High Capacity Drives for 4 Bay Setup

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davewolfs

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 7, 2006
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Hey folks,

Looking at putting together a decent performing mini server using a Xeon 1540D processor. The case that I am using will only have 4 3.5 Bays so I prefer to use higher capacity drives.

With respect to the 4TB and 6TB drives that are available the price difference between say WD, HGST and Seagate Enterprise drives arent that large.

Initially I was concerned about noise but now I am thinking that it might just make sense to dump one of these drives into a closet and use powerline to connect. I plan to run some VM's on the server itself so would like decent performance for those instances.

Some drives I've looked at are:

WD Red
HGST Desktar NAS
Seagate Enterprise NAS
Seagate Enterpreise Capicity

Any thoughts on these drives? I plan to use a ZFS setup.
 
I would look at HGST drives for better reliability and better performance (at least compared to WDC RED drives). Although HGST NAS are 7200 RPM drives which you may not want in a closet.
 
I like WD RE drives myself, although for movies and such I use WD RED.
 
ToddW2 said:
I like WD RE drives myself, although for movies and such I use WD RED.
Click to expand...

I like the RE drives too. I've had several years of good experience with them. The problem is that their pricing is non competitive. I can understand a little bit of premium but not 50%.
 
davewolfs said:
Some drives I've looked at are:

WD Red
HGST Desktar NAS
Seagate Enterprise NAS
Seagate Enterpreise Capicity
Click to expand...

The Seagate Enterprise drives are in a different price/market category. There's also a "Seagate NAS" range of drives that compares to the Western Digital Red line.

Of these three:

Seagate NAS
Western Digital Red
HGST Desktar NAS

You'll find that the Seagates are the least expensive (Amazon pricing shown below) and the HGSTs the most. The big performance difference among these is that the Seagate and Western Digital are 5x00 RPM drives and the HGST is 7200 RPM.

Seagate NAS 4TB (ST4000VN000) $131.22
Western Digital Red 4TB (WD40EFRX) $154.00
HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB (0S03664) $177.09
 
I just bought 4 x WD Red Pro 6tb drives but I haven't had a chance to try them yet. $279 isn't too bad for 6tb drives with a 5 year warranty. It's not a bargain by any stretch though.
 
Different Market Category yes but price between say the HGST/Red Pro and Seagate Entrprise are around $10-$20 - nearly insignificant.

JJ Johnson said:
The Seagate Enterprise drives are in a different price/market category. There's also a "Seagate NAS" range of drives that compares to the Western Digital Red line.

Of these three:

Seagate NAS
Western Digital Red
HGST Desktar NAS

You'll find that the Seagates are the least expensive (Amazon pricing shown below) and the HGSTs the most. The big performance difference among these is that the Seagate and Western Digital are 5x00 RPM drives and the HGST is 7200 RPM.

Seagate NAS 4TB (ST4000VN000) $131.22
Western Digital Red 4TB (WD40EFRX) $154.00
HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB (0S03664) $177.09
Click to expand...
 
I've got 20 HGST Desktar NAS 4TB and 25 WD Red 4TB. Anything enterprise is much more expensive, certainly not 10-20$.

After a couple of months in my ZFS NAS 2 of the WD Red are showing errors. They're not dead, but not perfect (ZFS doesn't drop them yet, but soon). Not a single error on the HGST.
 
Have a pair of HGST NAS 4TB running for over a year, rock solid.
They tend to go on sale often too.
If 6TB is too much due to being the flagship I believe the 5TB has a competitive price.

As I've read the 5/6 are are a more updated model then 3/4, mostly a cache bump which should help.
 
I have 1K rpm 140mm fans blowing on mine and they run between 87-89F. Never seen them peak over 95f during long read/writes.
 
Decided to dump this in a spreadsheet :)

The Reds truly do offer a lot of value on a per Gb basis. The Red Pro's are outrageously expensive for the most part except for the 6TB. It's actually cheaper than the 4tb version from a cost/gb perspective. I wonder why WD chose to price it like this? Good for those who are purchasing it.

