that system is to start it 1 or 2 times a week, run a backup from all my devices, maybe do some additional stuff, like software upgrades, and then shut it down again. So it only runs for a few hours per week. Meaning I don't exactly need 24h-rated drives. However, beyond 8 TB capacity per drive, there doesn't seem to be anything normal/non-enterprise. Which means, if I choose to select larger drives (>8 TB), they will be 24h-rated anyway. And since the system is only running when I do the backups, the noise from the drives or even power consumption is not a very big concern.
In terms of price per TB, these are (currently) my best 3 options:
- Seagate Exos X18 16TB
- Seagate Exos X18 16TB
- Seagate BarraCuda 8TB
My main concern here is that I don't know how those enterprise drives, like Seagate Exos X, are going to handle the weekly start/stop cycles (50-100 per year). Is that something I need to consider or be concerned about? Or do these enterprise drives just don't care about that, even since they are supposed to run constantly?
So basically, the question is: Exos or BarraCuda? Can the 24h-rated enterprise drives (Exos X) operate well in this scenario or should I rather stick to the non-enterprise BarraCuda drives?