ZFS drives, what's the current choice?

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Deleted member 12106

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Not having good times as of late, Toshiba drives are dropping like flies I have three that shit the bed in the past week. These are the PH3300U/DT01ACA300 units, manufactured JAN-2013. I've not checked warranty on all of them but first has none. They have been in my shelf since I got them with plenty of air flow and house is air conditioned.

As it sits, both spares are in use and a 3rd recently shit out. Not impressed with these drives, when I first bought them one dropped within the first week, so out of 26 drives 4 failures. Came from the Sammy HD204UI, I had 20 or so in use, none of those dropped in the 5+ years I ran them, even when my basement was 100+ degrees. The Toshiba drives have never seen those extremes:mad:

I want to hurl.:eek:
 
I hope I have better luck with my TOSHIBA 5TB !!

I've been using mostly WD RED and RE, but got the Toshiba on sale... fingers crossed.
 
HGST or WD Red for lower spindle speed.

Although there are some HGST 4TB coolspins floating around.
 
PH3300U/DT01ACA300 are not real Toshiba, they are former HGST made on the Chinese factory sold to Toshiba during the WD deal, and they seem to be less reliable than regular HGST drives.

5TB Toshibas are made on Toshiba's own factory in Philippines, so far there is no negative feedback on their reliability.
 
Will Toshiba honor the out-of-warranty made in China drives knowing they are lesser quality? Knowingly selling/distributing bad drives will not make me a repeat shopper! I could just as well roll the dice with Seagate.
 
What do you want them to honor if they're out of warranty ?

My problem with Toshiba is that I'm in Europe and they don't offer a RMA service, you're supposed to go through your retailer, no thanks.
 
The one Toshiba I had (bought to use only as an off site back) crapped out way too fast as well. Bearing failure, made plenty of nasty noises on its way out.... I dont know the model number, warranty was expired so it when to the drill press then recycling.

My vote goes to WD Reds, I have 8x WD20EFRX-68E that have all ready 6k hours without a single issue. Not that many hours to be fair.
 
Authentic HGSTs have very good reputation too. I now have 19 of them, the oldest ones have 1570 power-on days count according to SMART, not a single problem so far.
 
Hitachi Ultrastar 3TB HUA723030ALA640 52 of them only 4 with bad sectors after 35000 hours on-time.
 
Hitachi Ultrastar 3TB HUA723030ALA640 52 of them only 4 with bad sectors after 35000 hours on-time.

The prices are all over on those guys, $171 from newegg gets you the 5yr warranty, $100 other sources gets you a 60day-1yr warranty.

For now I bought 3 retail 3tb Toshibas to replace what is ded. I am leary of the 5tb drives, I would like to see more data on those and it may be too soon to get that data so I will wait. Ideally I want to retool and create a new pool at raidz2 or raidz3 and look at adding encryption, move data, retool old, split data accordingly and move forward with life.
 
I created a little Splunk app that parses smartctl output, and has a few visualizations so I can set up alerting on my drives. The drives shown are all in my ZFS box, with the Toshiba's are 5 2-way mirrors in my data zpool. If a drive goes above 48 degrees, I get an email. If there are any Reallocated Sectors; email. Change in SMART Status? Yup, email.

When I have more time, I'm going to add more visualizations, and work on other SMART field extractions.

Take a look at it here: http://i.imgur.com/YMb8tVs.png


Anyway, I've been quite happy with my 10 Toshiba MD04ACA500's. All were bought for somewhere between $130-145 each, shipped. Granted they all have less than 2000 hours on them (~82 days or so), they have been solid. I've also retired 6 2TB HGST DeskStar's and 3 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300's, which have lasted for years. I just don't have a need for them now, but I may create a new ZFS pool with them just to play with.
 
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That splunk thing looks neat. If you wanted to sell the DT01ACA300s cheaply I may be interested. I anticipate more drives to drop but hope I am wrong:eek:

The box is powered down until the new drives roll in. Next build will incorporate more redundancy.
 
That splunk thing looks neat. If you wanted to sell the DT01ACA300s cheaply I may be interested. I anticipate more drives to drop but hope I am wrong:eek:

The box is powered down until the new drives roll in. Next build will incorporate more redundancy.

Yeah, I love Splunk.

I'll probably be building a 2U lower powered box to use as a second local copy of a subset of my data (user drives, photographs, music collections, etc)...stuff that can't be easily replaced. I just haven't found anything I like, yet.
 
Yeah finding smaller cases that hold more than two drives is a pita. More than likely you will have to craft something. A 2u case should hold an ITX board easily, may have enough sata connectors, but not enough power taps or space for the drives. Provided you don't mind getting your hands dirty you could put some small HD racks in there weather bought or built would be up to you. I had made a custom HDD rack and made a template to drill holes, it worked really well then I bought disk shelves.

12.11.2013-nas-4.jpg


I copied the spacing from an old case. I used this short-term and was more for funsies.
 
Yeah finding smaller cases that hold more than two drives is a pita. More than likely you will have to craft something. A 2u case should hold an ITX board easily, may have enough sata connectors, but not enough power taps or space for the drives. Provided you don't mind getting your hands dirty you could put some small HD racks in there weather bought or built would be up to you. I had made a custom HDD rack and made a template to drill holes, it worked really well then I bought disk shelves.

I copied the spacing from an old case. I used this short-term and was more for funsies.

Oh I pretty much know what I want, and that would be something like this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-...023?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item35eb8854af

I have a similar 4U box with dual L5640's and 96GB RAM as my main server/ZFS box, but I haven't decided if I want to do this, or get something new with a Xeon E5 chip (or two). $650 for that box, plus another $200 to get an identical RAID controller that's in my other box (Adaptec ASR-6805), plus 2 500GB SSD's for VM storage (hardware RAID 1). Slap in my existing 2TB and 3TB drives in a couple zpool's, and voila.

But that's like $1200 for that setup, and I cringe when I think about it. My OCD is forcing me to get a case like that one though, so it matches my 4U box...same drive trays and all. Again, OCD is why I want to use the ASR-6805 in my other box (I love the webUI on the thing).
 
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8 2 TB wd reds running 24/7 for 1-2 years (somewhere in between) FLAWLESS!

In agreement with tangoseal, 20+ 2TB Reds and 20+ 3TB Reds for 2+ years and havent had any issues yet. You can find pretty good prices too.
 
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