Best 2 TB drive around $80 for ZFS? (not-4k sector size)

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sofakng

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Apr 27, 2011
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What's the best 2 TB drive for around $80 to be used in an eight disk RAID-Z2 array?

I've been told that 4k drives don't work well with ZFS so I'd like something with the regular 512 byte sectors. (and not 4k with 512 byte emulation)

Anyways - I'm looking at buying eight of these:

Hitachi Deskstar 5k3000 2 TB

Are these 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM? Are they "eco" drives? (Surprisingly I can't seem to find any information on that...)

Anybody have any other suggestions? This is only going to be used for a home fileserver box.
 

ubiquityman

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Mar 18, 2011
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I have 3 of these in RAID 5 in a Synology NAS. They are Eco drives, which I prefer because of lower power/heat. They are 512 byte sectors.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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The 5K3000 drives are like 5940rpm drives. Still considered low power.

Plenty of drive for home use as sequential transfers are similar to the 7K2000 series (last generation 7200rpm).
 

sofakng

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Apr 27, 2011
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Thanks!

Are there better performing drives for that price point? ($80)

(Again, I need 512 byte sector size drives for ZFS...)
 

sofakng

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Apr 27, 2011
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General purpose use for the home but primarily for streaming 1080p videos, etc. I will also store HDD images on there, my photos, videos, etc.

How do the Samsung F4 Spinpoint drives compare to the Hitachi 5K3000?
 
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ubiquityman

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Mar 18, 2011
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I have 2TB drives of Samsung F4, the Hitachi 5k3000, and the WD Green EARS.
I went with the Hitachi for my NAS.

WD has the "head parking" problem and needs to be reconfigured.
The F4s need new firmware to prevent corruption, and they did not hibernate properly with Synology NASes.

I found very little difference in performance, so I went with price.
The Hitachi's were as low as $60 about 2 months ago, after $10 rebate.
 

sofakng

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Apr 27, 2011
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Thanks again for the reply.

According to the specs, the Hitach is 6.0 GB/s and a 5 year warranty. The Samsung is 3.0 GB/s and 3 year warranty.

However, the Hitach is rated at 170 MB/s (media transfer rate) but the Samsung is 250 MB/s (media transfer rate)...
 

S-F

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Feb 9, 2011
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250 MB/s? I'll eat my boots if they can do that. Can the VelociRaptors do that? Doesn't matter any way. I'm assuming that you are using 1 gig ethernet so even if they could read at 1,000 TB/s you'd have a network bottleneck.
 

nitrobass24

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Dec 26, 2010
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The internal media transfer rate of a drive (often just called the media transfer rate or the media rate) refers to the actual speed that the drive can read bits from the surface of the platter, or write bits to the surface of the platter. It is normally quoted in units of megabits per second, abbreviated Mbit/sec or Mb/s.

This is not the same as Sequential Read speeds that a user will see as these are Megabytes/sec (MB/s).

I would get Hitachi Drives if it were me. 5k3000 to be exact.
 

odditory

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Dec 23, 2010
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Thanks again for the reply.

According to the specs, the Hitach is 6.0 GB/s and a 5 year warranty. The Samsung is 3.0 GB/s and 3 year warranty.

However, the Hitach is rated at 170 MB/s (media transfer rate) but the Samsung is 250 MB/s (media transfer rate)...
AFAIK the Hitachi and Samsung are both 3-yr warranty. Also if Samsung lists 250MB/s, that is the interface transfer rate (SATA-II limit) and not the rate from the platters to the interface. So either you read/interpreted the spec sheet wrong or Samsung is playing creative marketing. Both drives have similar realworld benches.

Hitachi 5K3000 is a no brainer especially for not having to deal with 4K sectors. google around or search on this forum or others like [H] and you'll see this info is already readily available and widely discussed.
 
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Loto_Bak

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Mar 10, 2011
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I think its worth mentioning...
Just deal with 4k sectors now. Build your ZFS pool to support them now

If in a year or two a drive needs to be replaced and no 512 sector drives are available your performance using a 4k sector drive will be terrible.

Its better to create a 4k pool now, even if you are using 512 drives. The performance hit of 4k on 512 drives is much less than 512 on 4k drives.
 

nitrobass24

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Dec 26, 2010
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I can back this up, with personal experience as well.

5k3000 sequential transfer is just as good as 7k2000. Runs 10c cooler.
Random IO a little slower, but not noticeably slower for file server use.