I am planning a new home server build and am trying to decide between WD Red drives, Seagate NAS drives or White Label (the rebadged RE4 ones) drives. No matter what, they will be placed in a ZFS pool (probably a 4 drive RAIDZ2) and possibly used as a data store for 2-3 VMs in an all in one install. I have used mostly WD drives in the past, but I am not against other brands if they will perform better for me.
WD Red vs Seagate NAS vs White Label?
- Thread starter smccloud
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I would not bother with any of the NAS based disks. They have TLER and other RAID technologies that are of no use to ZFS. I have been using commodity desktop drives like Hitachi and Toshiba for several years and have had zero issues. Save your money, get Toshiba or Hitachi desktop drives for your pools.
Hitachi yes...Seagate desktop drives no no no. Seagate desktop reliability still sucks rocks big time.
Depending on your needs and your patience shopping (waiting for sales, etc.) there is no effective price premium for WD Red vs Seagate desktop at 3Tb and 4Tb drive sizes. While Sboesch is correct in general (no need for Red/NAS when using ZFS) you DO have a need for reliable drives. And if price is equal (or even near equal) there is no reason to purchase Seagate desktop drives.
Again - Hitachi is a different story. If you can get them at rational prices then they are still king. Problem is that recent pricing for them has not been rational (or, given their higher reliability, maybe it is rational...just not attractive
).
Depending on your needs and your patience shopping (waiting for sales, etc.) there is no effective price premium for WD Red vs Seagate desktop at 3Tb and 4Tb drive sizes. While Sboesch is correct in general (no need for Red/NAS when using ZFS) you DO have a need for reliable drives. And if price is equal (or even near equal) there is no reason to purchase Seagate desktop drives.
Again - Hitachi is a different story. If you can get them at rational prices then they are still king. Problem is that recent pricing for them has not been rational (or, given their higher reliability, maybe it is rational...just not attractive
).
I have two pools, one is a 4x 3TB Toshiba mirror, the other is a 8x Hitachi RAIDZ2 pool.
Here are some benchmarks.
Here are some benchmarks.
I will second PigLover on the Seagate drives, I had 12 of them, only used them for 18 months, 9 of them failed. I STAY FAR AWAY from Seagate drives.
Toshiba bought out part of Hitachi, Toshiba 3TB PH3300U-1I72 disks that you can get today for $99-$109 are the same as the Hitachi 3 TB 7K3000 series disks.
On the other hand, I've had zero issues with Seagates, including ones shucked from external drives. Then again, I've had zero issues from WD either, including Greens in 24x7 use.
Hmm, that's interesting. Wouldn't the jump from 5400 to 7200 rpm be noticeable when running multiple VMs? That's a significant jump in iops.
I'm myself looking to build a lower power SAN/NAS at home (ditching 16x 15K SAS drives) and looking to move to 7200 rpm SATA. I have about a dozen VMs running but only 2 of them are really IO intensive.
I'm myself looking to build a lower power SAN/NAS at home (ditching 16x 15K SAS drives) and looking to move to 7200 rpm SATA. I have about a dozen VMs running but only 2 of them are really IO intensive.
If you want 7200rpm NAS drives, then I can throughly recommend HGST's Deskstar NAS drives. They're 7200rpm, have hardware vibration compensation and they're fast. Only use about 6W, too.
Exactly. The ones I have were the retail boxed ones (only ones available here at the time). Mine were built Jan 14, and I've been running them since April, no problems.
The 3TB version would be fine too? Dropping over $1000 on the server itself leaves less for drives, might also have to go w/ two drives in a mirror and some smaller WL drives in a stripped mirror for VMs (probably the better route anyway).
I don't see why not, I've never tried the 3TB unit, but I can only assume it's similar to the 4TB one.
If you are putting 4 drives in a RaidZ2, a plain mirror provides the same protection (also potentially recoverable without long rebuild times) same space and better performance, especially reads. Z-type raids pretty much run like a single disk, Z2 is not worth looking at until you have 6+ drives.
FWIW for home buyers on a budget I would get hitachi/toshibas, IMO the backblaze report was a pretty good and damning sample of cheap drives.
Right now I have 4 drives in Z2, going to switch to 2 drives in a mirror (going from 4 1TB drives to 2 3TB or 4TB drives). The mirror will be HGST and store all important data. Going to get 4 WL drives (320GB or so) for VM storage.
If heat and power are an issue stay away from the larger white labels as they are WD RE4's
If speed is wanted go ahead and grabe WL
Seagate NAS drives seem to be good, all reviews like them, but they are still new. WD Reds are now thoroughly tested. Hitachi cost more right now, so i didn't bother with them.
Preclearing 7x Reds and 7x Seagates as I type this, see you in a few days.
If speed is wanted go ahead and grabe WL
Seagate NAS drives seem to be good, all reviews like them, but they are still new. WD Reds are now thoroughly tested. Hitachi cost more right now, so i didn't bother with them.
Preclearing 7x Reds and 7x Seagates as I type this, see you in a few days.