Hitachi 2TB Harddrive Owner's Thread

[OmegaAvenger]

Any luck finding it around that price via the web?

it was at newegg till the 7th.

 

[pjkenned]

Newegg has tax + ship time (and sometimes ship costs in CA). Plus, usually microcenter = retail packaged hitachi's

 

[Cyberbeing]

The RAID-5 expansion/migration from 3 to 4 drives took just under 48 hours to complete on my 3ware 9560SE-8LPML. It was moving a snails pace for the first 70% but then it started chugging along at ~10x the pace for the last 30%.

Since the entire first 2000GB partition is full for the time being, the below tests are from the 2nd 2000GB partition on the array. A quick test appears to show that the first 2000GB partition read speed maxes out at ~375MB/s, which is ~50MB/s faster than the second 2000GB partition from the results below. Once I clear off some space on the first partition I'll post some additional benchmarks to see if that holds true.

IOMeter 64K Sequential 100% Read (256 outstanding I/Os): 4734 IOPS
IOMeter 64K Sequential 100% Write (256 outstanding I/Os): 5196 IOPS

All in all, my first impression is the Hitachi 7K2000 are faster, run just as cool, and even a bit quieter then my 1TB WD Black drives in RAID-5. Even better, they appear to get along with my 3ware controller without any issues or hiccups.
For reference these are all JKAOA28A with the 28A firmware (post Dec 2009), not the older JKAOA20N with the 20N firmware (pre Dec 2009) which I've heard have some performance issues and should be avoided.

 

[odditory]

Any luck finding it around that price via the web?

not right now. the last time it appeared for $129.99 online was Frys.com back in late December. Microcenter selling for $129.99 is a loss leader- they want to get bodies into the store to buy other stuff while they're there. There's practically no margin for them at that pricepoint to just blow them out to online bargain hunters. of course prices will only keep falling so that's the good news.

 

[Cyberbeing]

Heh, it seems like last night when HardForum was inaccessible, they restored a back-up. My edit to my previous post was reverted.

Anyway, here are the results from the first 2000GB partition on the array. Both tests from my previous post were done with Intelligent Read Cache. In this post, CrystalDiskMark is still run with Intelligent Read Cache, but this time I ran ATTO with both Intelligent and Basic Read Cache.

IOMeter 64K Sequential 100% Read (256 outstanding I/Os): 5399 IOPS
IOMeter 64K Sequential 100% Write (256 outstanding I/Os): 5866 IOPS

 

[izx]

Is there a firmware upgrade tool available for these drives?

 

[sniggle]

Been biding my time waiting for new drives to come out but I am running low on space. My idea is to buy 9 of these and run 8 of them in RAID 6 with a cold spare on hand. Only thing I'm not sure of is which controller to go to with. I'm looking at this one because it's new and seems to be a pretty good deal:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116108

Any other recommendations? It seems to be down to an Areca versus a 3ware, just not sure which is better with these drives or if it even really matters.

 

[nitrobass24]

That 3ware is the same as the LSIs
LSI owns 3ware

I will say that they both work just fine with the controllers, but the Areca's management software is way better than LSI/3ware.
Also you wont really see a beneift from the SAS2 with these drives.

 

[Cyberbeing]

While SAS2 would be pointless with these drives, the faster cache and ROC processor on the 9750-8i (800Mhz ROC / 800Mhz DDR2) should show some benefits over the older 9690-8i SAS1 card (533Mhz ROC / 533Mhz DDR2).
Oddly enough, the new 3ware 9750 card sells for almost identical price as the old ones.
It appears Buy.com is selling the 9750-8i Kit for $516 which is $29 cheaper than NewEgg if you do decide to go with that one.

That 3ware is the same as the LSIs

I wouldn't necessarily say this is true. The LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i and LSI 3ware 9750-8i could end up being two completely different beasts with minimal similarities.
Though honestly, the LSI 3ware 9750 is a bit of a wildcard at the moment. While it does retain the same 3ware Web-GUI and compatibility with the AMCC 3ware cards' raid sets, without user reviews it's hard to say how much of the AMCC 3ware performance characteristics it has retained. If you do end up buying it, I'd be curious what sort of performance you get.

