Found a good deal on WD 12TB, but they're 5400prm drives, should I buy them?

[mhweb]

I'm trying to build a FreeNAS box for plex and storage, and I just found a good deal on WD 12TB drives for $285, but they're 5400, it's still a good by even though they're not 7200rpm drives?

Thanks,

 

[scrappy]

You will never notice the difference when using for Plex and storage. In fact, 5400 RPM drives are more ideal for a NAS as they don't produce as much heat or vibration and *should* last longer than their 7200 RPM counterparts.

 

[sretalla]

I use 5400 RPM drives for my primary NAS and Plex works fine.

Low power and heat are the best things about them. Speed isn't that much worse that it makes a difference (to me).

 

[jgreco]

Spinning the platters faster doesn't necessarily make ZFS much faster. You can often get MUCH better performance by keeping your occupancy rate low, adding ARC/L2ARC, etc. With a large drive, you are still limited to (optimistically!) a few hundred seeks per second, a number that hasn't increased much in decades, but the size of a drive has grown greatly. Modern drives are really mostly suitable for workloads with large sequential components. And if you are doing sequential, 5400 vs 7200 actually favors the 5400 because of what the previous two posters indicated.

If you are creating seek-heavy workloads such as small files, you really should be doing that on SSD anyways. It will be lots more pleasant.

 

[jgreco]

I'm trying to build a FreeNAS box for plex and storage, and I just found a good deal on WD 12TB drives for $285, but they're 5400, it's still a good by even though they're not 7200rpm drives?

Thanks,

Also, it's Black Friday. Best Buy and maybe others are selling the WD EasyStore's for $180. These have WD 12TB drives inside, and if you know what you're doing, these can be shucked cleanly using a handful of guitar picks. WD will not warrant the drives inside, but you can carefully bag the board, screws, grommets, etc., inside and put it back into the enclosure so that you can un-shuck a drive later, which will get you some warranty coverage. This is the cheapest way I know to acquire disks.

 

[diedrichg]

Also, it's Black Friday.

I just realized that after all these years of being on this forum that I don't think I've ever seen you post or talk about your homelab. What are your specs for your home server(s)? Curious minds want to know.

 

[mhweb]

@jgreco I was planning on doing that shucking for the second set of drives, so that's why I was mostly leaning toward not to buy the 5400rpm, because as far as I know the easydrives are 7200. Can I mix 5400 and 7200 rpm drives with FreeNAS? I think I can do the shucking drives is worth it?
Thanks,

 

[jgreco]

I just realized that after all these years of being on this forum that I don't think I've ever seen you post or talk about your homelab. What are your specs for your home server(s)? Curious minds want to know.

That's 'cuz I don't have a homelab. I inflict damage on production or staging gear. ;-) Many years ago (predates FreeBSD), I started what is now the region's oldest internetworking services organization, and we've done a lot of work on providing Internet services such as e-mail and Usenet. I created what was probably the first floppy-based FreeBSD appliance version, which became PicoBSD, and I did some of the earliest work designing 4U-24-drive SATA servers in the early 2000's, a format that is very common now, but was radical at the time. It arguably launched, or at least definitely threw gallons of gas on, the Usenet "retention wars" at a time where big providers were using pricey SAN storage and large SMP servers to serve customers. I've generally had access to sufficient gear over the years to experiment on. Our operations have actually shrunk with the advent of FreeBSD jails and then full virtualization -- what used to be a very power-heavy hot rack (every U full, some on both sides!) out in Ashburn in the 2000's was reduced down to a few high-spec hypervisors back around maybe 2015.

So I'm a little radical and a little cheapskate too. This works out well because I've taken to doing infrastructure engineering for a few interesting projects, such as NTP.ORG. I've talked to lots of certified-this-and-that's over the years, and it's clear to me that some of my ideas about how to do things are different than everyone else's. I had one reputable fellow who, when asked to set up a SQL server, asked for a 32GB RAM VM, to which I had to reply that the entire hypervisor only had 32GB of RAM. Another person was shocked that I was running 32-bit VM's and only 256MB RAM on many VM's. Or no shared storage. Or no vSphere. Well the thing is, if you're donating work for a nonprofit with a shoestring budget, like NTF is, then you just don't have five or six figures to throw at a would-be-nice-to-have like vSphere. But that's fine, I've been making things work on the cheap for many years.

For my own operations, I resist spending money where possible, and try to go cheap where I can reasonably get a good result doing so. I know many IT geeks who just assume that there will be money for whatever they think is necessary, and they just submit whatever PO's. It's different when you're technically competent and you also happen to be the guy signing off on the PO's. I sleep well when I buy a dozen dual 10GbE cards for $30 each off of eBay.

