What drives are you using?

[Fuganater]

I am thinking about purchasing a bulk amount of drives but not sure which route to go? I've read at least 30 threads here that say this is good and that is good so I'm kind curious what most ppl are using.

I found some Seagate ST2000DM001 that are only $45 after shipping. Anything close to that price are "white label" and I don't trust that.

I currently use 3TB WD Reds and 4TB WD SE drives.

 

[SirMaster]

My main storage array is currently using 12 4TB WD Reds.

 

[Darren Myers]

I have x7 4Tb WD Reds in RAIDz3 for movies, and then i have x14 2Tb WD RE4 drives in 2 RAIDz3's of x7 hdds each drives for my TV shows and software/iso's/ect.

Problem with white label drives is lack of warranty, i have no problem purchasing drives like these http://www.ebay.com/itm/281733566662?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT because most of them still have 3 odd years of warranty left, but thats if you get them...i think out of the 20 i ordered only 2 were truly out of warranty. I purchased that many because i didnt want to be screwed out of a drive or 3 if i got ones that died during burn in, having a bunch laying around at least i could swap it out instantly and return the back one.

 

[Something]

I use WD Red 4TBs.

 

[Bidule0hm]

I use 3TB WD Red and Seagate NAS (mainly to compare them with exactly the same conditions). For now I prefer the WD Red drives over the Seagate NAS ones.

 

[DifferentStrokes]

6 - 4TB WD Reds
6 - 4TB WD Reds

 

[HoneyBadger]

HGST 5K3000, WD RE4 and RE4-GP, Constellation ES and ES2.

Depends on the workload ... low-power leans towards the HGST/RE4GP, more demanding gets the NL-SAS stuff.

 

[jgreco]

I've had average luck with Seacrate 4TB desktop drives; they were the only thing readily available at the time I built our 30TB filer several years ago. I believe that three of the drives have developed bad blocks or have failed.

 

[Mlovelace]

I haven't had any problems with the 18 3TB WD-SE drives (2.5yrs of use). Also I have 48 3TB WD-Red drives in use and so far I have had to RMA 2 of them (3yrs of use).

 

[zemlin]

I just finished swapping out (6) 1TB Hitachi Ultrastar disks (HUA721010KLA330) with 4TB HGST NAS disks (H3IKNAS40003272SN). Not quite finished, actually, as the last drive is still resilvering.

 

[jgreco]

Like the increased pool size?

 

[ethereal]

3tb western digital - av-gp

3 year warranty

 

[jgreco]

3tb western digital - av-gp

3 year warranty

The AV-GP drives are a really poor choice for a NAS. Their error tolerance and recovery are tweaked for surveillance video purposes.

 

[ethereal]

if there are problems with the av-gp wouldn't a scrub discover this?

 

[jgreco]

Perhaps. But I think I'd be really concerned that, in addition to many of the same aggressive power-saving features as the Greens, their additional tweaks to handle errors expeditiously would be a real risk. In particular, not understanding the differences in error handling could mean that a drive would detach from the pool or something like that.

 

[ethereal]

i don't want to hijack this thread - i'll open one tomorrow

 

[craigdt]

Drives I'm currently running are:

6x 3TB WD RED PROS (raidz2)
5x 2TB WD GREENS + 1x 2TB WD RED (raidz2)

If I was to buy new ones today, I would likely go for the 6TB HGST Deskstar NAS drives as my friend has 6 of those in his 24bay freenas box and has been very happy with them...

 

[Fuganater]

Geez those 6TB HGST are expensive. Guess that should be my next logical purchase instead of more 2TB or 3TB.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, all of the 6TB drives are unreasonably priced, and may be a good reason to look at the 8TB SMR tech. That may well be viable right now, especially if you have a pool that isn't heavy on the writes. ZFS is already not that bad in how it works on a SMR drive, and Nexenta's been beating away at how to optimize things further for a few years now. With Seagate just {days,weeks?} away from announcing a new 10TB SMR drive, that will probably drive down the 8TB price a bit further, suggesting that this is probably the way to go if you require large capacity but not incredible write performance.

I think what we're really waiting for is some real world results from some poor sucker who actually tried it. Sadly I cannot justify it right now as the big pool here is only at 48% capacity ...

 

[TXAG26]

5TB WDC RED's are the sweet spot at the moment and have worked well for me. I've had more issues out of the 4TB Seagate NAS drives. Just my $0.02.