The real "sweet spot" from a value perspective for NAS seems to be the WD Red 3TB or 4TB drives if you are running with RaidZ2 and using 6-10 disks. I really don't think one can go wrong with the standard Red 3,4,6 TB drives or the Red Pro 6TB.

As an aside I switched from Seagate probably over a decade ago due to problems. Perhaps I was having a soft moment for even considering going back :)

Seagates Enterprise offerings are currently priced aggressively - and perhaps there is a reason for that! I really don't know.

Will end up going the WD route. Thanks for all your replies.
 
davewolfs said:
The Reds truly do offer a lot of value on a per Gb basis. The Red Pro's are outrageously expensive for the most part except for the 6TB. It's actually cheaper than the 4tb version from a cost/gb perspective. I wonder why WD chose to price it like this? Good for those who are purchasing it.
Click to expand...

I thought the Red Pro was only available up to 4TB in capacity at the current time. I believe Western Digital may not use their highest density platters in these drives, perhaps for the greater reliability of the older technology.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1280#Tab3
 
I'm using 6x 6TB WD Reds in a Node304. You might want to use wdidle3 to disable the Intellipark timer before deploying them.
 
The 3TB WD Reds are the sweet spot IMO. Using 3 of them in my NAS right now. The Pro's are better because of the warranty and the 7200 speed. I notice the speed difference a bit.
 
XViper said:
The 3TB WD Reds are the sweet spot IMO. Using 3 of them in my NAS right now. The Pro's are better because of the warranty and the 7200 speed. I notice the speed difference a bit.
Click to expand...

The cost between the 3TB and 4TB is so low, I would actually go with the 4TB probably it comes really to what you are willing to dish out up front.
 
davewolfs said:
The cost between the 3TB and 4TB is so low, I would actually go with the 4TB probably it comes really to what you are willing to dish out up front.
Click to expand...

If, like me, your storage needs are constantly growing, there's also the issue of how often you want to upgrade your storage drives. You can, of course, keep adding servers, but I have no desire to have a data center in my basement, unlike some others who drool over such things. I have one file server with a 15 drive capacity, and that will be it.

I previously had mostly 2TB drives, then I bought a couple of 3TB WD Greens, then decided not to waste more money on 3TB drives, and I've since bought only WD 4TB Reds. My file storage is JBOD with non-realtime parity drives, so "NAS" drives aren't a necessity, but I did decide that the added year of warranty of the WD Red line is worth a little extra to me.
 
davewolfs said:
The cost between the 3TB and 4TB is so low, I would actually go with the 4TB probably it comes really to what you are willing to dish out up front.
Click to expand...

Mostly not disagreeing with you, but it really depends upon the size of the array you want to make and the price per drive.

I made a spreadsheet the other day to graph the dollar cost of a RAID6 array vs. total array size using 3/4/5/6 TB drives. For any given capacity, it cost the most to create that capacity using $274 6TB drives, slightly less (and more drives) using $219 5TB drives. But 4TB and 3TB switched positions for being the cheapest as the size grew larger so that sometimes using 4TB was cheaper than 3TB, even without including incremental cost of controller card/storage bay.

For example, if you wanted to build a 15 TB RAID6 using 3TB drives, you need 7 drives. If each drive is $124 (HGST Deskstar NAS pricing from last week from the site that must not be named), total cost of drives alone is $868. Using 6 of the 4TB model that costs $150 to make the same capacity of 15TB (15TB is in the range of 13TB to 16TB), it costs $900. However if you want a 24TB volume, it would cost $1240 using 10x3TB drives and $1200 using 8x4TB drives.

OP basically has to decide for a 4-bay NAS if 3x4 TB drives is cheaper than 4x3 TB drives (3x4 is $46 cheaper using my numbers above) and compare it to 2x6TB drives ($48 more expensive than 4x 3TB) and whether or not the incremental cost for filling out the rest of the array compensates for the incremental capacity.
 
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