[SOLVED] Best HDDs for NAS/Backup/Storage

[sirhawkeye]

Looking for suggestions on best (most reliable) hard drives for NAS/Backup/STorage. I'm rebuilding my "NAS" (which is an old PC running Windows 10) and need to expand storage.
I am looking for 4TB-5TB per drive, and 3.5" form factor, as I will be putting them into a software RAID 1 with Windows 10 using storage pools.

Reliability will take precedence over speed (I do want decently fast drives that have decent read/write speeds, but overall, reliability will be most important since this will be used for archiving/backup purposes).

I used to WD Reds, but I had about 2 of them that started to exhibit what I could consider "odd" noises, almost sounding like the read arm coming in contact with a disk platter, so a period chirp/screech, which WD has said is "normal" but I don't think it is. Typical clacking when reading/writing the drive is normal, but not the "chrip" (sounds similar to a drive spindle motor issue is the best way I can describe the noise).
Anyway, I went with WD ever since Seagate had their firmware crisis with the 1.5TB drives about 20 years ago.

Suggestions? Key is reliability and ability to be powered on all the time. Speed comes second.

 

[faalin]

Ive had 3 WD red pro 6TB drives in my computer since 2015, they were moved over to my current build in 2018 and have maybe been turned off a few dozen times if that. My computer stays on 24/7 and is on a battery backup that will keep it running till the backup generator turns on.

In my backup server i run 4 8tb seagate Ironwolfs, those have been up and running since December 2020 and have not been turned off since they were brought online.

 

[USAFRet]

"reliability" is determined by your backup routine.

Among all the major manufacturers, among all sizes, there is very little 'reliability' difference, except for a couple of outliers.

Any drive can die at any time, taking the data with it.
A backup will let you recover that data to a replacement.

See this:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/backblaze-uncovers-the-most-reliable-hard-drives/

And direct from BackBlaze:
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html