"Mac In A Rack" progresses....hard drive buying considerations

This weekend I’m going to nab a QNAP TR-004U. Theoretically I have a couple of 8 TB consumer-grade drives (a couple of theoretically-shuckable external storage drives, like MyBook stuff), but I definitely don’t have 4 large drives laying around.

So I’m in drive buying territory. At this point I’m looking at mostly 8TB drives or larger, with the intent of being able to populate the 4 bays over time.

Based on my research I’m seeing that CMR seems to be the way to fly for drives to go in an enclosure like this. Something like a Seagate Ironwolf or something similar.

I realize that hard drive preferences are venturing into quasi-religious territory, but is anybody (especially people who work in data centers!) willing to share their drive preferences, and why?

I’ve found this useful in the past.

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

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As long as they are NAS rated, you should be good. E.g. WD Red Plus
I would imagine QNAP, like Synology, has a list of recommended drives.

I would also recommend using the zfs file system if possible. It’s enterprise grade, with built in support for combatting bit rot. I don’t have experience with QNAP, but use it on my TrueNAS CORE systems. I really wish there was Synology support for it too. One of the reasons I’m transitioning to TrueNAS.

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This might be helpful if you shuck drives or find an ambiguous Amazon listing:

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