Norco Builds - Hard drive recomendations - RAID w/ Green Drives - Page 2

These Seagate drives appear to be very new; newegg ref I gave had no user reviews as of yesterday. I also see that newegg bumped the price to $115 but that's not unusual for newegg as they constantly play price games; it just means that you might have to shop around to find a reputable seller at $95.

Why not write a question to Seagate at: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/pro...ContentReviews

They seem to respond with good answers. Get specific and name the hardware raid card that you're considering, but make it a card that is popular and well used by people running large raid configurations.


OK. Probably by tomorrow.

I expect sequential to be the same as the similar desktop drive, but random read/write to be somewhat better (based on Seagate's specs for the 2 drives).

Of course, one never knows until you do it.

FWIW the desktop version shows slightly better overall performance than my 7200rpm 1TB boot-drive which is Samsung's very decent HD103SJ.

But that's due to both the higher platter density and twice the cache memory; the 64MB of cache is the one thing that might pay off with having SATA III, which shows up with noticeably higher burst rate (199.7MB/sec (Seagate 2TB desktop 5900rpm) vs 138.5 MB/sec (Samsung 1TB desktop 7200rpm)).


Nope; just as a 2nd drive in my desktop machine.

actually the $119 gets you 20 data drives (plus 1 cache drive (if needed) and 1 parity, for a total of 22 drives), you need a bigger case

so $119(unRAID) x ($100 x 2) (drive expanders) still is cheaper than just your RAID card...


note: I really am not anti RAID, I still go down in my basement from time to time and fire up my poweredge server with its 8gig RAM & quad XEON's (450Mhz!!!) and 8 15K RPM 36Gb SCSI drives (about 200Gb RAID 5) attached by Fiber Channel (anyone remember fiber channel? was going to be the next greatest thing ever... but then it faded away into history)... it was a blazing fast, for its time/decade/etc... it is fun watching the house lights dim during disk I/O...
anyway I Just think you might be over thinking/planning this a bit...

196 drives is somewhat unrealistic... just imagine your electric bill...
you will personally be responsible for the neighborhood black/brown out when they all spin up at the same time
and with that many drives, your odds of having 3 or more more drives fail at the same time are much, much worse...

actually, a random useless thought... 196 SSD's might make a cool (both from a heat,electricity and just plain WOW factor) array... actually, the $$$ factor might rank up there with the WOW factor... but that is one of those "someone else's problem" type things.

anyway, back on topic, I have always had good luck with Seagate & Hitachi... but I have nothing newer than older 2Tb drives at the moment... so no up to date experience...

true...
but a unRAID (or others, but I like unRAID) 20x2Tb array = 40Tb, not sure what your current needs are, but 40TB isn't that small... if 40Tb can last you until your 10Tb drives come out and reach the correct price point (and we know the will... just a matter of when), then you can slowly replace the 2Tb drives with 10Tb drives upgrading as needed... eventually getting you 200Tb...
actually that is one of the great things about the JBOD+Parity setup is you don't need to wait for 10Tb drives, you could just upgrade a couple drives to 6Tb or even 3Tb if you just need a bit more space while waiting for the 10Tb drives... the mixing & matching of drive sizes is unlimited...


but it would be extremely cool... and cost is irrelevant...ie it's not my money, so it doesn't matter


you sure you just don't have the really old site cached or something? the only reference I can find to the 16 drive limit is for really old versions...
there is this:


I am confused as to why you think you need 2 unRAID's? (not that there is anything wrong with that, actually seems like a pretty cool idea... and the 2nd unRAID license is only $30 more...) and really as far as additional hardware goes, the biggest cost adder is the drives themselves... and they are needed regardless of which system you end up with...
would be cool to see if someone has 'crunched the numbers' and did an actual cost comparison...

just how much storage do you currently need? and how much additional storage will you need to add on monthly/yearly basis? as long as hard drive sizes keep increasing at an adequate rate, there should no real need for more than 20 drives at any given time, assuming you don't need the full 60Tb (3Tb x 20) right now at least... as a general rule, buying storage as you need it is far more cost effective...

Below is mainly what I observe of time/speed when doing real world stuff like clone backup (HDD to HDD) or a full virus/malware scan; but also the free HD Tune 2.55 program, but which is also very limited in what it can do.