A typical hypervisor build around here between ~2010-2018 consisted of an Opteron or Xeon platform, as much not-stupid-price RAM as possible, a high end LSI DAS RAID controller (9260, etc), and 2.5" disks. Back in 2010 that included a small amount of SSD, and almost always "consumer" grade SSD, and "NAS" grade HDD. Always in RAID1, because we're doing production operations. There's actually a thing I just totally don't get, the number of commercial orgs that seem to not run RAID on their hypervisors. This seems like it is getting worse in the NVMe era...

Anyways my go-to HDD had been the WD 2.5" Red 1TB from about 2013-2018, but with a stable price of $65, and with SSD prices falling so that 1TB SSD is now only about double that, that was the point at which I stopped speccing HDD for hypervisors. I typically pair an 860 EVO and WD Blue SSD in a RAID1 to get a DAS datastore, possibly with a hot spare. For transient data such as OS image building, I actually do like the speed of nonredundant NVMe and the price of WD Black SN750 is hard to ignore.

Once again this is a place where people put their hands up in horror and howl "!!!!BUT!!!IT'S!!!CONSUMER!!!GRADE!!!!!"

Ok, so, yes. But I've been doing this for years. In 2015 I put nearly a dozen Intel 535 480GB's out in Ashburn. They were maybe(??) $160/each on Black Friday. They had write endurance of 40GB/day. I was blowing 90-150GB/day at them. I figured they'd survive until cheaper SSD came along. I was wrong, as SSD prices plateaued and then actually increased. But 3 of 10 are still running fine today, and that was running an insanely heavy load against them, and the remainder got warranty replaced by Intel and assigned to other duties. I do not believe I would have gotten as much value out of the substantially more pricey Intel DC S3710's that were being recommended.

Most of our hypervisors run quad 10GbE, fully redundant. If you want to look at a picture of how the redundancy works, here it is. The weird thing in the middle on the left is a single hypervisor and its two vSwitches. This is a data flow visualization to explain the redundancy. Both of the core switches carry all VLANs. The design is not for SPEED, it's for REDUNDANCY. In aggregate, we rarely seem to get anywhere near 10G so I haven't bothered trying to move to 40G or something "faster."

The office cluster has:

An E5-2697v2 host (X9DR7-TF+) with 128GB that really needs 256GB.
An E5-1650v2 host (X10SRW) with 128GB - fast build box
A Xeon D-1537 host (X10SDV-7TP4F) with 128GB - low watt system, light duty VM's live here
An E5-2620v2 host (X9DR3) with 192GB - really needs to get re-chipped with E5-2697v2's.

The office cluster does engineering builds, which require a bit more RAM than I'd prefer, and is currently supporting 361 VM's.

For shared storage, there is a nice big massive FreeNAS box, but outfitting it with sufficient storage turned into a bit of a costly debacle, so most shared storage is actually on a quartet of Synology DS416slim's. Dual ethernet, they can handle up to 4x 2.5" HDD/SSD, but they seem to max out around 50-80MByte/sec (each). Sufficient but not great.

So anyways there's kind of a meta-point I'm trying to make but I'm not quite sure it's clear. Don't be afraid to save a buck. I've spent a lot of time on these forums on how to spot good deals on gear on eBay, how to spot knockoffs, and how to make things go fast even where those things don't involve FreeNAS. There's no harm in shucking drives. If you are smart and careful, you can even retain the warranty on them. Wasted money is just money you can't spend on more fun toys.

 

[jgreco]

@jgreco I was planning on doing that shucking for the second set of drives, so that's why I was mostly leaning toward not to buy the 5400rpm, because as far as I know the easydrives are 7200. Can I mix 5400 and 7200 rpm drives with FreeNAS? I think I can do the shucking drives is worth it?

You can mix drive speeds, yes. Ideally it is better to keep all the same speed drives within the same vdev if you have multiple vdevs.

Shucking drives is worth it if the drives inside are worth it. Some years ago, Seagate had 3TB HDD's being sold at... Costco? ... which turned out to be tragic shuckables because the drives were crap and prone to failure.

If you look at a drive like the WD12EFAX which is normally around $300-$330, the normally $280 WD Easystore 12TB probably isn't a big savings, and maybe not worth shucking. But if the price drops to $180, you can get almost two of them for the normal price of the drive. When buying 12 or 24, there is a HUGE savings, and even if you buy two or three as spares and don't bother with the warranty, you can come out ahead - as long as a bunch of them don't fail.

 

[mhweb]

@jgreco For shucking I was looking at the 10TB WD drives, which now are $160 each.