Hard Drive recommendation

[Ericloewe]

Wie bitte?

Solche Missverständnisse haben schon Kriege verursacht. ;)

Apparemment nous ne devons rester sur le sujet dans ce discussion
c'est sufficiant de divaguer un peut en français :p

+1 à cause da la cédille. Comme est-ce que on fait le c cédille sans un clavier français/portugais(/turc)? En Windows, avec la séquence Alt+0231, en OS X avec Opt+C. Dans autres environments, cherchez "cedilha" - après, c'est seulement copier et coller. :D
C'est un peu de travail, mais je fais le même avec le ß (Alt+0223).

I'll take a stab at getting back to topic.

Fine...

So here's my opinion on hard drive brands:
Seagate clearly has some problems at the moment, so I would avoid them. That doesn't mean "avoid them forever", which would be irrational. Some models are just bad (and some Seagate 3TB models are atrocious), but those are bound to happen to any brand.
I've been using mostly WD for a few years now, but I don't have a good reason for that. It just happened and inertia did the rest.
Of course, if we start to see indications of systemic crappiness from Seagate in general, across model lines, that would be a good reason to avoid them outright for quite some time. Unfortunately, I don't have faith that the other manufacturers (I don't even know if Toshiba has a 2.5" HDD unit anymore - if not, I guess that leaves WD and WD and WD) won't end up in similar situations.

Some might ask "What about Kingston? You said you boycotted them!". Well, that's a bit different. Kingston had a string of nasty things attached to it, all self-inflicted. Besides the X10 memory story, which, though unpleasant, isn't that serious, they did the ol' switcheroo on the SSDNow V300 (or whatever they called it) and made it half as fast as the review units overnight. Their USB drives also have a nontrivial correlation with boot device failures with FreeNAS, suggesting that they're cutting corners they really shouldn't have.

 

[smit4.hage4]

Thanks guys. I went with the Reds.

Is there any recommendation on the order to fill the drive slots? Does anyone find lower temperatures by filling row by row instead of vertically?

 

[Ericloewe]

Thanks guys. I went with the Reds.

Is there any recommendation on the order to fill the drive slots? Does anyone find lower temperatures by filling row by row instead of vertically?

You'll need to keep the blanks in the empty bays, or else airflow will just skip your drives.
Other than that, spread them out as much as possible.

 

[Dice]

3) I don't trust Backblaze data that much as it is not representative because of how they mount their drives.

What (and why) is the issue ?

 

[Bidule0hm]

The drive isn't screwed and just sits on its connectors...

 

[adrianwi]

I've got 9 Seagate 4TB NAS drives and with the 3rd one sat in a box ready to be RMA'ed I'm starting to think the small premium for WD drives might have been sensible.

On a positive, the 3 year warranty is good and I've not had an issue with the RMA on the other 2.

 

[Dice]

The drive isn't screwed and just sits on its connectors...

Right, which would then imply that drives that show higher fail rates are less capable of handling ...bad mounting?
Perhaps skewing the overall picture, yet, that would not take away anything from drives that are still performing great in their statistics.

 

[Bidule0hm]

The thing is the drive can vibrate and that's not a good thing for the failure rate. It can also be vibrating because of the other things (other drives, fans, others servers, ...).

So yeah, good drives in their stats are probably good but failing drives in their stats aren't necessary bad drives.

 

[scwst]

I have a rather specific question that would seem to fit in this thread -

After many years with a four-bay brand name NAS (very happy years, I should add), I need more bays and am using this occasion to switch to FreeNAS. One of the drives I'll reusing is a 3 TB WD Red WD30EFRX from 2015 which I plan to mirror with another, new 3 TB drive as part of a larger zpool.

Now, based on the Backblaze numbers from Q2 2016, it would seem like a no-brainer to go for a 3 TB HGST drive and not another WD Red. However, the docs seem to imply that ZFS is most happy when both mirrored drives are the same. Oops: The HGSTs spin at 7k and the WDs at 5k, so that looks like a big difference. Also, if I understand things correctly, wouldn't a 5k saturate my 1 Gb LAN (ASRock C2550) anyway? Given both drives are basically the same price (in Germany at least), is there any real preference here?

Thanks, and BTW thanks for all the great work you guys have done.

 

[Sakuru]

I have a rather specific question that would seem to fit in this thread -

After many years with a four-bay brand name NAS (very happy years, I should add), I need more bays and am using this occasion to switch to FreeNAS. One of the drives I'll reusing is a 3 TB WD Red WD30EFRX from 2015 which I plan to mirror with another, new 3 TB drive as part of a larger zpool.

Now, based on the Backblaze numbers from Q2 2016, it would seem like a no-brainer to go for a 3 TB HGST drive and not another WD Red. However, the docs seem to imply that ZFS is most happy when both mirrored drives are the same. Oops: The HGSTs spin at 7k and the WDs at 5k, so that looks like a big difference. Also, if I understand things correctly, wouldn't a 5k saturate my 1 Gb LAN (ASRock C2550) anyway? Given both drives are basically the same price (in Germany at least), is there any real preference here?

Thanks, and BTW thanks for all the great work you guys have done.

I'd say stick with WD Red. They are very reliable and you probably won't see a performance gain from going to 7k RPM.

 

[Mr_N]

I'd also add that 4TB drives were (last i checked) more cost effective in terms of $/GB so wouldn't recommend 3TB drives from any company :p

 

[Chuck Remes]

FYI, I was pricing out 5TB WD Red drives yesterday. They should be around $200/each but I couldn't really find any at or near that price point. NewEgg was quoting me $280 or so. Looks like maybe the 5TB variety are getting dropped soon.

That said, the 6TB are starting to look pretty good. The difference in cost per terabyte for a 4TB versus 6TB is negligible. NewEgg is listing the 4TB Red for $149.99 and the 6TB for $234.52. So the 4TB can be had at a cost of $37.50/TB and the 6TB at $39.08/TB.

BTW, NewEgg is selling the 3TB for $109.00 or $36.33/TB so it's a better deal than the 4TB right now. Other resellers may have minor adjustments but I doubt the order will change.