Enterprise HDs - not so noisy nowadays? (Exos X16 opinion)

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sphinx99

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 23, 2006
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I found an Exos X16 selling for $400 locally, right in line with the $200 8TB shucked WD deals that were considered pretty good just a year or two ago. Since I need to put together a new storage system sometime in the next 6 months, I bought it thinking it'll be an interesting thing to exercise. It's been doing so the last several hours and to my surprise, it's incredibly quiet and physically stable. Seek clicks are muted, and there's virtually no discernable noise from the spinning platters. I have long been gun-shy about using enterprise drives at home (maybe past experience with 15k rpm SAN storage in a prior IT career) and had an impression that enterprise drives were still loud, noisy, hot monsters. This Exos surprised me.... and the price isn't far off what you'd pay for a typical quality NAS drive.

Questions:
- can the above experience be generalized to other DC / "exascale" drives?
- any comments specifically on the Exos X12/X14/X16?
- if there is no cost downside, is there any reason not to consider this class of drives for NAS?
 
sphinx99 said:
I found an Exos X16 selling for $400 locally, right in line with the $200 8TB shucked WD deals that were considered pretty good just a year or two ago. Since I need to put together a new storage system sometime in the next 6 months, I bought it thinking it'll be an interesting thing to exercise. It's been doing so the last several hours and to my surprise, it's incredibly quiet and physically stable. Seek clicks are muted, and there's virtually no discernable noise from the spinning platters. I have long been gun-shy about using enterprise drives at home (maybe past experience with 15k rpm SAN storage in a prior IT career) and had an impression that enterprise drives were still loud, noisy, hot monsters. This Exos surprised me.... and the price isn't far off what you'd pay for a typical quality NAS drive.

Questions:
- can the above experience be generalized to other DC / "exascale" drives?
- any comments specifically on the Exos X12/X14/X16?
- if there is no cost downside, is there any reason not to consider this class of drives for NAS?
Click to expand...
There is only the generalized issue of Seagate drives having a higher failure rate than WD or Hitachi. What is the warranty on these drives?
 
You definitely want to avoid enterprise high capacity (8/10TB) air drives. Helium drives like yours are lower power and noise, even compared to lower capacity air drives.
 
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