What Drives are We Putting in our NAS systems These Days?

As someone mentioned above, and what has been by 30+ years of experience with mechanical drives is if it works for a year or two it will most likely work for a long time, long time.

Heck, usually if it lasts a few months out of the box the same applies, actually....

Just sayin'

~RF

My experience has been different. Yes, most drives that survive the first month seem to last for years. But after 3 years you never really know. That is when I've had smart errors start popping up leading to replacing the drive. Wd greens, Seagate barracuda, hgst drives in the 3-8 year range have all exhibited this. Not all my drives, but all those brands that Ive owned at one point or another.
 
My experience has been different. Yes, most drives that survive the first month seem to last for years. But after 3 years you never really know. That is when I've had smart errors start popping up leading to replacing the drive. Wd greens, Seagate barracuda, hgst drives in the 3-8 year range have all exhibited this. Not all my drives, but all those brands that Ive owned at one point or another.
I use that as a convenient excuse to up to the next level of storage density.
My duplicate HTPCs more or less went from 2TB -> 4TB -> 8TB.
Waiting on the Ultrastar He10 (or better yet He12) to make its debut in externals to be shucked :)
 
My experience has been different. Yes, most drives that survive the first month seem to last for years. But after 3 years you never really know. That is when I've had smart errors start popping up leading to replacing the drive. Wd greens, Seagate barracuda, hgst drives in the 3-8 year range have all exhibited this. Not all my drives, but all those brands that Ive owned at one point or another.

It sounds like your experience has been just about exactly the same, actually. :)

5-8 years is a LONG, long time for 24/7 moving parts!

The one thing I have noticed is that the enterprise (10-15k RPM) drives are not to be trusted after three years of typical 24/7 data-center usage. Three years seems to be the beginning of the end for those puppies.

~RF
 
Yeah, I agree.

If it lasts the first 3 months, it'll be fine for about 3 years. If it passes the three year mark, it'll be fine for another three years. 6 years drives get replaced regardless. HDDs just seem to have a 3 year cycle for me.
 
So, I still haven't bough my next drives.

I plan on limiting the pain by buying two at a time, once per pay period and inserting them in my ZFS Pool and rebuilding, with the intent of having the pool grow once the last drives have been rebuilt.

The added benefit of this should be different shipping ever time, and possibly different lots, so there is less of a chance of multiples going bad at once.

I am currently leaning towards the last gen HGST HE8 8TB drives. While slower than the latest enterprise drives, they are 7200rpm and ought to be a nice upgrade over my 4TB WD Reds.

Once done, my old WD Reds will go into my secondary server and be used for backup. Hopefully I can find some affordable colocation or somewhere else to stash it too.

I'll probably create a single large RAIDz3 vdev with 11 disks for those (3 drive redundancy due to the drives being older) with 12 drives in the system overall, one as a hot spare.
 
I just filled up my 4-bay with 8TB reds from shucking mybook devices.

So far so good, helium filled and 179 each by this method.
Same here. I chose these because they were cheap and 5400 RPM which I prefer in a NAS thats limited by network speeds anyway. Lower heat and vibration than 7200 RPM drives.
 
So, I still haven't bough my next drives.

I plan on limiting the pain by buying two at a time, once per pay period and inserting them in my ZFS Pool and rebuilding, with the intent of having the pool grow once the last drives have been rebuilt.

The added benefit of this should be different shipping ever time, and possibly different lots, so there is less of a chance of multiples going bad at once.

I am currently leaning towards the last gen HGST HE8 8TB drives. While slower than the latest enterprise drives, they are 7200rpm and ought to be a nice upgrade over my 4TB WD Reds.

Once done, my old WD Reds will go into my secondary server and be used for backup. Hopefully I can find some affordable colocation or somewhere else to stash it too.

I'll probably create a single large RAIDz3 vdev with 11 disks for those (3 drive redundancy due to the drives being older) with 12 drives in the system overall, one as a hot spare.

Well, I'm going to have to lean away from those HE8's.

The ones for sale on Amazon right now at a very competitive price are OEM drives and thus lack the 5 year HGST warranty.

The seller offers their own 2 year warranty, but it seems sketchy to me.

Back to the drawing board on this one.

I'd love to go with HE10's but the price is a bit hefty for me
 
As someone mentioned above, and what has been by 30+ years of experience with mechanical drives is if it works for a year or two it will most likely work for a long time, long time.

