To be 100% honest: I didn't even think about this kind of strategy (never did even in the past).

Thinking about it now, it might make sense.

On the other hand, nowadays there isn't a lot of choice (only 3 manufacturers? WD, Toshiba and Seagate? If yes, then it's quite sad...) and honestly for me it hasn't been easy to choose even just a single model (reading all user reviews, comparing prices, searching specs for e.g. operating temperature, mtbf, finding infos about SMR, etc...) => I felt exhausted after deciding for Toshiba/N300 and I didn't have any other good 2nd candidate... .

Let's see in another ~4 years, maybe I'll adopt this strategy. At least I ordered 2 groups of 4 HDDs from 2 different shops, so I should have at least a minimal amount of "mix" in it. And the ones used in the NAS host the backup of the ones used by the server, so I just hope that I don't have a 2+2 HDD failure in the two raidZ1 :P

Thanks for the enlightenment :)

I'm reminded of those HP drives that would brick themselves after a certain number of operating hours. People had every drive in their RAID array fail at once.

Ooook, ok, I got it - not a great idea to buy HDDs of the same brand => I'll try to remember this :)

But: in such a case, having a normal raid5/raidZ1 or even a raid6/raidZ2, etc..., you might still get scrd by just having 2/3/4 such HP-drives in such a raid (that might be composed of 8/9/10 drives), right?

> you might still get scrd by just having 2/3/4 such HP-drives in such a raid (that might be composed of 8/9/10 drives), right?

That's true. Ah well, you know what people say: RAID is for high-availability, not a replacement for proper backups.

That's true :D