If you want something with less unknowns, could always pay ~$125 more and go for the Areca 1680ix-8 card.

Your other options in the ~$500 price range of the 3ware 9750-8i would be the Adaptec RAID 5805 and LSI MegaRaid 9260-8i.

 

[sniggle]

If you want something with less unknowns, could always pay ~$125 more and go for the Areca 1680ix-8 card.

I like less unknowns, so I'll probably end up going with that (especially if the management software has a superior UI). Thanks for your input. I suppose I'd need some SAS -> SATA fanout cables with that? The included cables in the images don't see to do what I would need. Maybe two of these? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816103196

I do know that SAS2 would be useless with the Hitachi's but I figured I may as well go future proof. However, at the end of the day all I really care about is saturating gigabit bandwidth and any decent controller will do way more than that.

 

[nitrobass24]

While SAS2 would be pointless with these drives, the faster cache and ROC processor on the 9750-8i (800Mhz ROC / 800Mhz DDR2) should show some benefits over the older 9690-8i SAS1 card (533Mhz ROC / 533Mhz DDR2).
Oddly enough, the new 3ware 9750 card sells for almost identical price as the old ones.
It appears Buy.com is selling the 9750-8i Kit for $516 which is $29 cheaper than NewEgg if you do decide to go with that one.


I wouldn't necessarily say this is true. The LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i and LSI 3ware 9750-8i could end up being two completely different beasts with minimal similarities.
Though honestly, the LSI 3ware 9750 is a bit of a wildcard at the moment. While it does retain the same 3ware Web-GUI and compatibility with the AMCC 3ware cards' raid sets, without user reviews it's hard to say how much of the AMCC 3ware performance characteristics it has retained. If you do end up buying it, I'd be curious what sort of performance you get.

If you want something with less unknowns, could always pay ~$125 more and go for the Areca 1680ix-8 card.

Your other options in the ~$500 price range of the 3ware 9750-8i would be the Adaptec RAID 5805 and LSI MegaRaid 9260-8i.

While i have not used a 9750, i have used a 9650-8i. Build times are not any faster than my Areca 1680.

Also the LSI/3ware managment software is not web based, it is java based. It is painfully slow, unintuitive, and makes using an otherwise good card a miserable experience.

If LSI/3ware and Adaptec got their acts together and developed out of band web management like is on the Areca's they would be comparable, but right now using one of those other cards is just more trouble than it is worth IMO.

Just some food for thought. There is a reason that Areca's maintain a high resale value and you can get LSI/Adaptecs for pennies on the dollar compared to new cost. Also a reason why there are not many for sale on ebay/[H]/etc. because once you use one your not going trade down

 

[nitrobass24]

Also Areca is coming out with their 18xx series in about a month and will be a SAS2 offering.

I plan on grabbing one ASAP, and the thing is ill still be able to sell my 1680 for almost what i paid for it.

 

[Cyberbeing]

Also the LSI/3ware managment software is not web based, it is java based. It is painfully slow, unintuitive, and makes using an otherwise good card a miserable experience.

Yes, technically it's java-based Web interface. Other then it being a bit slow, I really can't say I have any usability complaints with the 3ware Web GUI. I would even go to say I've found the very simplistic GUI to be nicely laid out and a pleasure to work with.

I'm curious, what were your usability complaints with the 3ware Web GUI (other then the slowness)?

Any word on what the Areca 1880 cards will be selling for? Will they be replacing the current MSRP of the 1680 cards or living along side them with a higher MSRP? I hope they plan to be matching the prices of the LSI cards since the new Areca 1880 has slightly lower hardware specs using only 533Mhz DDR2 VS 800Mhz DDR2 compared to the LSI cards. I guess it all depends on how well the new Marvell 800Mhz ROC on the Areca 1880 matches up to the LSI 800Mhz ROC, as well as firmware/driver optimizations. Marvell's less than stellar SATA 6Gbps controllers up to this point, doesn't exactly build up my confidence that they'll pull off an amazing SAS 6Gbps ROC/controller combo chip, but who knows. Still, the larger Areca cards have >8 ports and allow up to 4GB of cache, so they'll keep that advantage.

