FreeNAS support for HGST Ultrastar He12

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CF HEOH

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Hello everyone,

I would like to know what is the current support like for the HGST Ultrastar He12 (https://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrastar-he12) with P/N HUH721212ALE600 or LE604.

I am building an ~100TB storage system for a client in the CG/Animation space using Quanta D51BV-2U. This is a 12-slot chassis and with 12TB, I would get about 98TB +/- usable capacity.

I would appreciate you can share the FreeNAS driver support, performance and reliability of the He12 drives. Your advice is much valued and appreciated.

Thank you
/CF
 

CF HEOH

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Do you expect it would require any different driver than any other SATA/SAS hard drive?

Hi danb35,

Thank you very much for your quick reply.

I am not that familiar with the SATA/SAS driver in FreeNAS. Can you share your knowledge and experience with the driver? Here are some "dumb" questions:

1) Will the latest release of the FreeNAS SAS/SATA driver **always** work for every main **enterprise** HDD drives eg. WD RE/XE/SE, HGST Ultrastar, Seagate Constellation etc?

2) Is there a way to know the reliability factor and the performance factor of these drives other than just driver support?

3) Is there an updated list of drives or HCL where I can countercheck without asking the same question in the forums?

The reason is I have been an enterprise tech person for a long time. I want to be *doubly sure* the systems that I craft are of good standing to my clients.


Appreciate your advice and good sharing. Thank you and best regards

/CF
 
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The latest current release of FreeNAS pretty much supports the same as FreeBSD

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.1R/hardware.html

As far as I know the controllers need drivers to work but once they work the drives are just there.

Will the hardware always be supported, no if FreeBSD drops support for something it will not be added in to FreeNAS. Usually mainstream hardware that is commonly used will stay supported for a good while though. So that means the best practices are to use name brand hardware that is commonly used in servers if you want to have something that will be supported long term.
 
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Chris Moore

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I will just point you at this and let you draw your own conclusions:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...rprise-st10000nm0016.58251/page-3#post-425321

Not all drives are going to work in FreeNAS. Additionally, if you are trying to have a performant system, using a small number of large capacity drives is not the solution of choice. Each drive is it's own bottleneck to the system IO. The way to acheive transfer speed, which I would guess they want based on other solutions I have worked on, is to have many drives. I would probably go with 30 x 8TB drives in 5 RAID-z2 vdevs. This should get you about 112TB of usable (RAID-6 equivalent) capacity that is reasonably performant.
A fairly economical chassis to put that in is the Q30 Turbo from 45drives.com:
http://www.45drives.com/products/
http://www.45drives.com/pdf/StorinatorQ30_Turbo_TechSpecs.pdf
More drives gives greater performance than a small number of large drives every time.
 

tvsjr

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Your calculations are wrong right off the bat. Use this: https://jsfiddle.net/Biduleohm/paq5u7z5/1/embedded/result/

Assuming 12x12TB drives, you'd need to run a single vdev in RAIDZ1 to get 94.51TB of capacity. RAIDZ1 is dead, *especially* on a huge drive like these. You'd be well advised to consider two 6-drive RAIDZ2 vdevs, minimum... and that still only gives you ~150 IOPS.

IMO - if all you know is "they need about 100TB" - in short, you've done no profiling of the actual IO load, you're in for a world of hurt. Chris' suggestion is the minimum I'd go, but there's a fair reality you might need to consider striped mirrors. I would also strongly advise an E5-class system with substantial RAM and, potentially, a fast NVMe L2ARC to supplement. Personally, I would look at Supermicro chassis and their JBOD arrays. You may also need to consider 10gig networking, depending on their workload. Animation/rendering is *rough* on storage arrays.

I don't mean to be negative... but if someone's paying you to build a 100TB array, they're dropping some coin. They aren't going to be happy with something that runs at snail speed.
 

danb35

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Will the latest release of the FreeNAS SAS/SATA driver **always** work for every main **enterprise** HDD drives eg. WD RE/XE/SE, HGST Ultrastar, Seagate Constellation etc?
I would expect that FreeNAS would work with any compliant SAS/SATA drive until SAS/SATA are no longer commonly-used storage technologies--and probably for a good while afterward, if history is any guide. But if you're looking for an answer based on personal experience with this particular hardware, I'm afraid I can't help you there.
 

Ericloewe

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1) Will the latest release of the FreeNAS SAS/SATA driver **always** work for every main **enterprise** HDD drives eg. WD RE/XE/SE, HGST Ultrastar, Seagate Constellation etc?
Specs exist for a reason. Anything else is a bug. Storage can be somewhat buggy, so don't stray too far from the mainstream.
 
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