Anyhow the two HDD I'm talking about are both recent Seagate 2TB 5900rpm 64MB cache SATA III AF (Advanced Format; 4k sector size):

enterprise version (currently $95 to $115 depending on where you buy): http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/pro...Specifications

"desktop" version (currently ~$80): http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...Specifications

Yesterday I cloned my "desktop" version (2nd HDD in my PC that currently has 38GB of data on it) to a temporary enterprise version (via *recent* Acronis True image Home 2011 booted from the CD with the temp drive plugged in at the side of the PC on wooden blocks (don't laugh, this is what is done in the real world PC biz)), then replaced the 2nd HDD with the just cloned enterprise version; so I've now roughly a day of use on the PC.

My observations:
1. Fast; sequential is roughly same on both drives, but random is somewhat faster with the enterprise drive. Despite only 5900rpm both drives compare favorably to the best of my 1TB 7200rpm HDD (which admittedly have lower platter density)
2. Head movement is truly quiet! (compared to the quietest of my 7200rpm HDD)
3. Runs very cool.
4. Minimal vibration (via fingertip "test" while on the wood blocks)

no disagreement there... never understood the concept of trying to make the HT experience the best it could be, and then compressing the crap out of your media... I just don't get it... hard drives are relatively cheap...

the easiest is just from their registration keys page
note they count things funny... it is really 20 data drives + 1 parity, and maybe one cache drive if you really need it...

personally I have separate systems for data and movies... Data goes on a ReadyNAS NV+ with 4 2TB drives in raid X (basically a custom raid 5)
movies go on the unraid
sure, I know it makes no sense... but it makes me happy... I am not really a big fan of one size fits all (or none?), I prefer to let seprate systems play to their strengths...
also, there is nothing particularly special about the ReadyNAS, other than I had one, and it was just sitting there... might as well put it to use...

you should be... works great at least for media type applications...

just do one at a time? no issues then really, and you still have the data on the drive that is being 'upgraded'

true, but keep in mind when a RAID array fails, either 2+ drives really die, or they drop out while there are dead drives, or the controller takes a dump, all the data on all the drives spontaneously goes POOFF!!! in a little mushroom cloud of 1's & 0's...

with any of the JBOD+Parity setups, only the data on the drives that died is gone, and even that is assuming you cant get the drive to limp along long enough to rescue the data...
for whatever reason, you can always pull an individual drive out and read the data off him... try that with RAID...

If I were in the market for 20 2TB hard drives, I'd buy 3 or 4 different cheap enterprise drives and use them. Pick the 2 I liked best and buy another two of each of those and use them. Finally pick the set of 3 identical HDD that I like best and buy another 12 of those.

I'd also expect a few DOA units and not get bent out of shape about it. Order from Amazon when possible because are easier, although I'm told that if you request a free shipping label for a Newegg RMA that they'll send it.

With regard to what raid you go with, getting a setup that doesn't get totally lost when stuff goes wrong (which sooner or later it always does) would be my 1st priority; comments/ideas by Somewhatlost reflect that. Good luck to you.

Oh and FWIW I've 3 green 2TB HDD so far: 1 Samsung 2TB (5400rpm $80) and 2 Seagate (5900rpm $80) and the new enterprise Seagate (5900rpm $95). Good as they are, when I buy my next 2TB drive it won't be the $80 units.

You probably did not pay attention as I am "newbie" but mine entire hardware for 28-drives capable system comes to around the price you are going to pay for that RAID controller:

ECC capable MB with 2 x PCIe x8 slots - $70
ECC capable CPU (all the recent AMDs are) - $45
2x2 GB ECC DDR2 - $60
2 x IBM M1015 PCIe SAS/SATA controllers - $100 (these are now more expensive but still you can find some if you have time; if not and limited to 2TB you can use the cheap IBM BR10i instead - just flash the LSI "IT" firmware and you are set to go)
430W Corsair PSU (good for 12 drives "green"system) - $30. I did start with much beefier PSU but downgraded to one that will work at at least 10-15% of its power rating when the system is idle.
4 x SFF8087 to 4 SATA forward breakout cables - $40.

But that is the beauty if you are not buying HDs by caseloads with your own delivery channels.
In this way you will end with a mixture of drives made by different MFRs, different batches and with different but usually harsh treatment on their way to your place. And this probably will be cost effective too - instead of buying 20 3TB drives now you can buy them when they are on sales (usually there is a limitation on how many you can buy at this time) and later when you actually need them.
In this way the chances of getting 10-15-20 "lemons" that will fail in almost the same time are greatly diminished.