I Hate choosing hard drives.

[Thatguy]

Help!

I'm looking at adding a JBOD chassis to my current storage environment for home. I've currently got a Supermicro SC-847 w/ 36 Hitachi Ultrastar 7k2000? drives in it.

It's set up as 4x8 Drive Raid-Z3's zpool w/ 4 hot spares, 24 drives on a LSI 9265-8i, and 12 Drives + Boot (2x140gb raid1) on a 9211-8i. (~36TB usable)

I was originally planning on doing HW raid for the whole deal, but I like ZFS's end to end checksumming more, because it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.

Server has been on for ~2 years now, no drive failures or hiccups or anything, so that makes me happy. Servers primary purpose is to hold onto my media collection. 98% of the time it has just me watching media from it.

I'm torn between a few options, The newer Supermicro JBOD chassis that holds 44? 3.5" drives, a Supermicro 3U 15 Drive chassis, or a Norco 24 drive 4U. I know I'd be giving up a fault tolerant PSU on the Norco, unless I buy some magic to put in there, but the Norco is more than half the cost of the Supermicro. Plus I can add a 24-32 port HBA to the Norco for under $300, and I could probably get a power controller included for that cost (referenced on the site)

Also, I'm not sure what to do about drives. When I bought my 36 Drive array initially, I think I spent $7k CAD just on drives. and if I go up to a 3 or 4TB (lol) drive, it'll easily cost near that much or even more again. I'm REALLY happy with my Hitachi's, but I don't think I use them to their full potential enough to really justify the cost...

So in summary, looking for a cheap(er) low power setup to add to my current array. My current array consumes about 800W at idle. Noise isn't an issue as it lives in the basement.

 

[Zuhkov]

Have you considered a chassis like the SGI SE3016? You can find them quite reasonably priced on eBay. For example:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/SGI-RACKABLE-3U-STORAGE-DAS-SERVER-SE3016-16-HARD-DRIVE-BAY-SAS-SATA-MINI-SAS-/110987060876?pt=US_NAS_Disk_Arrays&hash=item19d758268c

16 3.5" drive trays plus the SAS expander and power supply for a couple hundred dollars. Based on testing (done by others), you don't get more than about 1GB/s aggregate bandwidth from the chassis over the SAS link, but given your use case that should be more than sufficient. If the PSU is particularly inefficient, you can probably replace it (based on my recollection of the design), but there are number of good threads (can't remember whether there are any on this site) covering this particular enclosure.

 

[Thatguy]

That is disturbingly cheap.

Oh, $350 for shipping. That's how they make their money on it, or maybe that's just ebay being poopy and refusing to show me anything but UPS Air.

Otherwise it's a geat idea. Everything I want, and yeah could probably swap the PSU without too much difficulty.

 

[cactus]

That is disturbingly cheap.

Oh, $350 for shipping. That's how they make their money on it.

Otherwise it's a geat idea. Everything I want, and yeah could probably swap the PSU without too much difficulty.

Only $40 to LA for the SGI chassis. Edit: saw $CAD in OP

What are you looking at accomplishing and what is the box used for? Do you want to keep current storage levels and decrease power usage? Or add more storage? Even going with 11W(Read/Write from site) a drive you still have over 400W being used somewhere else. What are your current server specs?

 

[mobilenvidia]

$40 shipping is nothing compared to $763 to New Zealand, it does get to go 1st class with VIP lounge and Limousine to our house

 

[Thatguy]

Alright, so that or a Chenbro 24U from unixsurplus for a little bit more. Someone on another website also put 4TB hitachi's in it without incident.

Now I just need to decide on drives =\ and if I'm going 2 or 4TB.

 

[Zuhkov]

Hmm...maybe try a different ebay seller. Don't know where in Canada you are, but this one came up with 80 CAD instead of 350 CAD when I switched the location to Canada:
http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-5...ep_vectorid=229466&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=lg

I've actually ordered other things from this seller before. They're good about communication, packing, and shipping, just not always as flexible on price as I might like. Still, at least worth an offer assuming the shipping is more reasonable to your location.

Edit: just looked and this seller is actually one of the ebay names used by unixsurplus, so there you go (and I learn something everyday).

 

[Thatguy]

Ordered. Now to decide on drives...

Was looking at the ST3000DM001. Backblaze uses the 1.5TB version for their hardware, so that's gotta be worth something.

In a 8 drive raidz3, with the settings in pessimistic mode, I have a very low chance of total data failure. Also I can get these drives with a in store replacement deal from a place about 5 minutes from me, so if any do fail, it's a short drive to get a new one.

Thoughts?

