4TB SAS Drives for SA120

[Shadowrun78]

Anyone have any experience or opinion on these SAS drives?

Hitachi HUS724040ALS640
Enterprise Western Digital RE WD4001FYYG

I have 4tb Seagate NAS drives, but if those are much better, I'll use those instead. Just wanted to get a general consensus.

 

[j_h_o]

I have around 12 HUS724040ALS640 drives deployed in SA120s.
I think I have a small array of 3 or 4 RE4 SAS 4TB drives too.

I (still?) avoid Seagate.

Not sure what you're asking though

 

[Shadowrun78]

Doh. Basically, I'm getting a Lenovo SA120 DAS and i'm in the planning process of loading it up with drives. I currently have 4 Seagate NAS Sata drives that I picked up when they were on sale. I seen those 2 drives I listed above for a decent price and now I'm trying to decide whether I want to return the sata drives and purchase the sas ones or just keep the sata drives and use them instead.

So far, the pro for the SAS drives is the ability to use the secondary IO port on the DAS, the con would be that they would be about $120 more total then what i paid for the SATA drives. If they are that much better/reliable then I guess I could pony up the extra $120, but if it's really not worth it, i could use the extra $120 for something else. I figured it wouldn't hurt to get a little insight from others to a better informed decision instead of basing it sole on dollars and cents.

 

[j_h_o]

What data is going into this array? Will you have a backup? How long can the data be offline for, while you rebuild/recover/restore?

I use 5K4000 HGST Coolspins (SATA) for data I don't care if I lose, and I use SAS (WD RE4s, HGST, etc.) for data I care about.

I don't use Seagate at all; I got burned by the Seagate 3TB debacle and I refuse to give them any more money. Even if they're cheap.

None of this is based on any data whatsoever, just my personal bias.

 

[Shadowrun78]

Most of it is going to be movie/tv files. There will be some document/picture data. It will be a freenas based nas.

 

[pricklypunter]

Everyone has their favourite/ preferred disk, my personal go to spinners are HGST. For basic media serving, pretty much any of the HGST SATA disks will serve(no pun intended) you very well and save you some money over their SAS counterparts. I am using 3TB HGST HUA723030ALA640 magnetics and they perform admirably. If you were to really need HA or need the last drop of speed out of them, then go for the SAS disks, but remember to make good use of them, the rest of your infrastructure must be able to get data to and from them in a timely manor

For a FreeNAS based storage solution, with maybe a bit of file/ media serving and some playtime thrown in, SAS disks are money wasted in my opinion

 

[Shadowrun78]

Everyone has their favourite/ preferred disk, my personal go to spinners are HGST. For basic media serving, pretty much any of the HGST SATA disks will serve(no pun intended) you very well and save you some money over their SAS counterparts. I am using 3TB HGST HUA723030ALA640 magnetics and they perform admirably. If you were to really need HA or need the last drop of speed out of them, then go for the SAS disks, but remember to make good use of them, the rest of your infrastructure must be able to get data to and from them in a timely manor

For a FreeNAS based storage solution, with maybe a bit of file/ media serving and some playtime thrown in, SAS disks are money wasted in my opinion

Ok. That makes sense. Sometimes I get googly eyes and go a little overboard when it comes to this stuff because of how much I love tinkering around. I mean, when I think about it, did I really need a server and das? I could've gotten by with one of those Synology devices, but now I get to tinker! Oh the plans I have....pfsense, esxi and linux, oh my!

 

[pricklypunter]

It's very easy to get carried away playing with this stuff, trouble is your wallet also gets carried away with you(stay away from the "for sale" forum or you'll be counting the money in your wallet three times a day). It wouldn't be the first time I have been declared disabled due to a broken wallet and I'm sure it won't be the last time either

It really is amazing just how many ways you can achieve your end goals and meet your requirements by using the simplest of hardware that's available today. Then there's the "sledge hammer to crack a nut" approach. By that I mean building a dual CPU system with a half Terrabyte of RAM in order to implement a Plex media server that streams to 3 endpoints and has somewhere to store your monthly bank statements. Both get the job done quite nicely and work reliably, just one of them costs you $200 to build and the other costs you $2000 to build. One of them is a 100W light bulb being on all year round, the other is a 1 bar electric fire, you can see where the electricity bill gets a bump here, it just goes on and on, but hey, it's great to play with enterprise level equipment and there's definitely something attractive about having a 24U rack full of heat, noise and twinkly lights in your living room, not to mention how sexy it becomes once you get into adding fiber to that mix of carefully trained cables

 

[Shadowrun78]

Yeah, definitely. I think I might have gone the sledgehammer route though this time. I was originally going to put together a basic nas for my media, but it then progressed from there to wanting to host vm's for a lab/learning and running game servers. Next thing I know boom...sledgehammer.

 

[b3nz0n8]

Next thing I know boom...sledgehammer.

www.ServeTheHome.com mantra....