DIY SANs and Vibration

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Red Squirrel

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Does anyone here use one of those popular Norco cases with consumer drives, and is there any issues with vibration?

I kinda mentioned that in this thread but figured I'd start a thread more specifically towards DIY SAN solutions.

If I am to build a SAN do I HAVE to use enterprise drives, or are these cases designed to damper the vibration of all the drives spinning at once? I'm also concerned about stuff like during a raid rebuild, for example. I have 2 4-bay drive enclosures in my main server, these are the ones where you just slide drives directly in. I noticed if it's filled with drives, drives start showing lot of errors as soon as I start a raid rebuild. I'm now suspecting it is due to vibration. Even had drives drop out of the array. Not cool. It's production so I could not really experiment much. I just gave up on the extra drives, more or less.

Just wondering if this is really an issue with those cases designed to hold 24 drives, or if they are better engineered. I plan to build a SAN but I really don't want to be spending thousands of dollars for single drives.
 
I have a norco 20 drive case setup at my pop's place for security video monitoring/archiving. It's been running for ~3 years with consumer sata drives (18 drives currently). I haven't had any die. Completely anecdotal though.
 
After I replied in the other thread I did a quick search and found this article:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/bad-bad-bad-vibrations/896

This article attacks vibrations from a performance standpoint and not a failure issue. So, looks like something could be there, but I still have doubt about complete drive failure from rotational vibes. (The other article down at the bottom of the page about RAID5 being obsolete because of drive sizes is interesting too).

Also, 2TB Seagate Constellation drives are about twice as much as the same size consumer drive. I think my reseller had them for about $220 each. If you can get them without the encryption then they may be even less expensive. They are enterprise class with RTV tolerance. Maybe an option?
 
drake3 said:
After I replied in the other thread I did a quick search and found this article:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/bad-bad-bad-vibrations/896

This article attacks vibrations from a performance standpoint and not a failure issue. So, looks like something could be there, but I still have doubt about complete drive failure from rotational vibes. (The other article down at the bottom of the page about RAID5 being obsolete because of drive sizes is interesting too).

Also, 2TB Seagate Constellation drives are about twice as much as the same size consumer drive. I think my reseller had them for about $220 each. If you can get them without the encryption then they may be even less expensive. They are enterprise class with RTV tolerance. Maybe an option?
Click to expand...

I've heard of these, nearline drives, we use some of them in our SAN at work. They work very well, but the price is high due to increased fault tolerance and vibration resistance (they are much heavier than consumer drives). While they may not be as expensive as enterprise-class drives, nearline-class drives are still steep in price and may not necessarily be suitable for users who are cost-conscious.

Also, nearline-class drives are not equal in quality or performance to enterprise-class drives at all and were designed for SANs and other devices not demanding high-speeds, unlike servers and OS drives.

btw, the guy in that article is a fucking idiot, don't listen to him as everything he says has been proven wrong time and time again on these forums and many others. ;)
 
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