Do NAS drives matter?

Looking at building a server with old pc parts when I do an upgrade and am unsure if “NAS built” drives really make a difference, warranty aside. Also since I’m in Canada everything is more expensive and trying to save money as much as possible.

It can make a difference in a RAID setup where some more efficient drives such as those with a green designation can have issues. If RAID isn’t in the plans, whatever drives you have access to will be fine.

So, in an Unraid array like JDM_WAAAT’s typical/optimized (1 SSD cache, 1 HDD parity, 4 HDD array, 1 SSD unassigned(which was my plan)) it would be smart to just find all same model HDDs if I was shucking? A 6tb raw red label is nearly $300 per for me which is a little much

Quite the opposite. UnRAID isn’t RAID at all (hence the “un”) and is designed specifically to use whatever drives you plug into it.

So you can use a variety of sizes and performance specifications. They are used independently so they don’t have to match in any way.

About the only thing you will have to take into consideration is that the parity disk will have to be as large or larger than any other drive in the array.

Oh, glad to know I’m overthinking it. Thanks a bunch

My Unraid is literally JBOD (Just a bunch of drives)…I’ve got a few SAS drives from a Dell R410 and have purchased some others since then. It’s not huge capacity like many on here have but as I need to grow I’ll worry about it then. I’ll just get used enterprise storage from eBay…seems to work fine so far. After hearing about what these manufactures are doing with “Nas drives” under 8tb…I’m not sure anyone is really getting what they are paying for.