Heck, usually if it lasts a few months out of the box the same applies, actually....

Just sayin'

~RF

In my 30+ years with mechanical drives is if I for some reason stop doing backups, then they will die!
 
Well, I'm going to have to lean away from those HE8's.

The ones for sale on Amazon right now at a very competitive price are OEM drives and thus lack the 5 year HGST warranty.

The seller offers their own 2 year warranty, but it seems sketchy to me.

Back to the drawing board on this one.

I'd love to go with HE10's but the price is a bit hefty for me

Well, I decided to increase my budget.

I have the first two of 12 total Seagate Enterprise 10TB Helium drives (ST10000NM0016) coming my way soon. Ordered them last night, probably won't be here until at the earliest Sunday, but more likely probably early next week.

Now I have a discussion on testing going on here.
 
Yeah but you don't want those whiny things in your living room. Some of us prefer to live in a nice home than a data lab.:)

That's why I keep my servers and networking hardware out of earshot in my basement :p

Only time this ever became a problem was with my HP DL180 G6 which was just too damned loud even for the basement.



I measured it at over 100dB...
 
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Yeah but you don't want those whiny things in your living room. Some of us prefer to live in a nice home than a data lab.:)

So, I just received my first two Seagate Enterprise 10TB Helium 7200rpm SATA drives last night.

These are possibly the quietest drives I've ever heard. I can't even hear them over the flourescent bulbs in my basement.

The spinning is entirely silent to me. The tickets of the seeks are a little louder, but not terrible.
 
Just curious, what storageOS/FS are you going to use with those 12x 10TB drives? ZFS, hardware Raid?
 
I think my next upgrade will be vertical scaling. I'll still use 2TB SAS drives, I'll just get another chassis and set 'em up as direct-attached storage.
 
So, I just received my first two Seagate Enterprise 10TB Helium 7200rpm SATA drives last night.

These are possibly the quietest drives I've ever heard. I can't even hear them over the flourescent bulbs in my basement.

The spinning is entirely silent to me. The tickets of the seeks are a little louder, but not terrible.

Sounds (ha) promising!
 
I don't understand the OP's question. You mean OTHER than an HGST drive? Because honestly, why would you consider anything else.
 
That's why I keep my servers and networking hardware out of earshot in my basement :p

Only time this ever became a problem was with my HP DL180 G6 which was just too damned loud even for the basement.



I measured it at over 100dB...


WTF are they using in those? Dozens of black-label Deltas?!
 
I don't understand the OP's question. You mean OTHER than an HGST drive? Because honestly, why would you consider anything else.

Are there any 5400 RPM HGSTs these days? I feel like they've stopped making them.

So has anybody stepped up and tried to do an all-SSD NAS or is that just too hardcore still? It doesn't seem like capacity is moving much in the SSD world. And it would probably need a 10 GbE network.
 
WTF are they using in those? Dozens of black-label Deltas?!

Worse, IMHO.

IMG_20171021_135205.jpg


IMG_20171021_135233.jpg


There are 8 60mm fans in a 2x4 redundant arrangement, each capable of 14k RPM.
 
I don't understand the OP's question. You mean OTHER than an HGST drive? Because honestly, why would you consider anything else.

Well,

HGST certainly has the best reputation for reliability by far, but they just didn't work out for me.

After looking at WD Red's since I have had good experiences with my current WD reds, and deciding they were overpriced for what they were, I started by looking into Ultrastars but according to my research they didn't seem to have the ability to set a shorter time on error recovery like you want for drives in RAID, so I decided against them.

Then I was looking at HGST's last gen HE8 Enterprise drives. They were priced great, but I found that all of the ones you can find now are OEM drives and don't carry HGST's 5 year warranty, so I decided against them as well.

Then I looked at HGST's HE10 8TB drives, but they aerw just too damned expensive. They cost more than the Seagate Enterprise v6 10TB Helium drives, so I wound up going withthem instead.

After years of hearing how much Seagate drives suck, I have to admit, they were my last choice, but I figured that most of Seagate's troubles must be behind them at this point. That, and their Enterprise drives can't possibly have the same reliability problems as their much maligned desktop drives have had over the years. I have good redundancy in my ZFS pool (2x RAIDz2 pools) so if any of them fail, I should be able to quickly swap and resilver.


Are there any 5400 RPM HGSTs these days? I feel like they've stopped making them.

