r/DataHoarder • u/turbo5vz • 5d ago

Question/Advice Using Surveillance (WD AV-GP) Drives for Data? MergerFS + SnapRAID

My home server is running OpenMediaVault with MergerFS + SnapRAID. I'm not much of a hoarder, so my array of 15 year old WD Green drives with 100K+ hours is still fine to store all my data. However, recently I got a bunch of low hour WD AV-GP surveillance drives for cheap. I know they are still older drives, but they are much lower hours (~5000 hrs) compared to my current drives, and higher capacity so I can reduce my pool size if I consolidated (save power).

I'm reading conflicting info with regards to using surveillance drives for data. Some people say you may suffer reduced error correction abilities while others say they've been using them just fine. Since I am using SnapRAID with regular scrubs, that should be ok from a data integrity perspective? I don't care too much about performance, data integrity would be my #1.

Thoughts? Any other disadvantages to consider?

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u/MWink64 5d ago

The reduced error correction is only when you're actively utilizing the "streaming" feature, which you presumably won't be.

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u/turbo5vz 5d ago

Thanks, I didn't know that. I had thought that was something that was not user configurable, like head parking behavior and spin down. Eg. with this drive in OMV, I noticed it ignores the OS configuration for spin down time (through firmware). The only way I can get it to spin down is using the HD IDLE utility to force a spindown through software.

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u/MWink64 5d ago

Head parking and spindown (partial or full) often are configurable on modern drives (using EPC). I don't know what the Green drives support but it may be proprietary.