 

[Zuhkov]

Those are my current go-to drives (after the 3TB Hitachi 5K3000 got scarce and expensive) mostly because of price, especially at the price they were available on Black Friday. I have probably half a dozen of them at the moment (2 in my storage server array, 2 warm spares, 1 in my DVR server, and 1 in my other ESXI lab) and I've had excellent results with all of them. I was initially bummed that Seagate was dropping Barracuda LP in favor of all 7200 RPM drives, but in stark contrast to the old 5-platter Barracuda XT 3TB drives (which run hot, loud, and a bit temperamental), the new Barracuda 3TB drives seem to run relatively cool and relatively quiet, especially for a 7200 RPM drive.

I will say that I'm a proponent of burning in drives with bad blocks or preclear or something similar and then checking SMART reports before and after and look for any failed or re-allocated sectors. I understand drives could fail at pretty much any time, but there are enough reports of DOA or young drives failing (this model and others, obviously) to make it worth checking while you're still in an easy exchange period (though it sounds like that may not be as much of a factor for you).

Would I consider the WD Red 3TB if they were around the same price? Absolutely. I'll probably get one at some point anyway just to try out. If I could get the Toshiba/Hitachi 3TB 5K3000 (or whatever Toshiba is going to call them) in good, reliable quantity I might be inclined to go that direction given your use case even if they were slightly more expensive on a per drive basis. Those drives are just workhorses as storage drives and I believe were the previous disk of choice for Backblaze.

Edit: meant to ask, does your setup allow your idle drives to spin down or are they up pretty much all the time?

 

[Thatguy]

My 9265-8i would let me spin down drives if required. I haven't set anyting in linux/zfs relating to power management.

Is the WD Red a significantly better drive as far as longevity goes? I'm willing to spend an extra $40/drive, but not nearly triple for a RE.

 

[mobilenvidia]

My 9265-8i would let me spin down drives if required. I haven't set anyting in linux/zfs relating to power management.

Is the WD Red a significantly better drive as far as longevity goes? I'm willing to spend an extra $40/drive, but not nearly triple for a RE.

http://forums.servethehome.com/show...vs-consumer-drives&p=9055&viewfull=1#post9055

Might be of interest

 

[Zuhkov]

Is the WD Red a significantly better drive as far as longevity goes? I'm willing to spend an extra $40/drive, but not nearly triple for a RE.

As discussed in the thread mobilenvidia linked, there doesn't seem to be as much variance in failure rate between different models as one might assume (rate goes up over time pretty consistently), but there is a major difference in the warranty (don't know whether the warranty policies are the same in Canada). The Red drives have a 3 year warranty. The Seagate only has a 1 year warranty. If that longer warranty is of use to you, it may be worth the slight difference in cost between the Seagate and the WD Red.

 

[mobilenvidia]

No matter what you choose, your data is only as safe as the backups you do

The figures are very indicative only, as they are just numbers plucked from a formula on a good day in an ideal world.
As Odditory has said no drive is safe from failure, just the risk of them happening are reduced as you go up in price.

The RE drive theoretically has an error in no less than 1136TB of data read or 30x the capacity of a 4TB drive). (10^16/8/1024/1024/1024/1024)
The other drives in 11.4TB or every 3x the capacity of a 4TB drive (10^14/8/1024/1024/1024/1024)

RE drives with full ECC on a full ECC system (RAM and SAS RAID controller with UPS) should eliminate any errors (as long as there are no more than 1bit errors)
All non SAS drives do not have ECC internally on the drives and is the one place of weakness in a SATA system setup the same as above

 

[Thatguy]

No matter what you choose, your data is only as safe as the backups you do

The figures are very indicative only, as they are just numbers plucked from a formula on a good day in an ideal world.
As Odditory has said no drive is safe from failure, just the risk of them happening are reduced as you go up in price.

The RE drive theoretically has an error in no less than 1136TB of data read or 30x the capacity of a 4TB drive). (10^16/8/1024/1024/1024/1024)
The other drives in 11.4TB or every 3x the capacity of a 4TB drive (10^14/8/1024/1024/1024/1024)

RE drives with full ECC on a full ECC system (RAM and SAS RAID controller with UPS) should eliminate any errors (as long as there are no more than 1bit errors)
All non SAS drives do not have ECC internally on the drives and is the one place of weakness in a SATA system setup the same as above

Regarding on drive ECC: Doesn't the use of ZFS/Most RAID eliminate or reduce the importance of this? With ZFS's end to end checksumming, and scheduled scrubs, should be able to catch any errors, single bit or otherwise.

Sadly WD doesn't seem to publish read error rates for their RED series of drives, and they have a terrible website. Another site claims the REDs which are $30/drive more also ship with the same 10^14 error rate as the Seagates I was looking at.

In my specific situation, I can get a 2 year instant replacement warranty for an extra $15 per drive, so the drive only having a 1 year warranty isn't a big deal, and at the end of 2 years, I'd probably upgrade to 4 or 6TB drives.