Hopefully you'll do a mini-review of the card when you buy it. I would be interested to see how its IOPS performance compares to your current 1680ix with the 7K2000.

 

[odditory]

Any word on what the Areca 1880 cards will be selling for? Will they be replacing the current MSRP of the 1680 cards or living along side them with a higher MSRP? I hope they plan to be matching the prices of the LSI cards since the new Areca 1880 has slightly lower hardware specs using only 533Mhz DDR2 VS 800Mhz DDR2 compared to the LSI cards. I guess it all depends on how well the new Marvell 800Mhz ROC on the Areca 1880 matches up to the LSI 800Mhz ROC, as well as firmware/driver optimizations. Marvell's less than stellar SATA 6Gbps controllers up to this point, doesn't exactly build up my confidence that they'll pull off an amazing SAS 6Gbps ROC/controller combo chip, but who knows. Still, the larger Areca cards have >8 ports and allow up to 4GB of cache, so they'll keep that advantage.

Answered in the Areca thread to keep this Hitachi 2Tb thread on topic. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1483771&page=4

 

[tdigi]

Some reviews of this drive if anyone is interested:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/2tb-7200rpm.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-6Gbit,2528.html?xtmc=7k2000&xtcr=1
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hard-drive-upgrade,2515-3.html?xtmc=7k2000&xtcr=4

 

[Archmage]

I'm thinking about picking up one of these...

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10011109&prodlist=search - ZZF has it for $145 - $15 rebate = $130, free shipping, and no tax in CA - 2% BCB = just above $127.

Or I could get the 2TB WD EARS 64mb drive for about $118... I think I might go Hitachi this time.

Except... that Xbitlabs review isn't so flattering. I am using this thing just for mass storage, so... hmm...

Edit: Tomshardware says this drive is quiet... moreso than the WD Greens (seriously? can this be true?). So considering that, and the fact that I'll be storing mostly large files, I can ignore the high power consumption and odd performance revealed in the Xbit article.

 

[myrison]

I'd suggest you look at Tiger Direct for a simpler option. They are $145 with free shipping, -12.3% BCB, no rebate required. (also no tax to CA as far as I can tell). Nets out to right at $130, but without the annoyance of sending in rebate forms.

Search bing for Computer RAM and you'll see the 12.3% BCB link.

 

[odditory]

Nice to see the price of these drives continuing to drop. $139 every day price on Amazon with no tax and free ship. Since I despise rebates and don't really care about bing, I don't mind paying a few extra dollars. I just love Amazon and my prime account- free 2-day ship and $3.99 overnight. I wish I could buy everything there.

@Archmage: I wouldn't put too much stock into that xbit review -- their assumptions run totally contrary to my own experience, and especially for striped RAID arrays, they've been the most trouble-free.

Now, were I looking for a 2Tb drive to standardize on for non-striped arrays (WHS, etc), maybe I'd go back and consider some of the other options, but for me I keep ending up at the fact that - while I've probably been just lucky - the fact stands that I've never had to RMA a Hitachi, and I've owned 48 of the 1Tb's for more than 2 years, a bunch of 500GB's for 4 years, and now over 100 of the 2Tb's between home and work. Hardly a scientific indicator but i'll take my chances, given that I find myself RMA'ing both 1Tb and 2Tb WD green drives on a regular basis, and recently watched a friend pay $2700 to recover a 6 month old crashed WD20EADS drive he hadn't backed up.

Perception is reality, no?

 

[Neb]

Also, Amazon occasionally will ship out a 2-day prime package out next day saver. It's happened to me more than a few times.

 

[pjkenned]

Now, were I looking for a 2Tb drive to standardize on for non-striped arrays (WHS, etc), maybe I'd go back and consider some of the other options, but for me I keep ending up at the fact that - while I've probably been just lucky - the fact stands that I've never had to RMA a Hitachi, and I've owned 48 of the 1Tb's for more than 2 years, a bunch of 500GB's for 4 years, and now over 100 of the 2Tb's between home and work. Hardly a scientific indicator but i'll take my chances, given that I find myself RMA'ing both 1Tb and 2Tb WD green drives on a regular basis, and recently watched a friend pay $2700 to recover a 6 month old crashed WD20EADS drive he hadn't backed up.

