4TB Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 $129
- Thread starter andrewbedia
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Good deal, but I wonder if NAS drives are really worth it when using them with ZFS. A typical RAID setup, yes, they are worth it, but ZFS doesn't particularly care.
I have been keeping my eye on these 5TB 7200rpm Toshiba Canvio drives: TOSHIBA Canvio 5TB USB 3.0 3.5" Desktop External Hard Drive HDWC250XK3J1 Black - Newegg.com
They hover around $120-125 on sale. I'm hoping for a great deal come Black Friday.
I have been keeping my eye on these 5TB 7200rpm Toshiba Canvio drives: TOSHIBA Canvio 5TB USB 3.0 3.5" Desktop External Hard Drive HDWC250XK3J1 Black - Newegg.com
They hover around $120-125 on sale. I'm hoping for a great deal come Black Friday.
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ZFS or not, a better drive is a better drive. The NAS drives have additional firmware tweaks to help prolong the life of the disk. Head parking, vibration reduction, and so on. ZFS doesn't solve everything, just ask people that used WD green drives (I think it was green) and constantly had them constantly parking the heads causing premature failure in a 24/7 NAS setup. This was with ZFS, it didn't matter.
Thanks for the input JayG30. I know the firmware tweaks typically revolved around the idle timers to help with RAID timeouts.
Out of curiosity, I decided to compare the specs listed on Seagate's site for the Desktop 4TB and the NAS rated 4TB drive. Largest differences circled. Curious though that the MTBF is not rated on the desktop drive.
Out of curiosity, I decided to compare the specs listed on Seagate's site for the Desktop 4TB and the NAS rated 4TB drive. Largest differences circled. Curious though that the MTBF is not rated on the desktop drive.
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I've noticed that NAS drives run significantly cooler than pretty much any other line of drive. Less active cooling needed. Source: I Have a ST4000VN000 and a WD20EFRX.
Woah, Seagate drives are rated for "power on" hours??
Those are some insanely low numbers of hours powered-on. I mean, 1 year is 8760 hours so if you run your NAS 24/7 for 1 year that's all it's rated for? And the desktop drives even less? I've not seen any WD "power on" hour rating, only the MTBF
I'm going to label that as "absurd", but it would be amusing to call seagate and ask pre-purchase questions about that number. Maybe that's how many hours per year it should run? Seeing as it is a 24/7 duty cycle drive.
I'm wondering if that's how many hours it is rated to run per year. That number is too coincidental otherwise.
All I will say is I have 6 of these 4TB seagate NAS drives in a PRODUCTION environment. Multiple users accessing it for ~8-9 hours a day, 5 days a week, sometimes weekends. Power on Hours show 19,370 hrs or ~2.21yrs. In fact I believe I've posted this info in another one of these same Seagate NAS deal threads. Never an issue.
WD disk on the other hand, over 15 years have had nothing but issues.
Do what works for you I suppose.
WD disk on the other hand, over 15 years have had nothing but issues.
Do what works for you I suppose.
FYI that 8760 hours is just to denote the "expected time the disk will be powered on during a year". It has nothing to do with its expected life (MTBF). So the standard desktop drive is rated based on a usage pattern of ~100 days of on time/year while the NAS disk is based around being on 365days, or in other words all the time.