8x2TB 2,5" 9.5mm HDD Z2

[Radu]

Did someone has experience with such a vdev?

I will build with this model:
SAMSUNG Spinpoint M9T ST2000LM003

What do you think about this? Can someone who has used 2.5" HDD in some builds share his experience?

 

[jgreco]

Please don't include NewEgg links when you can just as easily specify the model. Your post has been edited accordingly.

The Spinpoints seem to be a reasonable drive. Had one arrive with errors.

 

[Radu]

OK, sorry about the link. What kind of errors?

 

[jgreco]

No problem on the link, it just reduces readability which is why I edited it. You get better answers from more people when you provide the information in your post (and you're welcome to ADD the link!)

Just normal infant mortality, read errors somewhere out mid-drive. Vaguely disappointing as it suggested poor QC. If drives are going to fail on me in the first thousand hours, I like them to flame out or do something spectacular, not have an uncorrectable media defect.

 

[Radu]

:) myeah flames would be much better, I have ordered 8pcs and i hope that they will arrive ok and they will work fine. I hace the Sm Mobile Rack M28SAB for them. I hope they will be fine.

 

[jgreco]

:) myeah flames would be much better, I have ordered 8pcs and i hope that they will arrive ok and they will work fine. I hace the Sm Mobile Rack M28SAB for them. I hope they will be fine.

My only concern with these drives is that unlike the Toshibas, they are intended to be aimed more at laptops or game consoles. It has been reviewed pretty well, but as with many drives these days, the rated duty cycle is conspicuously missing.

 

[Radu]

2.5" 2TB Toshiba's ? with the same price as M9T's ? Unfortunately there is no MTBF listed, i agree with you.

 

[jgreco]

The MTBF on the Samys is 550K or thereabouts. That's different than the duty cycle, which is an indication of whether or not they expect a drive to stand up to continuous use.

Toshiba MQ01ABB200. It's a 15mm high drive so it fills an entire standard 2.5" bay; it isn't compatible with laptops, which usually require a low profile drive.

It's usually a tad cheaper than the Samsung/Seagate. The intended use model appears to be primarily external USB storage devices, and I don't believe I ever located a duty cycle rating for that either. Sigh.

I'm hoping that WD comes out with a non-Green version of their 2TB 2.5" drive soon, because for the VM storage filer, I was going to have some fun and make an array of 8 drives of each type, Samy, Toshy, and WD, mirroring one of each type in a three way mirror, seven vdevs of that and then three spare disks.

 

[Radu]

I do not understand why do you need such a setup for the VM storage filer. And i do not know what a VM storage filler does ... yet :)
I want to put all the 8 drives in a 2x5,25" bays, space so i do not think that my SM case can accept 15mm 2,5" HDD's and that is the reason why i needed them small 9,5mm thick. M9T is the only one 2TB in size... btw made by Seagate it is not Samsung anymore.

 

[jgreco]

I do not understand why do you need such a setup for the VM storage filer. And i do not know what a VM storage filler does ... yet :)

SAN storage for virtual machines. One of the nastiest, stressiest applications there is for ZFS. I've been talking about this for months. You mean you haven't been reading every single post I've written, and pieced it all together? Heh.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/change-iscsi-drive-type.27121/#post-173508

Our environment here isn't that large, that stressy, or that nasty, because over the last half a decade we've carefully restructured stuff to be VM-friendly - our VM's do not assume they have resources all to themselves.

For VM storage, though, RAIDZ doesn't work well, and you need mirrors. If you use two-way mirrors, then the failure of one drive means you no longer have redundancy within that vdev. This shortcoming can be repaired by going with three-way mirrors. But drives sometimes have a manufacturing batch defect, so putting three drives from the same manufacturing run introduces a stronger possibility that all three drives could catastrophically fail in a similar manner in a short period of time, hosing you.

Therefore selecting a heterogeneous set of drives decreases the likelihood that you will experience simultaneous failures. Usually people just pick two different manufacturers. I might just end up doing this since there's no strong indication of a third manufacturer coming to the party; the WD Green 2TB 2.5 has been out for a Very Long Time and the Reds are usually very similar to the Greens (mostly just different firmware).

I could also move on up to SAS drives where there are several options, but at $400+ each, that was deemed not desirable.

But mostly it's because of the rage involved when a major failure happens, so lots of engineering goes into trying to avoid major failures.

I want to put all the 8 drives in a 2x5,25" bays, space so i do not think that my SM case can accept 15mm 2,5" HDD's and that is the reason why i needed them small 9,5mm thick.

Most Supermicro cases are designed towards enterprise 2.5" drives, which are usually 15mm.

M9T is the only one 2TB in size... btw made by Seagate it is not Samsung anymore.

Designed by Samsung engineers and originally built in a Samsung factory, bought out by Seagate. I'd say that's Seagate in name only.

 

[Radu]

Thanks for your explication. I hope you are wright about the Samsung engineers and the Samsung factory ... because seagate is crap.
Regarding the SM rack, you are correct about te 15mm HDD, but i don't think that i can find cheaper 15mm 2Tb HDD that the M9T's , can I?

 

[jgreco]

Thanks for your explication. I hope you are wright about the Samsung engineers and the Samsung factory ... because seagate is crap.

They're all pretty much not-so-great these days. Storage has become all about price. It used to be that enterprise HDD development helped to balance the books, but with the advent of SSD, buying 15K RPM enterprise drives has become a fool's errand, and software defined arrays are rapidly demolishing a lot of traditional SAN storage environments. My favorites are the ones where someone buys a massive array because they needed some portion of their storage to be fast, and so they bought it *all* fast. Hard drive manufacturers were doing very well. Now, hard drives are slow storage, and sooner or later they're probably all going to be 5400RPM (or maybe even slower!) as it becomes an intermediate tier between SSD and tape.

Products like FreeNAS do not help that. ZFS was designed to make good use of relatively inexpensive storage like SATA drives without the finickiness of a RAID controller. See, I can take one of those Samy, Toshy, and WD 2.5" drives, each of which has somewhat lower reliability specs than an enterprise class 2.5" 2TB drive, and by combining them together with ZFS, I get something with much greater reliability, better performance for read, and somewhat lower performance for writes - all for the same price. That's not a horrible tradeoff. Especially since the 2.5" enterprise drive is not redundant at all.

So in a way the reliability of the individual drive manufacturers isn't a major deal, as long as the reliability isn't awful. And it won't/can't be. It isn't as great as we'd like, of course, but that's why you design around it with mirroring or RAIDZ.

but i don't think that i can find cheaper 15mm 2Tb HDD that the M9T's , can I?

The 15mm Toshies are $105 wholesale, the Sammies are $107. The WD Greens are $170, heaven only knows why. Your retail prices may vary.

 

[Radu]

Where did you find 15mm Toshiba HDD for that price? are they sata 6Gbps?

 

[MtK]

@jgreco, I wonder that as well...

 

[jgreco]

I believe they're 3Gbps. Think I saw that at TechData. You should find them in the retail channel for a bit more.

https://www.google.com/webhp?q=toshiba+mq01abb200#q=toshiba+mq01abb200&tbm=shop

WalMart (?!?!???!!!!) for $108, WiredZone for $109, ServerSupply for $113. NewEgg shows them at $99, but out of stock, as does Best Buy. Seriously, guys, Google...