Perception is reality, no?

Q1 2010 for me has been RMA WD greens, buy more Hitachi's (a 1TB disk arrived today in fact).

 

[SinShiva]

i have 2tb via 7k1000c raid0, do i count?

 

[xnoodle]

Newegg has the retail version of these drives currently for $134.99 after $15 coupon EMCYRYX33 (you need to be a newsletter subscriber to be able to use the coupon). Not bad for free shipping and no tax. Sigh @ NY and tax at buy.com and Amazon.

 

[myrison]

+1 Xnoodle. I picked another one up as well. I'm down to ~3TB free on my array and had started to get a little twitchy so this gives me a nice comfortable runway of free space once again. By the way, for those of you who use Bing, you can usually get 1% back from NeweEgg. It's not much, but if you're like odditory and buying 100 of them, then maybe it matters.

 

[MustRotate]

Just bought six for my array. They seem a little bit lounder than the other one that i've bought two months ago.
Does anyone know if by using the Feature Tool you can make them quieter? Or from Adaptec 's Storage Manager?

 

[smidley]

On the website for the newest version of the Feature Tool it says:

Features in Version 2.13
Removed the function of acoustic management.

 

[xnoodle]

I'm getting drive time outs testing these with my Areca 1680LP/HP SAS expander. Any tips on what features to turn off or what to check for? I'm getting these time outs during stress testing, writing small files. Writing large files doesn't give any. There were no time outs initializing it.

I'm running 1.48 firmware on the Areca.

I set SATA NCQ Support to disabled instead of enabled, and Disk Write Cache Mode to Auto instead of enabled, and it seemed to help with the amount of time outs, but I still get time outs. Here are my current settings..

 

[lizardking009]

Is there a way to jumper to SATA150? That's helped me with timeouts before....

 

[myrison]

These are on sale again. $125 + tax at Fry's and at Fry's.com (limit 2 is what my local ad says, but online they'll let you put 10 in your cart).

 

[xnoodle]

Still troubleshooting my write issues. With a raid volume without >2tb support, the writes are fine, which is odd. If I disable raid functionality and turn on JBOD, disk writes are capped at 13megabytes/second. Most of my drives are running JKAOA20N firmware, with one with JKAOA22K and one on JKAOA28A. Bypassing the expander now and testing 4 drives directly to the 1680LP. I wish this just worked, le sigh.

 

[myrison]

Sorry to hear that. I ended up getting a Chenbro expander from Blue Fox on the FS/FT forum and fortunately, it gets along quite well with my HighPoint 4320. Have you contacted Areca about the problems you are having? (supposedly their support actually answers questions as opposed to HighPoint's, who just forward your question straight to the bit bucket after confirming they've received the question)

 

[rurifan]

First, let me say that I've been a Hitachi drive user for quite some time with very positive results:
- I ran 12x250GB (HDS22525VLSA80) RAID5 on a 3ware 9500S-12 for ~4 years with a single replaced drive. Towards the end everything was operating fine but a couple drives were growing new bad sectors a week detected&corrected by the RAID verify. Still good performance.

- For 2 years I have been running 10x1TB (HDS721010KLA330) RAID6 on a 3ware 9690SA-4. During this time I have not had any failures or bad sectors during weekly verifies. Solid so far.

So anyway ... I'd like to add an additional 10x2TB (HDS722020ALA330) RAID6 array to my current server but I noticed that a lot of people in the Newegg comments specifically mention this drive running unusually hot. The chassis I am using has 24 hotswap bays (http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/846/SC846E1-R900.cfm) which I currently have populated with 1TB drives spaced/staggered such that they are not adjacent to each other.

The new 2TB drives will be added in the bays between existing 1TB drives, so my concern is that if the 2TB drives do run unusually hot the close proximity to other drives might lead to a cooling problem. The 1TB drives current operate at a maximum between 29C-39C (the max varies by drive due to airflow variety I guess).

It sounds like some of the owners here are pretty serious with big arrays. Can anybody help me out describing the temperature characteristics? Or other general opinions.

