Micro ATX Home NAS with Upgrade path. Suggestions Welcome.

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rvassar

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Personally, I bought these drives (a 20 pack) last year and use 6 in my main system, 12 in my backup system and have 2 on the shelf as cold spares. I like them.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178338

Those have been discontinued. Newegg is pointing us at:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822179009&ignorebbr=1

...as the replacement these days. $97/ea is tempting. But for ~$30 more you can have 128mb cache, 7200 RPM, and NAS oriented firmware (TLER, etc...):

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822146116

On edit: That is an awesome spreadsheet!
 

Chris Moore

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Those have been discontinued. Newegg is pointing us at:
The link is being changed. That is not what I was pointing at. Discontinued or not, you can still get them and they are $87.99...
When you are buying 20, it makes a big difference for the dive to be less expensive...
for ~$30 more you can have 128mb cache, 7200 RPM
7200RPM just makes more heat and doesn't get you anything, not in a storage pool, and the in drive cache is totally meaningless.

Maybe if I put it in code tags they won't edit the link.
Code:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAD3E7BJ1190&cm_re=ST4000DM000-_-22-178-338-_-Product
and NAS oriented firmware (TLER, etc...):
Not saying that firmware doesn't make a difference, but I have been using these Seagate not-NAS drives long enough that I had a set age out after 5 years and had to buy that 20 pack as life-cycle replacements. I also upgraded from 2TB to 4TB, but that was a side issue. Even without TLER, they have provided superior service and I did buy them again. You can spend more if you want, but I don't think it is strictly necessary.
 
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rvassar

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Not saying that firmware doesn't make a difference, but I have been using these Seagate not-NAS drives long enough that I had a set age out after 5 years and had to buy that 20 pack as life-cycle replacements. I also upgraded from 2TB to 4TB, but that was a side issue. Even without TLER, they have provided superior service and I did buy them again. You can spend more if you want, but I don't think it is strictly necessary.

Weird the way the link was getting edited. I'll assume that's the ad support hook from the forum software... Anyhow... $88 is even more tempting, but as I stated elsewhere, I'm ex-HGST and ex-Sun, I stick with what I know. I'm even typing this on a Sun type 6 keyboard with the control key next the the letter A. Makes me a bit of a curmudgeon, no doubt. :cool:

I mostly wanted to point out the feature/cost spread. It's corollary to the wide vs deep discussion in another thread too, but here with the drives the same capacity.
 

Chris Moore

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Makes me a bit of a curmudgeon, no doubt.
I don't know about curmudgeon. I may not be as old as that and my experience is certainly different. I have tried a lot of different things at home over the years. I build my first home server back in the day of 9GB Ultra SCSI drives on a hardware RAID controller connected to Windows NT server. There were 7 drives in the server and I had a drive shelf connected to the server with another 14 drives in it. These were the old 1.6 inch drives and the whole array only got me about 50GB of usable storage. Later, I upgraded to the 1 inch 18GB drives and later yet, I upgraded to 36GB drives. I still have four of the 18GB drives, one is still in the factory bag. Over the years, I have used (probably) every kind of drive that was made, some of the companies are not even around any more, like Maxtor, I have one of their drives (IDE) and it still works. I still have a Quantum BigFoot drive also, I don't remember if it works, they were really bad about failing early. Back when I worked as a repair technician, Compaq released the Deskpro 2000, 4000, and 6000 lines of computers with the chassis specifically designed to accommodate that 5.25 inch hard drive. Less than a year later they (Compaq) had replaced so many of those BigFoot drives under warranty that they stopped having us send them back and just gave us a regular 3.5 inch drive and an adapter bracket. I bet they lost a bundle buying those drives... If I recall correctly, it wasn't long after that Quantum got out of making hard drives.
When I built my first FreeNAS system, I did it using HGST Ultrastar 2TB drives because I had good experience with them in the datacenter at work and that was what several of the big companies (like Sun) were shipping in their systems. In the second NAS I built at home, I used the Western Digital Re (WD2000FYYZ) drives. We used both of those extensively in systems in the datacenter at work, but we kept the kept the datacenter at 65 degrees and all those servers had high speed fans to pull cool air over the drives.
I found that, in my house, the drives ran worryingly hot because I am not keeping my house as cold as the datacenter and I am not running my fans as fast because I don't want my servers that loud. We use a massive number of those Seagate Desktop drives in the workstations at the facility where I work, so I have a lot of experience with them too. My main reason for switching to the Seagate Desktop drives was that they ran cooler, five to ten degrees cooler per drive, and that was more important to me than the reliability. As to the reliability, perhaps I have seen more failures with the drives I am using than I would have seen with the enterprise class drives, but, I have saved on my cooling for the whole house. I still got 5 years of service out of the Desktop drives, with a few replacements due to bad sectors. I have not had any catastrophic failures and I have not had any data corruption. I call it good enough, especially for home. I don't do that at work. I get to make suggestions, but ultimately my immediate supervisor makes the decision and we are getting the Seagate Constellation or WD Red Pro or even the WD Gold series drives. We have not ordered any of the HGST drives, but my predecessor did get a server full of them about four years ago and they are still going strong with no failures. I don't have anything against HGST and the heat issue may not be an issue with the newer drives.
To each their own, but I will probably go back with Seagate Desktop drives for the next batch I buy. Unless I go with the Barracuda drives... But I think I am good for now, just having bought the 20 x 4TB drives I got last year, I am not in the market for drives. I don't anticipate needing more space in any of my pools for at least a year, maybe two. My smallest capacity, the 'backup' pool, is only at around 65% full .
 

