4TB 2.5 vs 3.5 performance/reliability?

[scline]

Ello wonderful people

I have been itching to lower the footprint of my FreeNAS build from a 4u supermicro 3.5 chassis to a 2U 2.5 array. Was wondering on your thoughts around the move, I know in the past 2.5" drives (spinning disks that is) have higher responce times and less reliability. With 2.5" 4TB drives being the same price if not slightly cheaper then the 3.5" drives.

Today my FreeNAS system uses 5x2TB and 5x4TB 3.5 drives in raidz2. I would use the same motherboard setup, xeon-d 1518 board.

Thoughts?

 

[Evan]

I can't comment on those drives since I have none in use currently but I hear some debate on pmr or smr and a few people complain about performance or failures.

But as a general rule the 2.5" WD 15mm green/blue that I use have been running for about 4 years without a single failure. (~12 of them)

Having said his and if you want to change would 8tb/10tb disks mirrored maybe an option also to consider on the lower power per TB front that may still work in a small (although not 2.5") chassis.

 

[TType85]

I have 8 of the 4TB 2.5" drives running in my Unraid server with around 7K power on hours with zero failures. Small sample size so no real data can be drawn from it.

 

[pricklypunter]

My advice is if you go to 2.5" magnetics, use good enterprise rated disks

 

[Evan]

My advice is if you go to 2.5" magnetics, use good enterprise rated disks

True but that means if you want cheaper then it's SAS, 1.2tb 10k sas should be cheap and plentiful (within reason on both counts) on eBay etc

Does mean many more slots + sas adapter/expander and a whole lot more power consumption.

 

[pricklypunter]

I agree, you will lose capacity unless you add more disks, larger chassis etc and there's less options available. I have never really rated 2.5" chassis for use in home lab's with spinners, purely from a cost perspective to implement it with any decent capacity, although it is slowly getting cheaper to do so. There are some SATA offerings in 2.5" that are reasonable money too, but the pickings are slim as they say

Some reasons why I don't rate 2.5" for use in a home lab would be capacity, sympathetic vibration, heat, power consumption, poor value for money, lack of options. Really the only exception I would say is if you had a requirement for an all flash based tier where just the compact nature of the form factor makes more sense.

 

[scline]

Thanks for all your responses, 3.5 I will stick with. No full-flash necessary. I am using a few SSD's as cache drives (L2ARC), but the purpose is mainly media storage and backups where speed is not that large of an issue. On my ESX hosts I use all flash but less of a large storage pool need. Its just a bit odd that online (at least today) it appears some 2.5" 4TB drives are cheaper then the 3.5" variants. At least by 5-10 bucks on new drives, though something tells me I should likely stick with NAS/Enterprise drives anyway.

Thanks again!

 

[Schoondoggy]

If you have room for 3.5" drives go that route. That said, I have been running four ST4000LM016 in an array for 9 months with no issues. The fact that you can put 16TB in a 5.25" bay in a small form factor case can be very appealing. My initial concern on the ST4000LM016 was transfer rate, was it was listed as up to 130MB/s where as 4TB 3.5" drives tend to be 175-200MB/s sustained.
Even though these say laptop drive on the label, obviously at 15MM drive will not fit in a laptop, it and its 5TB sibling are now listed as Barracuda instead of Momentus on Seagates website. So I would have to believe it is a different design/firmware from their traditional laptop drives. From a little research, it appears these drives are being sold to DVR and external USB drive manufacturers. They need a 2.5" form factor, but they have room for the 15MM height. I have to assume these drives are ending up on ebay due to surplus inventory at some of these manufacturers. If these are OEM drives they may not have a factory Seagate warranty.
When I first read your post it reminded me that I was going to buy a fifth ST4000LM016 to have a spare on hand. Bid on one a few days ago and won it today for $82!
Seagate 4TB Laptop HDD SATA 6Gb/s 128MB Cache 2.5-Inch 15 mm Internal Hard Drive