2.5" "NAS" drives over 2TB with ERC / TLER, workarounds?

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pocock

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It is well known that 2.5" drives are better for lower noise emissions, especially in homes.

I've noticed that for some time now no vendor has offered a 2.5" drive bigger than 2TB with the ERC/TLER feature. There are lots of 3.5" drives for NAS purposes and there are also several 2.5" drives for laptops that are 4TB but without ERC/TLER.

- is anybody aware of any 4TB or bigger 2.5" drive with ERC/TLER from any vendor?

- is anybody aware of any such drive being available in the near future?

- are there any viable workarounds to use drives without ERC/TLER?
 

joeschmuck

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It is well known that 2.5" drives are better for lower noise emissions, especially in homes.
Hum... I can say with complete confidence that my six WD Red 2TB drives are silent when installed inside a case. I can only hear them when the case is open and my ear is very near each drive. There are 2.5" laptop hard drives that I can clearly hear seeking (head movement) and they are inside a laptop. So if you choose the correct hard drive, even a 3.5" drive can be practically silent. But from a small size and weight point of view, 2.5" drives would be nice to have.

I am not aware of any 2.5" hard drive that meets your criteria. Seagate makes drives up to 5TB but none are "NAS" drives. @Arwen uses 2.5" hard drives in a media server I believe, she may be able to give you some advice. Her drives were not NAS drives either unless she upgraded them.
 

pocock

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Hum... I can say with complete confidence that my six WD Red 2TB drives are silent when installed inside a case. I can only hear them when the case is open and my ear is very near each drive. There are 2.5" laptop hard drives that I can clearly hear seeking (head movement) and they are inside a laptop. So if you choose the correct hard drive, even a 3.5" drive can be practically silent. But from a small size and weight point of view, 2.5" drives would be nice to have.

I agree that there are some quieter 3.5" drives and some noisier 2.5" drives. I've got a wide range of drives in my lab environment, including 10k and 15k SAS, some RE4 drives, etc, so I'm also well aware of the diversity of noise levels.

All the WD Red 6TB (WD60EFRX) drives I bought failed and each time they go the distributor lets me take another model, so I've been replacing them with Seagate 4TB drive, e.g. ST4000VN000.

Another noise factor with 2.5" drives is the lower power consumption, this reduces load on the PSU and overall the cooling fans, if any, should be working less.

Her drives were not NAS drives either unless she upgraded them.

Can you point me to a link about upgrading drives to NAS firmware?
 

joeschmuck

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All the WD Red 6TB (WD60EFRX) drives I bought failed
That is sad to hear.

Can you point me to a link about upgrading drives to NAS firmware?
I think you misunderstood me, I meant that unless she replaced them with newer drives that support NAS, not a firmware upgrade. That would be cool though.
 

Chris Moore

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are there any viable workarounds to use drives without ERC/TLER?
From what I have read, FreeNAS is not as sensitive to this problem as systems that use hardware RAID controllers and a drive that has enough errors to be booted from a FreeNAS pool is probably just defective regardless.
is anybody aware of any such drive being available in the near future?
I don't expect there will be because of the small form factor. The 2.5" Seagate 4TB and 5TB drives appear (from the literature) to be using SMR to pack more data into a smaller space and I don't think you are likely to see any company selling SMR drives as suitable for a NAS.
All the WD Red 6TB (WD60EFRX) drives I bought failed and each time they go the distributor lets me take another model, so I've been replacing them with Seagate 4TB drive, e.g. ST4000VN000.
You must have a very speccial relationship with your distributor if they will swap a WD drive for a Seagate drive for you. I buy a lot of drives and I don't get that treatment, but my failed drives have to be crushed and I can't send them back.
 

Arwen

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I am not aware of any 2.5" hard drive that meets your criteria. Seagate makes drives up to 5TB but none are "NAS" drives. @Arwen uses 2.5" hard drives in a media server I believe, she may be able to give you some advice. Her drives were not NAS drives either unless she upgraded them.
...
Can you point me to a link about upgrading drives to NAS firmware?
While my minature media server does have a 2.5" drive in it, it's a 2TB laptop model from Seagate. I had to use that specific model because it was the highest capacity that was 9mm or less in height. (I am not sure my little box will support a 15mm, 2.5" drive.)

No firmware update to NAS features is available for laptop 2.5" drives as far as I know.

On the subject of noise, it sits about 5 feet from my left ear and I never hear it. Not even during a scrub. (Yes, I do use ZFS on Linux for both root pool and data pool.) And I have disabled head parking, (as it was getting too high).
 
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