Green Drives for Backup System?

[quietas]

I've got my big 24TB media server full of 3TB WD Red drives using Drivepool with duplication on and it's great. It runs Plex as it's primary purpose but I also have a large fileshares with data backed up from my other computers in the house, Acronis images mostly as well as some file copies.

 

Losing the video files is not the end of the world, but ripping the DVDs took an insane amount of time and I'd prefer to not do it again. My pictures, taxes, and whatnot that are in the backups from my other computers are things that I can't lose, thus backups.

 

The server needs a backup and I'm thinking about piling in 5x 3TB WD Green drives into an HP N40L Microserver for nothing other than backup storage. No primary shares, no media storage. Just backups from my main server. It will be small, portable, and easy to grab on the way out out in case of a fire or other disaster.

 

What is the current opinion on Green drives for use in this case where they are idle most of the time and are pooled in a non-RAID manner? Greens are quite a bit less expensive up front and there is a minor power consumption savings as well.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

If you're using the Greens for just backup, then I think they are ideally suited for that  task, actually.

 

I'd still recommend running the "WDIDLE3" utiltity to turn off the head parking, to increase these drive's longevity, but other than that, they should be perfect for what you want.

 

 

Also, depending on the OS, I would HIGHLY recommend the LightsOut add-in/program, so you can sleep/hibernate the server (if possible, though you should be able to manually enable hibernate by running "powercfg -h on" on the system). This way, the system can be off or in a low power state until needed.

 

 

 

 

Additionally, shameless self promotion here, but I'd recommend StableBit Scanner for both systems as well. That way you can see the disk's health and replace them hopefully before a disk fails.

And you can get the licenses at a discounted price, because you own StableBit DrivePool already (just ask, if you're interested)

[Umfriend]

Have you considered Seagates 8TB Archive HDDs? They might even be a little bit cheaper than 5x3TB WD Greens? And I think 5 HDDs is what you can fit into that HP N40L? (not sure) in which case larger HDDs allow for future expansion? Just a suggestion.

[RobbieH]

Keep in mind a big part of why the green drives save more energy over the red drives is due to the fact that the heads aggressively park, saving some drag. If power savings is the primary factor for buying these drives, this is all but erased by using WDIDLE3 to change the behavior to cause them to act like the red drives. 

 

But if paying less for the drives initially is your goal, then this doesn't matter. I just noticed you said something about them using less power than the red drives.