I was wary of 7200rom drives as well, as they used to be noisy, hot and use lots of power. This new generation of helium drives seems to change all that though. As mentioned previously, I have one running badblocks in the basement, and I literally can not hear the thing over the slight 60hz hum of the fluorescent bulbs down there.. I think they are actually quieter than my 4TB WD Red's at 5400rpm. Their spec sheet suggests they use less power too, if I recall.

So has anybody stepped up and tried to do an all-SSD NAS or is that just too hardcore still? It doesn't seem like capacity is moving much in the SSD world. And it would probably need a 10 GbE network.

My current 12 drive ZFS pool of 5400rpm WD Reds is enough to saturate two to three gigabit ethernet connections at the same time, and can hit sequential speeds of ~950MB/s reads.

If all you have is gigabit, even 7200rpm is overkill.

All SSD NAS:es may be slightly more responsive, but yeah, a complete waste IMHO, unless you have some sort of local mega enterprise database sitting ontop of it or something. For a filer like my own, it would make absolutely no sense, especially considering the outrageous cost it would take to go to the 12x 10TB capacity I am going for :p
 
Hmm.

I may have a bit of a problem.

Because I was curious how close the two drives I've gotten thus far are, I punched in the part and serial numbers of these Seagate drives into Seagates Warranty Validator.

To my surprise, despite the Newegg stores page saying they came with 5 years of manufacturer warranty, Seagate's page claims they are OEM drives, and thus I need to contact the seller (Newegg) to get warranty.

So, I started a live chat with Newegg to verify that they are covering the drives for 5 years. they told me they ahve the 30 day return and replacement policy, but after that to contact the manufacturer.

So I called Seagate to confirm, their customer service rep said these were OEM drives (listed as having been sold to Supermicro International, no less) and that Seagate would not honor any warranty on them.

So, now I have a ticket with Newegg with them "looking into it" for me.

I may have to send these back to Newegg within the 30 day window unless this gets worked out.

Sure am glad I decided to check now, and didn't find out 2 years from now when something went wrong...
 
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Hmm.

I may have a bit of a problem.

Because I was curious how close the two drives I've gotten thus far are, I punched in the part and serial numbers of these Seagate drives into Seagates Warranty Validator.

To my surprise, despite the Newegg stores page saying they came with 5 years of manufacturer warranty, Seagate's page claims they are OEM drives, and thus I need to contact the seller (Newegg) to get warranty.

So, I started a live chat with Newegg to verify that they are covering the drives for 5 years. they told me they ahve the 30 day return and replacement policy, but after that to contact the manufacturer.

So I called Seagate to confirm, their customer service rep said these were OEM drives (listed as having been sold to Supermicro International, no less) and that Seagate would not honor any warranty on them.

So, now I have a ticket with Newegg with them "looking into it" for me.

I may have to send these back to Newegg within the 30 day window unless this gets worked out.

Sure am glad I decided to check now, and didn't find out 2 years from now when something went wrong...

I would suggest sending the drives back regardless. Seagate clearly won't honor the warranty. If Newegg tries to make it right by sending the right drives later so be it. I wouldn't accept a third party warranty either.
 
I would suggest sending the drives back regardless. Seagate clearly won't honor the warranty. If Newegg tries to make it right by sending the right drives later so be it. I wouldn't accept a third party warranty either.

Yep. That's what I'm thinking as well.

In waiting for them to finish their investigation. It could be a contract mistake between them and Seagate, someone could have records messed up, etc. etc.

I want Newegg and Seagate to talk, and if the outcome isn't that the drives have warranty, they are going back before my 30 days expire.

Pain in the ass though...
 
I would suggest sending the drives back regardless. Seagate clearly won't honor the warranty. If Newegg tries to make it right by sending the right drives later so be it. I wouldn't accept a third party warranty either.


UPDATE:

So, not quite sure what they did, but I called Newegg back today, and they claimed they had resolved the warranty issue.

So, when I got home from work, I re-ran the serial numbers in Seagate's Warranty Validator, and - indeed - they now show as being covered by warranty. (they expire a couple of months short of the 5 year mark, but close enough. I don't know what they use as the start date. Is it date of manufacture, not date of purchase?)

Anyway, I'm confused but satisfied.
 
Just curious, what storageOS/FS are you going to use with those 12x 10TB drives? ZFS, hardware Raid?


