8TB disks upgrade suggestions?

[Daisuke]

Hi,

I have a C2100 Dell server with 12x2TB disks connected to a H210 flashed card, running on TrueNAS-12.0-U1.1 release. I'm currently at 44% of my RAIDZ2 pool capacity and I plan to upgrade gradually the pool to 12x8TB disks. I was looking at the Seagate Barracuda ST8000DM004 model, because its cheap price. Do you have any experience with it in your NAS? What affordable disk model do you recommend? This is a home NAS where I store all my raw picture files and other related media, longer resilvering time in favour of a better price is acceptable for me.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Do I understand things right that the main driver for upgrade is the fact that your pool is getting close to 50% utilization? If so, and without additional information, I would argue that you can probably wait a bit longer

 

[artlessknave]

Seagate Barracuda ST8000DM004 are SMR drives. highly not recommended.
good chance of taking weeks to rebuild -per drive- or killing teh whole pool.

WD Red SMR vs CMR Tested Avoid Red SMR

We tested WD Red SMR v CMR drives to see if there was indeed a significant impact with the change. We found SMR can put data at risk 13-16x longer than CMR

www.servethehome.com

List of known SMR drives

Hard drives that write data in overlapping, "shingled" tracks, have greater areal density than ones that do not. For cost and capacity reasons, manufacturers are increasingly moving to SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR is a form of PMR...

www.truenas.com

they are cheap for a reason, they are using SMR, which is inappropriate for zfs.

 

[Daisuke]

Do I understand things right that the main driver for upgrade is the fact that your pool is getting close to 50% utilization? If so, and without additional information, I would argue that you can probably wait a bit longer

I want to start the process gradually, say I purchase one 8TB disk every month.

Seagate Barracuda ST8000DM004 are SMR drives. highly not recommended.
good chance of taking weeks to rebuild -per drive- or killing teh whole pool.

WD Red SMR vs CMR Tested Avoid Red SMR

We tested WD Red SMR v CMR drives to see if there was indeed a significant impact with the change. We found SMR can put data at risk 13-16x longer than CMR

www.servethehome.com

List of known SMR drives

Hard drives that write data in overlapping, "shingled" tracks, have greater areal density than ones that do not. For cost and capacity reasons, manufacturers are increasingly moving to SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR is a form of PMR...

www.truenas.com

they are cheap for a reason, they are using SMR, which is inappropriate for zfs.

Thanks for the info, what affordable disk model do you recommend as alternative to SMR drives? The cheapest CMR drives I found are:
- Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS ST8000VN004
- WD Red 8TB WD80EFAX

 

[HoneyBadger]

- Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS ST8000VN004
- WD Red 8TB WD80EFAX

Both of those are fine; the 8TB WD Reds are CMR even with the EFAX designation. You could even mix and match.

(That's a heck of a machine just for home storage as well.)

 

[Daisuke]

Thanks @HoneyBadger, I think I will settle for Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS ST8000VN004 model. I purchased 2 today on Amazon at $200 each, as my first upgrade.

I wanted a real server with production grade components, even if my old NAS ran perfect for last 9 years or so. I got the server with 12 2TB disks included for $480USD and free shipping on eBay from a reputable servers vendor (esisoinc). I asked them to replace the H700 card with a H210 so I can flash it myself and replace the included 32GB of RAM with 2x16GB bars. They accommodated me, great customer service, I will purchase from them again. I purchased the balance of 16GB sticks up to 192GB with room for an additional 6 sticks.

Overall the server + 8x16BG RAM upgrades cost me a total of $640USD. The biggest expense will be the new disks, that's an average of $2000-2200 for all 12x8TB Seagate IronWolf disks. Crazy, ehh? That's why I plan to buy one at the time, plus is better for disks reliability not to buy all of them in one batch.

 

[artlessknave]

WD tried to sneak SMR into the RED line with noone noticing, so be careful ordering WD red drives, as the core RED series is mixed SMR. only the Plus and Pro reds are 100% CMR, at least until WD tries to sneak SMR into them.
seagate made the statement that ironwolf will never be SMR.
I no longer buy reds.