pro lamer

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Chris Moore

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Can you remember their temperature? What is 'hot'?
I have log files somewhere, but it was around 47 degrees C and I would rather have the temperature around 35.


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rvassar

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I have log files somewhere, but it was around 47 degrees C and I would rather have the temperature around 35.

47/C is only 116.6/F... 35/C is 95/F, which is actually below human body temp. A drive at 35/C would feel cold to the touch. I checked the specs on both the Seagate and the HGST, and they both list an operating limit of 60/C, which is 140/F. So you had plenty of safety margin.

The Seagate does not list an MTBF. HGST publishes a 1 million hour MTBF, which is kind of silly... That's 114 years... (Side Note: I hate marketing people... Have had a professional "bad experience" early in my career that has shaded my opinion for 20+ years...) But I have 8+ year old HGST drives and the Backblaze quarterly data to support my bias.

Having said all that... I like reliable drives and I live in Texas, so I'm totally getting the cool room end of the equation. Call me conflicted. I will disagree, on the 7200 RPM & 128mb cache. A 6% sustained transfer difference per spindle jumps right out of the spec sheets. The HGST drive can cache 32k 4096 byte sectors, and the Seagate can only cache 16k sectors.

-Rob

Sources:

https://www.seagate.com/www-content...a-fam/barracuda-new/en-us/docs/100804656b.pdf

https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/resources/DS_NAS_spec.pdf

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-q1-2018/
 

Chris Moore

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The Seagate does not list an MTBF. HGST publishes a 1 million hour MTBF, which is kind of silly... That's 114 years... (Side Note: I hate marketing people... Have had a professional "bad experience" early in my career that has shaded my opinion for 20+ years...) But I have 8+ year old HGST drives and the Backblaze quarterly data to support my bias.
Do tell about the marketing people...
In regard to the reliability, I got a few infant mortality drives in the beginning (one or two) and after the 4.5 year mark I started loosing about 1 a month to bad sectors, but they were very reliable overall. I had two pools of 12 drives, one in the primary NAS and one in the backup, and out of those 24 drives, I probably replaced 9 in the whole 5 year lifetime. I had spares on hand though because I anticipated a higher failure rate.
47/C is only 116.6/F... 35/C is 95/F, which is actually below human body temp. A drive at 35/C would feel cold to the touch. I checked the specs on both the Seagate and the HGST, and they both list an operating limit of 60/C, which is 140/F. So you had plenty of safety margin.
Like I said, the heat was the big factor in my decision as my servers are in my office at home and I don't have additional air-conditioning. I rely on the regular household air and I was roasting alive. I had to get the temperature in my office down to a bearable level and I still use a fan to pull cool air from the hallway in via the door because the heat will buildup in the office without that. If things continue the way they are, I may be getting a supplemental cooling unit for my office. I have a feeling that it would be more efficient than the dinosaur of a central unit we have.
Having said all that... I like reliable drives and I live in Texas, so I'm totally getting the cool room end of the equation. Call me conflicted. I will disagree, on the 7200 RPM & 128mb cache. A 6% sustained transfer difference per spindle jumps right out of the spec sheets. The HGST drive can cache 32k 4096 byte sectors, and the Seagate can only cache 16k sectors.
About the speed. I only have two systems that use the 10Gb network interface and those systems are hitting the iSCSI pool. My wife and I both have laptop computers that are incapable of 10Gb networking, so everyone in the house can read and write to the NAS at the full capacity of 1Gb networking and the system never misses a beat. It might be able to be faster, but it would be capacity that can't be utilized and I don't see the need to spend extra money for something that will only make more heat to give me something I can't use.