Sorry, missed this question originally.


Yes, they are going in my "home production" Proxmox & NAS server using ZFS in a 2x 6 drive RAIDz2 configuration.
 
Just sold my 36x2TB array drives and replaced with 30x3TB. But even though I got those for $28 each, looking at the cost of the 8tb shucked drives I might pivot that way now...

I'm no stranger to shucking, started it six years ago when black Friday Best Buy had 3TB Seagate drives for $99 each (down from $299). They're still going strong on my file server today. Just be careful about the warranties and whether you need to reinstall without scratches into external cases.
 
Just sold my 36x2TB array drives and replaced with 30x3TB. But even though I got those for $28 each, looking at the cost of the 8tb shucked drives I might pivot that way now...

I'm no stranger to shucking, started it six years ago when black Friday Best Buy had 3TB Seagate drives for $99 each (down from $299). They're still going strong on my file server today. Just be careful about the warranties and whether you need to reinstall without scratches into external cases.

There are actually people willing to buy used NAS drives?

I never even considered trying to sell my just out of warranty 4TB reds with 30,000+ hours on them. I just didn't realize it would be worth it, and I'd find a buyer.

Instead I am moving them to a backup server.
 
There are actually people willing to buy used NAS drives?

I never even considered trying to sell my just out of warranty 4TB reds with 30,000+ hours on them. I just didn't realize it would be worth it, and I'd find a buyer.

Instead I am moving them to a backup server.

Yep, I bought used storage servers and their drives all the time simply because they are so cheap.

I've never had trouble selling off a disk, no matter how old, as long as it passes smart tests and is priced right.

Yep, my thought process is if a drive has been running for several years in a commercial environment without failure then it's going to have a higher reliability with me than what I would get out of a brand new drive due to "infant mortality."

Backblaze's recent article on failure rates shows THIRTY PERCENT!!! of some models of new drives.
 
Yep, I bought used storage servers and their drives all the time simply because they are so cheap.



Yep, my thought process is if a drive has been running for several years in a commercial environment without failure then it's going to have a higher reliability with me than what I would get out of a brand new drive due to "infant mortality."

Backblaze's recent article on failure rates shows THIRTY PERCENT!!! of some models of new drives.

Well yeah, but at some point you reach the other side of the bathtub curve...

ht21_1.gif
 
My experience has been different. Yes, most drives that survive the first month seem to last for years. But after 3 years you never really know. That is when I've had smart errors start popping up leading to replacing the drive. Wd greens, Seagate barracuda, hgst drives in the 3-8 year range have all exhibited this. Not all my drives, but all those brands that Ive owned at one point or another.

From my experience major factor for disk's survivability is the ambient operational temperature . If it is steadily below 20C, HDDs live is x2 roughly . Second is power off periods . I have more faith in HDD with 1 year continuously spin than a some with 3 months per year power-on.
 
From my experience major factor for disk's survivability is the ambient operational temperature . If it is steadily below 20C, HDDs live is x2 roughly . Second is power off periods . I have more faith in HDD with 1 year continuously spin than a some with 3 months per year power-on.

And the thread is back from the dead! :p

As far as temperature goes, I think Backblaze disagrees.

I also vaguely recall a google study from several years ago now that curiously found the opposite, that warmer drives last longer than cooler ones, but I could be misremembering.

From my own anecdotal evidence, I have been running my NAS server in an un-air conditioned basement for 4 years, where in the summer temps often reach 90 degrees or above, and have not seen an excessive drive failure rate.
 
And the thread is back from the dead! :p

As far as temperature goes, I think Backblaze disagrees.

I also vaguely recall a google study from several years ago now that curiously found the opposite, that warmer drives last longer than cooler ones, but I could be misremembering.

From my own anecdotal evidence, I have been running my NAS server in an un-air conditioned basement for 4 years, where in the summer temps often reach 90 degrees or above, and have not seen an excessive drive failure rate.

Backblaze also gets 30% failure rates on some drives. Seagate drives, in particular, are very vulnerable to degredation by heat, and consumer level drives are far more vulnerable than enterprise drives. I used to work as the admin in a server software test lab with tens of thousands of drives, from WD green and black drives to Intel X25-E SSDs to Ultrastars and Constellations. I have experience to note on that. Yes, Seagate drives are bad at failure rates compared to Ultrastars, but not 30% bad, if the conditions are kept right.
 
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