Any experience with the WD3003FZEX drives?

[essg88]

I am looking to purchase a decent amount of these drives for my new build and wondering if anyone has any experience with them yet?

I havn't seen these and have not really been keeping up with the latest and greatest on HDD's. What do you think?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236623

 

[Yatti420]

Blacks are good..

 

[DrKK]

Please don't listen to Yatti.

"Black" drives are an inappropriate choice for a NAS. 7200 rpm drives, like these, run much, much, much hotter than lower rpm drives, and in a storage array, you want the lowest rpm drives available. This is why you will see every, single, hard drive branded for NAS use has very low RPMs.

if, for some reason, you already had WD blacks on hand, you *CAN* use them, but if you are buying new drives, not only do you not benefit from the increased performance, the non-linear heat addition of the 7200 rpm drives can, and very often will, be a serious problem. Not one person on the planet will recommend 7200 rpm drives for a NAS.

It is possible to do, but not recommended.

 

[Yatti420]

DrKK makes good points.. If I had a choice blacks versus reds.. I will gladly take the blacks.. I just won't accept that this "NAS HDD" move isn't more then marketing.. Yet.. The price of blacks and even more pricier enterprise grade drives are much pricier and I believe the quality is there.. I'm not one to get the smallest coolest looking case to put drives into.. I don't like that idea with any hard drive..

 

[ser_rhaegar]

Please don't listen to Yatti.

"Black" drives are an inappropriate choice for a NAS. 7200 rpm drives, like these, run much, much, much hotter than lower rpm drives, and in a storage array, you want the lowest rpm drives available. This is why you will see every, single, hard drive branded for NAS use has very low RPMs.

if, for some reason, you already had WD blacks on hand, you *CAN* use them, but if you are buying new drives, not only do you not benefit from the increased performance, the non-linear heat addition of the 7200 rpm drives can, and very often will, be a serious problem. Not one person on the planet will recommend 7200 rpm drives for a NAS.

It is possible to do, but not recommended.

Are you only speaking for home systems? (Honest question. Looking for info, not trying to be a jerk.)

Every NAS/SAN I've bought at work has 7200RPM (storage) to 15000RPM (performance). All EMC and IBM enclosures. Not one was 5400RPM to my recollection. These were built by the respective companies, not myself.

I'm running blacks on my main home server. Greens on my replication target. I've always seen 5400RPM as an economic choice.

 

[DrKK]

Well, perhaps I'm dead wrong then, and my understanding on the situation was wrong. It happens.

It *is* the case, however, that heat production is a non-linear function of RPM's, so if you DO use those, you would need to factor that in.

 

[jgreco]

This is why you will see every, single, hard drive branded for NAS use has very low RPMs.

Ummm
m... ummmm...

*cough* HGST 0S03664

 

[DrKK]

Alright. DrKK was totally wrong. I've already come clean.

 

[cyberjock]

There are use cases for both high and low RPM servers. The thing to keep in mind also is that many/most/all of your servers at work are not running ZFS. Things are a bit different when you are doing stuff with ZFS.

For home, you definitely want lower RPM. When I/O and throughput isn't paramount, lower RPM means cooler drives, which means a lower powered server and a MUCH quieter server. Keep in mind that your bottleneck is probably going to be your Gb LAN connection, and it doesn't take many drives to have your LAN connection be your limiting factor.

Just have to take everything into consideration with planning.

 

[jgreco]

In general there is a difference between NAS drives intended for small gigE NAS appliances, which simply CANNOT put out much data, and bigger enterprise SAN or NAS with much higher speed interconnects like dual 10GbE.

You put the fancy fast drives in the fast arrays traditionally. But we're seeing SSD take up of that slack in a caching role.

 

[jgreco]

Despite what I was teasing DrKK about, drive manufacturers are starting to pull away from 3.5" enterprise drives.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/10/toshs_tiny_tour_de_spinning_force/

"Again, like HGST, Toshiba is seeing a withdrawal from the market of 3.5-inch enterprise drives and their replacement by, both say, 2.5-inch drives or, as we all know, solid state drives which are more expensive per GB but much faster responding, especially for random data."

It is a slow process, but we will continue to see the storage market eating away at that squishy middle ground of high RPM drives. Sooner or later (and I'm fine betting on later), we'll see storage optimized to treat spinny rust as the slowest tier, and as that happens it seems likely that there's going to be much less effort put in to developing high RPM drives. Storage tiering for the win.

 

[essg88]

Despite what I was teasing DrKK about, drive manufacturers are starting to pull away from 3.5" enterprise drives.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/10/toshs_tiny_tour_de_spinning_force/

"Again, like HGST, Toshiba is seeing a withdrawal from the market of 3.5-inch enterprise drives and their replacement by, both say, 2.5-inch drives or, as we all know, solid state drives which are more expensive per GB but much faster responding, especially for random data."

It is a slow process, but we will continue to see the storage market eating away at that squishy middle ground of high RPM drives. Sooner or later (and I'm fine betting on later), we'll see storage optimized to treat spinny rust as the slowest tier, and as that happens it seems likely that there's going to be much less effort put in to developing high RPM drives. Storage tiering for the win.

Interesting read. Good fine, I'd definitely agree that high RPM drives are slowly on their way out and for the better. Its just going to be a while until we see a similar $/GB ratio.

 

[jgreco]

Gloomy predictions from Gartner for "enterprise" performance-class drives.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/31/gartner_disk_drive_forecast/

I have said it before and I'm sayin' it again: those high-RPM high-performance hard drives are going to continue to become extinct. Hard drives will be the choice for massive storage, SSD and other flash or memory technologies for high performance storage, etc.

 

[cyberjock]

Interesting read. Good fine, I'd definitely agree that high RPM drives are slowly on their way out and for the better. Its just going to be a while until we see a similar $/GB ratio.

SOmeone did the math and said that hard drive and SSDs will meet around the year 2020. 2017 is an absolute best case for SSDs, with 2023 being the most pessimistic. They also added to the report I read that this is for the $/GB ratio and NOT that the same size drives will be available in SSD and platter based, just that the cost-ratio will be even. They said that if you want big sizes you are very likely to still be forced to buy platter based media, and potentially pay a premium for the very high density.

 

[jgreco]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/01/wd_confirms_disk_buyers_spending_less/