What drives for my ZFS build ?

A

Aesma

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 24, 2010
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My server is already up and running, however I'll greatly expand it, from 19 to 57 drives. Then make a similar backup server.

I use IBM M1015/LSI 9240 as controllers, with Rackable SE3016 JBOD units. I got one at the moment, but am ordering 8 more (one spare).

OS is OpenIndiana, 1 pool of 1 RAIDZ3 vdev (hence the 19 drives). Works fine with a bunch of various consumer 2TB drives, some green WD, green Seagate, non green, Samsung...

With the euro plunging I need to order drives right now before they become even more expensive. I'm ordering 20, in 4TB capacity.

Considering the dough I'm spending and that I might resell them after a couple of years to go bigger, I'm taking drives with 3 years warranty.

The options are, all for around 160€ in Germany (in France where I live it's more like 175€) :

Seagate NAS HDD 4TB, SATA 6Gb/s (ST4000VN000)
Western Digital WD Red 4TB, 3.5", SATA 6Gb/s (WD40EFRX)

HGST Deskstar IDK 4TB 7200rpm, SATA 6Gb/s
HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB, SATA 6Gb/s, retail (H3IKNAS40003272SE/0S03665)

I'm leaning Seagate NAS as they're optimized for NAS (even though it's not my kind of NAS), quieter, less power hungry (except the Red that is a bit better there).

Performance will probably be indiscernible between those, and is not my main concern anyway, I'm storing data, and not streaming anything, when I want to use a file I'll always copy it locally first, then shut down the server. I'm maxing out my network by and large (400MB/s benchmarks locally).
 
Whatever drive you can get that meets you warranty and size requirements - the differences in them are pretty minor when you are talking about consumer drives
 
The WD Red's are pretty solid. Just sayin'

I had a Seagate Barracuda LP 1.5TB drive die on me this week, so Seagate is on my shit list right now.
 
That Toshiba is a surveillance drive, from what I read those (from all manufacturers) are optimized for certain things I don't need, and desoptimized for the rest. Also, last time I checked (which was some time ago) there was no way to RMA a Toshiba drive in Europe, you had to go through your dealer, which is a big no for me. And finally it's more expensive.
 
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I've read a review from my go-to website hardware.fr and the Red is in practice quieter than the Seagate, and cooler too, so now I'm leaning there (I own a 3TB red and a 6TB red and they're fine, I don't own any Seagate NAS though, only desktop/green ones).
 
If you value your data do use drives that are known to work, mixing drives as you've done above is not a good idea. Anyhow, Toshiba (old Hitachi) works great, WD have some reported compatibility issues with LSI cards and go with Seagate at your own risk. Which leaves you with HGST but that might as well be a rebranded WD HDD in the end...
//Danne
 
No it has the look of a Hitachi drive, and is 7200rpm. I just read that it features a vibration sensor, unlike the others, that's an interesting feature.

I used to like Hitachi drives but then they became significantly more expensive than the competition in Europe, due to confidential sales, so I stopped buying them. But here they're at the same price.
 
smangular said:
P.S. Never buy a 1.5GB Seagate (7200.11)
Click to expand...

Never buy the 3 TB Seagate
I own a dozen of them and be not able to keep a Raid Z3 backup system online and stable ....

I will trash the whole pool (I do without RMA them as its useless)
 
Lol sounds like Seagate is great for testing failures. Zero positive things to say about them in this thread.
 
_Gea said:
Never buy the 3 TB Seagate
I own a dozen of them and be not able to keep a Raid Z3 backup system online and stable ....

I will trash the whole pool (I do without RMA them as its useless)
Click to expand...

ehem... running seagate 3tb since day one on 2011.
3 was failed during warrany period and 1 was failed outside warranty period.

one mistake on me, did NOT disable apm, which caused many head parking that went to failing drive.

I did run a simple init script to disable APM on all seagate drives.
so what? running smoothly, no trouble..
I am running ZoL 0.6.3.x with raidz2 (8 drives) on centos 7.X ( moved from centos 6.X)
 
smangular said:
Lol sounds like Seagate is great for testing failures. Zero positive things to say about them in this thread.
Click to expand...

LOL, some hate this and some hate that


I have positive experiences on 3tb seagate after disabled APM to avoid many head parking.

have no love on current wd green :D. Old wd greens give me positive experience.
loves wd blue, alas...... 1Tb is the max, WD plays gimmick by slipping green to blue mainstrem > 1Tb.

have samsung (real samsung), hitachi, and Toshiba...
 