PS. I added the 16 drive pool for iSCSI earlier this calendar year and those additional drives increased the heat load for my office ...
Which is why I am contemplating a cooling change.
 

pro lamer

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114 years...
If one has 114 HDDs that makes 1 failure a year. (I guess some companies do)
If one has 57 of them - 1 each two years.
If one has 23 - 1 failure each 5 years.

EDIT: the above are only calculation based considerations, not verified by my personal experience. I've learnt that calculation way from others.
 

Chris Moore

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If one has 114 HDDs that makes 1 failure a year. (I guess some companies do)
If one has 57 of them - 1 each two years.
If one has 23 - 1 failure each 5 years.
That may be the way they come up with their fancy number... I can't say. I can tell you that I have a server at work that is made up of multiple 16 bay chassis connected by SAS cables such that there are 80 drives managed. That server has had 9 drive failures in the last 12 months.
I have another server at work with 60 drives and it has had only 2 drives fail in the last 12 months.
The brand and model of drive does matter, but you have to weigh your tolerance for risk vs the initial investment in drives.
Four of the chassis on the 80 drive system were ordered as expansion shelves and they were delivered with WD Red drives in them. Out of the 64 WD Red (not Pro) drives, there have been 6 failures in the 12 months I am talking about.
The other server with 60 drives, they are WD Red Pro drives and the total failures in the life of the system (so far) is only 4. Now, the system with 80 drives (64 WD Red drives) is around 4 years old, where the system with 60 drives (all Red Pro) is only around 18 months old. That makes it not a perfectly fair comparison, but the point is that the, "lower-end," line of drive (not sure that is the right way to phrase it) is more prone to failure.
I am not saying that you must buy the most premium drive and I am not advocating that everyone should buy the least expensive model either. The quality of the drive does have an impact on the life expectancy. You just have to weigh your options and choose what is right for you.
Last year, when I bought that 20 pack of drives, I spend around $1800 for it. If I had bought the more, "premium," NAS drives that were available at the time, it would have been over $3000. For me, spending an extra $1200 up front to gain potential reliability was not worth it. I bought a couple extra drives at $100 each and saved $1000. If that means I need to buy replacements sooner because these drives only last 5 years instead of 8, well, I was likely going to need to replace them to get larger drives anyhow and I have no idea how the technology will have changed 5 years down the line.
 
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Senti_Mentel

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Personally, I bought these drives (a 20 pack) last year and use 6 in my main system, 12 in my backup system and have 2 on the shelf as cold spares. I like them.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178338

Well considering the other recommendations I've received in respect to raidz1 vs raidz2(I have decided to go with z2 with 6 drives) as well as the system requirements for FreeNAS in the HardWare requirements section, I do not believe 4tb drives are plausible with my current setup(limited to 16gb ram for now) although i will keep this in mind for a future upgrade. Although this does raise a few questions:

In the hardware requirements section it is recommended to use NAS level drives or better due to performance as well as reliability and the S.M.A.R.T. technology in these class of drives that detect bad sectors vs desktop HDD's without this level of tech not working well with ZFS and FreeNAS. So in your experience(or anyone elses) is this recommendation for NAS drives or better not necessary?

I have also come across several posts across the web stating that the life expectancy of 3tb drives is less then that of drives with even digits of storage(2,4,6tb drives). Although I have used 3 tb drives across several machines and have not noticed this fact I am curious if anyone else has?

Because of this I'm also wondering how difficult it would be to upgrade my drives in the future from 3tb drives to 4 tb drives or above. Although I have not looked into this yet, I've been rather busy with work.
 