 

[Daisuke]

Thank you @artlessknave, I was actually reading about this online earlier that Seagate IronWolf are truly CMR. That's the reason I started to purchase them. It will be a long ride until the upgrade is complete, I like to go slow because hopefully the prices will go down a little while checking monthly Amazon, eBay and other local sources.

Edit: I see you're in Canada also. :) I got the equivalent of $199USD on amazon.ca from a third party vendor fulfilled by Amazon.

 

[kn51]

Thank you @artlessknave, I was actually reading about this online earlier that Seagate IronWolf are truly CMR. That's the reason I started to purchase them. It will be a long ride until the upgrade is complete, I like to go slow because hopefully the prices will go down a little while checking monthly Amazon, eBay and other local sources.

Edit: I see you're in Canada also. :) I got the equivalent of $199USD on amazon.ca from a third party vendor fulfilled by Amazon.

Heh, I just replaced a couple 2TB drives with 2 of those exact same sized drives a couple months ago. No complaints so far.

 

[Etorix]

Thanks for the info, what affordable disk model do you recommend as alternative to SMR drives? The cheapest CMR drives I found are:
- Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS ST8000VN004
- WD Red 8TB WD80EFAX

Whichever is cheapest whenever you purchase. You can also consider WD Gold and Seagate Exos (enterprise drives). Mixing vendors, lines and/or batches is a way to avoid that all drives will die at the same time.

 

[artlessknave]

Mixing vendors, lines and/or batches

you do generally want to try and use similarly specced drives when possible. whole vdevs can only be as fast as the lowest spec drive.

 

[Daisuke]

I just noticed Seagate Exos prices dropping dramatically, $100 less. They sell on eBay for $173USD.

Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 (7200RPM, 3.5-inch, SATA III, Standard Format) 8TB Internal Hard Drive - ST8000NM0055 for sale online | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 (7200RPM, 3.5-inch, SATA III, Standard Format) 8TB Internal Hard Drive - ST8000NM0055 at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

Same thing on Amazon, the question is, do they plan to discontinue the Exos brand? I mean this is an enterprise grade disk, better than Ironwolf.

 

[Etorix]

Probably just clearing inventory on old low-capacity Exos drives now that 16 TB and 18 TB are available.

 

[Hellione]

i am working with 8TB Exos too, they are cheaper than ironwolf and just as good or even better with their 5yr warranty. i can absolutely recommend.
i heard they are cheaper because they are bought in large quantities from data centers. more produced/sold items and less ad makes them cheaper.

 

[Daisuke]

Do we know if Seagate Exos 12TB SATA are supported with TrueNAS 12? I was doing the math and with the rate my disks are filling from raw pictures and 4K movies from my Sony A7RIII, I might as well go with 12TB disks. As comparison, Exos 12TB $250, vs Exos 8TB $175.

 

[HoneyBadger]

TrueNAS doesn't add any additional limitations on disk size, so the 12T drives should work just fine to let you take advantage of the better $/GB.

There were firmware bugs in the 10TB Ironwolf drives but I haven't heard of any in the Exos line.

 

[Hellione]

there is no special need to support a specific drive. all drives will work. smr drives are not recommended. you can ask google, how they work, then you will pretty sure understand why. enterprise drives like exos are best for storage systems, that is exactly what they are built for.

 

[artlessknave]

as long as you are using a modern version of freenas and not SAS1 hardware, disk size limitations are like 100000 PB or something currently ridiculous (well, unless you are trying to use SATA multiplyers or something, since those are reportely garbage and do weird stuff).
limits technically exist, but the tech allocated enough bits in the newer versions to not be likely to hit the same addressing problems for our lifetimes at least (hopefully).

 

[Heffy]

I believe that with RAID Z2 your storage capacity won't increase until the last 2 Tb drive is replaced.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Show : My Current TrueNAS system

Asus Motherboard, 16 Gb Ram, 1 240 Gb SSD boot drive, mix of 3 and 4 Tb WD-Red NAS Hard Drives in ZFS Z2 configuration, TrueNAS 12.0 U1.x on FreeBSD

 

[artlessknave]

RAID Z2 your storage capacity won't increase until the last 2 Tb drive is replaced.

correct at the vdev level. any vdev will be the size of the smallest drive in the vdev.
if the pool only has one vdev, then this functionally applies to the pool; if the pool has multiple vdevs, then it applies per vdev.