DIY server: Good SATA HDDs

[Tim Watts]

I'm getting one of the HP Microservers while there's still a cashback on

- the older Gen 7 one.

Now, HDDs - don't work with loads of desktop PCs at work any more, so I don't have an upto date feel for what's good and what's crap based on numbers.

This will be a 24/7 server - light load. It can take 4x 3.5" SATA disks in RAID-5 config.

Normally I would stump up the dosh and put in something like:

WD 2TB RE SATA 6GB/s 7200RPM or Seagate 2TB Constellation.ES.2 Both 5 year warranty which is usually the indicator that they are any good.

The other option that caught my eye might be to stick some SSD hybrids in:

Seagate 2TB Desktop SSHD SATA 6GB/s 64MB 3.5" 8GB SSD Cache

Interesting. 8GB SSD cache. Bit cheap, but 3 year warranty so surely not

*that* bad? Anyone used this particular hybrid before?

Cheers

Tim

[Dave Liquorice]

Thanks for the heads up, I might get another. The G7 is being listed as "out of stock" or "discontinued" on several sites but if you can find a place with stock the cash back is £100 until 31st March.

The specs give the SATA controller as 3 GB/s...

[Mark]

Having looked at the reliability data, Seagate is significantly worse that WD. Hitachi looks the best though.

I bought a Microserver ages ago, started to set it up then I scrounged the disks for other computers. My intention now is to buy a SDD for the boot drive and few Hitachi 2TB drives using RAID-Z.

[fred]

In article , Tim Watts writes

uk.comp.homebuilt

[F]

If you're installing FreeNAS, it boots from a thumb drive.

[Tim Watts]

Ah - that's interesting... Where's this reliability data? There used to be a drive survey site but I thought that had died?

My SAN at work came with 48 1TB Seagate ST31000524NS SATA drives.

It has blown 3 to date, and it's about 4 years old.

I notice the latest replacement drive EqualLogic sent me was an Hitachi HUA723020ALA640

OTOH, it's not a bad failure rate for a system that is running 1000 IOPS

*average* 24/7. Not like the great Maxtor wipeout of 200x and the IBM Deathstars.

Ooohhh. I will be deploying debian 7 - and I've been interested in ZFS for a while. If it's stable and almost native, I'm in!

I usually stripe a RAID1 partition across the beginning of the disks for a system volume - simple and pretty bombproof.

But if you want an SSD that is not crap, I can highly recommend this:

SanDisk SDSSDXP2 and it's friends. I have one in this laptop I am typing on and another different sized one in my tiny server (that still works). My Media_Wearout_Indicator (SMART, Sandisks have this, not all drives do) is still at 100 despite heavy use every day. I do not have SWAP on it (or anything) as I have 6GB RAM.

Cheers!

Tim

[Adrian C]

My #1 hot tips in installing multiple drives for RAID'd servers.

Select the cheapest drives from the manufacturer with the worst rep, but with a good returns service. Seagate. Don't waste money on enterprise drives [1].

Purchase the drives from somewhere mail order that relies on just air to separate large heavy components in a large box, or citylink delivery staff to treat said boxes like footballs e.g. CPC, eBuyer. If possible, include a lump hammer in the same order.

Then if installing 4 drives, take the hammer, and with equivalent force, strike the corner of the first drive once, the second three times, the third - five times and the forth; six.

Optionally blow up a children's party balloon, charge it up on a woolly jumper and hold the ballon touching the first drive for 3 seconds, and repeat with a similar increment of static treatment duration for the others.

Install the drives.

What ye are trying to do is spread out the time before failure of individual drives, so that they all don't fail at the same moment being born that close to each others manufacture date. Also ye want them to fail sometime within the guarantee period for free replacements, not a later time out of it.

Ya know it makes sense ;-)

[1] - true,

[Peter Johnson]

I have put these in my my Synology boxes:

They are designed for the purpose but I've not had them long enough to say how they compare with these:

which ran faultlessly for two years in the same environment.

[Tim Watts]

Well - it's a theory... Not so sure about deliberately stressing the drives though! But I did see the ;-) !

Last time I built a server, I used 4 different makes of drive for the 4 drives it had. Similar theory - if one batch goes bad, then it won;t take out the whole unit - and this is what RAID is for :)

Ideally, I'd use RAID6 - but that's a bit silly with 4 drives. I think the RAID-Z idea is interesting - and if using cheaper drives, one could afford to by a 5th "coldspare" sitting by the machine. What you do not want to have is a device with zero redundancy whilst pratting around RMA-ing drives.

Unless you have EqualLogic/Dell Gold Support in which case, I have a 4 hour turnaround and no arguments. Then again my SAN has 2 hotspares so I usually don't fret and just book it to be shipped for the next morning.

[polygonum]

If fitting four drives, might be best to fit two different makes/models of drive.

[Tim Watts]

Thanks - I had not seen those - look rather interesting.

I'd still be inclined to mix them with some other makes - I wonder what else...

[F]

I have four of those in my Proliant NAS but from CCLOnline

- £95.99), not Amazon. I assume you saw 'Usually dispatched within 1 to

4 months' on the link you provided?

[Mark]

Here's one article:

There's plenty others around.

I also intend to for a Debian-based OS.

Thanks. So far I've bought one Samsung and was going to go for the cheap Crucial SSD from Amazon.

[Mark]

I'd also mix them or just buy at different times to get different batches. I don't intend to follow Adrian's suggestion. I'd rather have the drives work for a long time than have to mess about with warranty returns.

[dennis]

If you fit fewer big drives it will be more reliable and being a software RAID it will probably be faster.

[Tim Watts]

Thanks. That says Seagates are crap, WD quite good and Hitachi very good.

I would not recommend that!. I had a cheap Crucial SSD and it was a complete piece of shit. Unbelievably slow (much slower than any 5400RPM spinning disk) and it kept blowing sectors - usually the one holding the /sbin directory file! Made booting a bit of a problem...

Just checked my old emails and it was this one:

Crucial v4 64GB SATA 3GB/2.5" SSD

I did a lot of research the next time around and decided I would only touch Intel or Sandisk.

[Tim Watts]

I think I would be comfortable with a middle of the road 3 year warranty (eg the Red WD drives). You pay a lot more for the 5 year ones.

The other factor that was noted in some of the reports was the timeout on reading a bad block can be very long on a consumer grade drive - allegedly adjustable on NAS and Enterprise drives. However Backblaze did not seem to think that mattered.

Let's get the HP and RAM ordered before the offer times out - I'll get the disks in due course...

[GB]

The trouble is that the stats available are always going to be at least a couple of years out of date. Things are moving so fast that the drives that are in the survey are probably a couple of generations out of date by the time the survey is published. (Slight exaggeration, there.)

[Bob H]

I bought 2 of the 1Tb HDs in your 1st link around November 2011 for my NAS server, and they are still going strong. I then bought 3 2Tb HDs for the same box about 12 months ago, and everything is still good.

[Tim Watts]

Just ordered mine from here:

and they meet the cashback condition of being an HP Authorised reseller:

You just have to search HP with their legal name "Target Components":

But I've seen forum posts saying theres no problem with getting cashback claimed on stuff bought from ServersPlus.

Amazon is OK, but not Amazon marketplace sellers (unless they are individually on HP's list).