Enterprise class Hard Drives or NOT?

[rnicolas]

Are enterprise class hard drives worth the extra money?
Does anyone here own the more expensive drives?
If so do you recommend them over the cheaper hard drives?
What is your experience with them over the regular hdds?

Interesting article here:

http://www.pantz.org/hardware/disks/what_makes_a_hard_drive_enterprise_class.html

 

[Milhouse]

Perhaps the most important difference (other than cost) is that consumer-grade disks have an unrecoverable read error rate of only 10^14, while Enterprise drives are 10^15.

With 2TB+ drives this is likely to become a significant issue if you care about the availability and accuracy of your data. Fortunately the features of ZFS mean that it's still possible to build cost effective multi-terabyte volumes using Consumer drives - just scrub your data more frequently when using Consumer drives than you would with Enterprise drives (once a week and once a month respectively).

 

[rnicolas]

Perhaps the most important difference (other than cost) is that consumer-grade disks have an unrecoverable read error rate of only 10^14, while Enterprise drives are 10^15.

With 2TB+ drives this is likely to become a significant issue if you care about the availability and accuracy of your data. Fortunately the features of ZFS mean that it's still possible to build cost effective multi-terabyte volumes using Consumer drives - just scrub your data more frequently when using Consumer drives than you would with Enterprise drives (once a week and once a month respectively).

That's a plus for ZFS, but what about running a HDD 24/7/365, wouldn't an enterprise hdd be more reliable because of it's "higher grade" parts than a regular consumer hdd?

 

[Milhouse]

That's a plus for ZFS, but what about running a HDD 24/7/365, wouldn't an enterprise hdd be more reliable because of it's "higher grade" parts than a regular consumer hdd?

In theory yes, though of course even an Enterprise disk can fail before an equivalent Consumer-grade disk - the M in MTBF stands for "Mean", ie average.

On the whole, an Enterprise disk should prove to be more reliable than a Consumer disk, but it will also cost a great deal more too.

 

[TwinDaddyKev]

I have (2) Freenas headless units. Same hardware with 4x2TB WD RE4 WD2003FYYS Enterprise Drives and 4x2TB WD WD20EARS Green Drives.
I can feel a slowness in the Green drives whereas the Enterprise drives were snappier when browsing the content. Windows explorer opens the files much quicker with Enterprise drives.
Both units have been running rock solid for over a year. Is it worth it? It depends. If $$$ is no object, then yeah go with Enterprise drives.
I have movies/music/photos on both units and have no issues with either one.
Below is a speed test on both units:

Enterprise Drives:

WRITE
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/vPool1/tmp.000 bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 1240.756136 secs (86539312 bytes/sec)

READ
dd if=/mnt/vPool1/tmp.000 of=/dev/null bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 501.646707 secs (214043431 bytes/sec)

Green Drives:

WRITE
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/Media/tmp.000 bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 4505.426859 secs (23832189 bytes/sec)

READ
dd if=/mnt/Media/tmp.000 of=/dev/null bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 1174.179562 secs (91446135 bytes/sec)