Right now I have a 12 disk ZFS pool made of (2) RAID-Z2 vdevs with WD REDs and couldn't be happier with them.

I would stick to 5,400 RPM drives (less power/heat while still maxing Gb ethernet)

Prevailing wisdom says to buy HGST or WD and stay away from Seagate. Theses things change every few years, but I usually try and stick to what most other PUs are using unless I have good reason not to.
 
smangular said:
P.S. Never buy a 1.5GB Seagate (7200.11)
Click to expand...

I have tons of those and have flashed all the ones that had the faulty firmware before any bricked. For me they've worked OK, however they all get dozens to hundreds of reallocated sectors. No total failure.

_Gea said:
Never buy the 3 TB Seagate
I own a dozen of them and be not able to keep a Raid Z3 backup system online and stable ....

I will trash the whole pool (I do without RMA them as its useless)
Click to expand...

Now that I think of it (I really should complete an inventory of my drives !) I don't own any 3TB Seagates, only WD green and red. A dozen 4TB ones though, and 2 failures, so not a great experience.

MySongRanHills said:
Right now I have a 12 disk ZFS pool made of (2) RAID-Z2 vdevs with WD REDs and couldn't be happier with them.

I would stick to 5,400 RPM drives (less power/heat while still maxing Gb ethernet)

Prevailing wisdom says to buy HGST or WD and stay away from Seagate. Theses things change every few years, but I usually try and stick to what most other PUs are using unless I have good reason not to.
Click to expand...

I've now eliminated Seagate, the choice is WD 5400rpm or HGST NAS.

I won't be running the things 24/7, I might actually build a more reasonable NAS for that (Atom CPU, 6-8 low power drives), so power draw is not that big a factor.
 
Aesma said:
I've now eliminated Seagate, the choice is WD 5400rpm or HGST NAS.

I won't be running the things 24/7, I might actually build a more reasonable NAS for that (Atom CPU, 6-8 low power drives), so power draw is not that big a factor.
Click to expand...

I have no personal exp with HGST specifically, but in my exp 5,400s run 3-6 degrees F cooler than 7,200 rpm drives. This may be less of an issue for you b/c of non 24/7 usage, but you have to at least consider it when dealing with large number of drives the difference can be a lot.
 
Bad to mix drives? Actually, I heard the opposite. It is better to mix drives. Say you get a bad batch of Samsung disks, and one crashes. Then the chances are higher the others crash. But if you mix disks, and one crashes, does not mean the other will crash.
 
brutalizer said:
Bad to mix drives? Actually, I heard the opposite. It is better to mix drives. Say you get a bad batch of Samsung disks, and one crashes. Then the chances are higher the others crash. But if you mix disks, and one crashes, does not mean the other will crash.
Click to expand...

There is some truth to this. I think most times people order the same drives but from different sources and at different times in order to get different drives from different batches. The thinking being failure rates differ batch to batch due to manufacturing, diff. in shipping w/e so by sourcing from multiple places you reduce your chance of getting a bad batch, drives so similar they all go at once, etc.
 
MySongRanHills said:
There is some truth to this. I think most times people order the same drives but from different sources and at different times in order to get different drives from different batches. The thinking being failure rates differ batch to batch due to manufacturing, diff. in shipping w/e so by sourcing from multiple places you reduce your chance of getting a bad batch, drives so similar they all go at once, etc.
Click to expand...

exactly!!! I had this situation before

luckily smart alert me with the detail info... 3 Drives that I bought all together are failing soon :D
I got to replace one by one and do resilvering (ZoL). :|, and RMA all three drives.

I was not worried, since has 2nd backup server with all identical data
 
Aesma said:
....

I won't be running the things 24/7, I might actually build a more reasonable NAS for that (Atom CPU, 6-8 low power drives), so power draw is not that big a factor.
Click to expand...

on 24/7:
intel I3 V3 are damn low power while idling :D. Power draws is minimal compared with Atom and can provide more "power" when needed.
low power AMD sempron AM2 eats more power than i3. yeah 7 year old low power sempron. got replaced by i3.

minimally, I prefer Celeron ..... when trying to be cheap.
Celeron 847 is the current celeron running 24/7 with esxi for my ipcop and some ubuntu VMs.
 
Yeah I've not thought about it a lot yet, for the time being I'm still running a hard drive on my main computer along with an SSD (1TB SSD and 6TB WD red as HDD) so my most used data is always available.

I've decided to go with the HGST NAS drives, 10 from one shop and 10 from another.
 
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