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Inxsible

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In the hardware requirements section it is recommended to use NAS level drives or better due to performance as well as reliability and the S.M.A.R.T. technology in these class of drives that detect bad sectors vs desktop HDD's without this level of tech not working well with ZFS and FreeNAS. So in your experience(or anyone elses) is this recommendation for NAS drives or better not necessary?
NAS drives and Enterprise drives have what is known as WD TLER or Seagate ERC or Samsung CCTL. These dictate how long the controller waits for the drive before marking it bad in case of read or write errors. This is extremely important for NASes which have heavy use because you don't want drives to fall out of the array prematurely.
Desktop drives usually don't have this which is why NAS or Enterprise drives are recommended. Even desktop drives have SMART monitoring. So whereever you read that only NAS drives and above have SMART monitoring was lying or misinformed. Having said that, if you are the only user of your home NAS and if you don't hammer it too much, then you can use desktop drives without issues and many users on this forum do.
 
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Inxsible

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I have also come across several posts across the web stating that the life expectancy of 3tb drives is less then that of drives with even digits of storage(2,4,6tb drives).
What !!!!!

I have never heard such a thing. What is true is that Seagate once made a bad batch of 3TB drives which used to fail often. This was quite some time ago and is not even relevant anymore.
 

Senti_Mentel

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NAS drives and Enterprise drives have what is known as WD TLER or Seagate ERC or Samsung CCTL.

This was what I was referring to, my apologies if this sounded as though I thought only NAS and enterprise class drives have S.M.A.R.T.

But if that technology is only necessary for heavy users then I appreciate the information.

And regarding the 3tb/failing before other drives question... I was surprised to read this as well, which is why I wanted to ask considering this seems like such a strange thing.

Either way thank you for the clarification on both topics. Any other input?
 

Inxsible

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Chris Moore

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In the hardware requirements section it is recommended to use NAS level drives or better due to performance as well as reliability and the S.M.A.R.T. technology in these class of drives that detect bad sectors vs desktop HDD's without this level of tech not working well with ZFS and FreeNAS. So in your experience(or anyone elses) is this recommendation for NAS drives or better not necessary?
The Seagate Desktop drives I suggested are actually suitable for, "home servers and Entry-level (DAS)"... That is right from the documentation...
The big thing that most NAS drives have that the desktop drives don't is something called TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery). NAS drives will only try to read a bad sector for a certain, very limited, amount of time and they give up. In a desktop drive, it will keep trying for a long time because it knows that if it is not able to read the data, the data is lost. The NAS drive assumes that if it fails to read the data, it will be recovered from the array that it is a member of. For this reason, a NAS drive is not good to be used alone and a desktop drive can delay a read on a NAS. That is the big issue that most people point at. The desktop drives only present an issue when they begin to fail. When they are working as they should, there isn't an issue.
The other thing that NAS drives are usually built for is a higher annualized workload. The desktop drives I use are designed for less than 55 TB per year (per drive) and in my home NAS, they don't come close to that, partly because of the number of drives the data is spread across. With my drive count, I could transfer 440 TB of data in / out of the pool every year and just hit the limit. Fewer drives would reduce that limit and more drives would increase it...
As a comparison, the Seagate NAS drive has an average annualized workload rating of up to 180 TB per year, more than triple...
So, if you plan to wok your drives hard, get drives that are rated for it...
Because of this I'm also wondering how difficult it would be to upgrade my drives in the future from 3tb drives to 4 tb drives or above. Although I have not looked into this yet, I've been rather busy with work.
It is easy to upgrade and that has been covered many times in the forum, just do a search.
 
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anmnz

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(I have decided to go with z2 with 6 drives)

[ ... ]

I do not believe 4tb drives are plausible with my current setup(limited to 16gb ram for now)

Just guessing, correct me if I'm wrong, but are you being put off by the general "1GB RAM per 1TB disk" recommendation here? If so, I wouldn't worry about it; it is not a rigid rule. What would determine whether 16GB RAM is enough in your setup are things like whether you want to run lots of jails and VMs, not whether you have 3TB or 4TB disks in that vdev.
 

Senti_Mentel

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Just guessing, correct me if I'm wrong, but are you being put off by the general "1GB RAM per 1TB disk" recommendation here? If so, I wouldn't worry about it; it is not a rigid rule.

So 6x4tb disks 24tb total in raidz2 would work with 16bg of ram without issues?
 

Chris Moore

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