The Seagate Ironwolfs 18TB have a Workload Rate Limit (WRL) of 300TB/year, as do some WD models. Unlike SSDs this WRL includes not only writes but reads as well. (page 2, end) If you do a monthly scrub you already have 216TB of reads so it can be safely assumed that a lot of customers blow well past these numbers. This limit is in use since the 2TB drive area and simply does not fit 9x larger drives. ServeTheHome talked about this years ago.
I will just paste my standard procedure when I onboard any new (or used) drive:
Everybody has their own skin care HDD check routine. This is mine:
I first check the SMART status with CrystalDisk, after this a short smart test, full surface check with Macrorit, full h2testw run, CrystalDiskMark, and then I check with CrystalDisk once again if anything besides power on hours did change.
Will take some days for a large drive but in terms of work hours we talk about less than 5 minutes and it covers pretty much anything without being too excessive.
Removing CPUs and RAM will also decrease its compute power. Disabling features also will likely remove some of the enterprise features like IPMI. You might end up getting the worst of both worlds - Not a ton of PCIe, few cores and RAM - but loud, and still pretty power hungry.
Once you write ~400TB or whatever it’s rated for on a consumer SSD it dies.
Not really. Tests and my experience show this is just a pure warranty number. Meaning the manufacturer guarantees that the drive will do at least this many writes without failing and it reaching it also voids your warranty. However, you can usually expect 2x as many writes, although 10x and more is also not unheard of.
HDDs can take a lot more writes before dying.
They are actually often not rated for a ton of reads and writes. But once again this is more of a warranty thing and HDDs are usually unmetered so…
Keep in mind that this is a 3.0 enclosure. Fine for a JBOD setup but for any kind of RAID the throughput can severely limit your rebuild speed.
I highly doubt these systems are suitable for your needs. Dual socket servers are not great in terms of power efficiency and the 1u form factor means you cannot even use some of the benefits like the high number of PCIe lanes. On top of that consumer CPUs got a lot faster in recent years so even if you need a fair bit of CPU power (normally not necessary for a NAS) you are better off getting something more modern. Your best bet is to sell off the servers and get something more suited to your needs.
I think there are other factors at play. The community here is much smaller and the few people that are here are likely more dedicated and knowledgeable.
Just get an 18-22TB external drive. Cheap easy and can be reused once you outgrow it. Yes, a NAS is pretty cool but unless you need the uptime etc RAID can offer you are just better of getting a single, large drive.
Are you also using Powerline? This can cause all kinds of wanky issues.