(By the way, anybody running RAID on Windows OS might be interested in Hard Disk Sentinel since it can gather SMART data through 3ware/Areca controllers. It's great for recording drive health trends, including daily temperature maximums and bad sectors.)

 

[jschuricht]

I am running 24 2TB Hitachi's in a SC846E1. I am not aware of any way to get the smart data from my LSI based controller, but the chassis is reporting 39C, so it can't be too bad.

 

[nitrobass24]

I am running 24 2TB Hitachi's in a SC846E1. I am not aware of any way to get the smart data from my LSI based controller, but the chassis is reporting 39C, so it can't be too bad.

35c here, and my norco is in a closet with no A/C

 

[rurifan]

I am running 24 2TB Hitachi's in a SC846E1. I am not aware of any way to get the smart data from my LSI based controller, but the chassis is reporting 39C, so it can't be too bad.

Nice, I guess the fact that it hasn't had a meltdown is a good sign. Wish you could get SMART temperature readings, that would be a great comparison from the same chassis.. What controller is it?

 

[jschuricht]

It's the Supermicro AOC-USAS-H4iR which is based off the LSISAS 1078 chip.

 

[myrison]

I run 8 of these in a mid-tower case (Cooler Master 690) that is packed full and as I have filled it up with an i7, RAID card, GPU, SAS expander, and 8 of these disks, it has run a hotter than I would have preferred (it's on my list to upgrade to a larger case with better airflow). This is not a pure media server for me as I also use the computer on a day to day basis for graphics processing, etc., so components like the i7 & GPU definitely add to the heat.

With all that said, in my experience, the Hitachis do run ~10 Fahrenheit degrees hotter than a set of 6 WD 1 TB green drives that they replaced. Overall, I'm running from 113 to 120 F (41-49 C), and when I just had the WD drives running, they were all around 100 F (~37C).

 

[Cyberbeing]

With all that said, in my experience, the Hitachis do run ~10 degrees hotter than a set of 6 WD 1 TB green drives that they replaced.

For comparisons sake, I've found the Hitachi's run on average ~2-4 degrees cooler than the WD 1 TB Black drives. So while they may run much hotter than the Green drives, if instead compared to the Black drives, their temps should be the same, if not marginally better.

Currently (spun-up & idling), my four 7K2000 have an average temperature of 35c (33-38c), while my four WD1000FALS have an average temperature of 39c (38-40c).

Conversely, over the entire lifespan (as recorded by SMART), the absolute maximum temperatures of my four 7K2000 averages 44c (40-49c), while the absolute maximum temperatures of my four WD1000FALS averages 50c (45-54c).

For the sake of full disclosure, my Lian Li V2100 case has less then optimal airflow for the HDD rack, which is likely the cause of the large variations of temperature for the same model drives. It just goes to show how having a case which can provide direct airflow for all your drives is very important in keeping temperatures down.

 

[rurifan]

Thanks for the info everybody. I have 10 of these on the way from Newegg ($130 currently); I'll report back with some numbers of my own in a couple days.

By the way, what size logical volumes do you guys create on larger RAID arrays? I used to be conservative at 2TB in order to mitigate the impact of catastrophic filesystem corruption, but that starts getting ridiculous in a 16TB RAID unit. (Plus I've never actually had a filesystem-level issue...)

 

[myrison]

@Cyberbeing: Just for clarity, the ~10 degree number was in Fahrenheit, not Celcius. I clarified above as well.

@Rurifan - My logical volume fills up my entire array, so currently 12TB usable on an 8x2TB RAID6. Remember during formatting that if you do want larger volumes than 16TB at any point in the future growth of your array, you need to format the volume using a larger than default cluster size.

 

[calamar]

At last I have my Hitachis
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1511013

I just wanted to post to confirm 9750SA successfully detects those 2TB drives. My problem right now is 2/9 disks I bought were DOA. So I'll have to wait some days to build a RAID-6. I'll post some numbers given that 9750SA is still very unused card.
I don't want to create the RAID-6 with 7 drives and then expand it, because is a PIAS all the time required.

Have fun.