Looking for a solid 4TB drive to buy -- need 24 of them

T

tycoonbob

Limp Gawd
Joined
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Messages
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So I have a little side project I'm working on, utilizing 3 Dell C2100 servers, each with 2 120GB SSD's in RAID 1 for the OS, 8 4TB drives, and 4 additional 60GB SSD's. These 3 servers will be running Ceph, so each will have 8 OSD's and 4 SSD journal drives.

I'm also hoping to run OpenStack on the same boxes (which have dual Xeon L5630's, 24GB RAM, and a PERC H300 controller), but may have to double the RAM on each to do so nicely. Probably use Mirantis to manage the deployment, but that's outside the point of this post.

Anyway, I'm having an internal struggle deciding which drives to buy. Unfortunately, I don't have the cash to go out and buy 24 drives all at once, so I need to buy a few at a time. Once I get to 4 4TB drives per host with 2 of the journal SSD's, I will start building out the servers and add additional drives later, but I need to decide now on which drives to buy.

I keep bouncing back and forth between enterprise grade and consumer grade, but I don't really see the benefits of going enterprise. Sure, enterprise drives are generally rated at 10^15 URE, where as consumer drives are 10^14, but length of warranty is much more concerning. I'd prefer 5 year warranties, but 3 years are the minimum.
Price wise, I'd like to stick around $150/drive, or less. For a 4TB, that should be doable, but larger than 4TB likely won't be an option because of cost. Even using 8 4TB drives per node, with a replication factor of 2, I'm still getting ~16TB of usable storage per node. 3 nodes would give me ~48TB of storage, when I currently only have ~12TB of data. My fourth node could be 3 years away, and pack in 8TB drives or something like that, and make expansion easy in the future.

Sorry for the rambling. I'm currently considering the Toshiba MD04ACA400, though. I've got several Toshiba DT01ACA200's and DT01ACA300's, that have been running over 2 years now without issue. I like Toshiba, and they have been pretty solid in my experience. I'd love to get WD RE's, or HGST Ultrastars, but I don't think paying the additional money is really worth it. So go for the MD04ACA400? Something else?
 
I'm gonna third (edit: fourth) the HGST recommendation. Veeery low failure rates, according to BackBlaze's sample size. Just got me a 4TB 7200 deskstar one to add to my storage server, myself.
 
Oh yeah? Works for me.

I've also got like 6 2TB HGST 7K3000 chugging along for 3+ years. For whatever reason, I've stopped looking at the Deskstars and was looking more at Toshiba.

I'll start looking around for best prices, but I'm open to any other feedback in the mean time!
 
tycoonbob said:
Oh yeah? Works for me.

I've also got like 6 2TB HGST 7K3000 chugging along for 3+ years. For whatever reason, I've stopped looking at the Deskstars and was looking more at Toshiba.

I'll start looking around for best prices, but I'm open to any other feedback in the mean time!
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I purchased over 400+ toshiba's (which are rebranded from WD I think) 4TB disks 2 years ago. Failure rate is about 2-3% over 2 years, considering they were put into a SwiftStack SAN. Fully expected more drives to die but i've been surprised by their resilience.
 
If you have cjeap drives, zfs corrects all eventual data corruption. Zfs increase data safety so you can use cheap drives without worries.
 
Corrects all eventual data corruption? What does that mean? How does it know the future?
 
I think he's referring to the checksum error correction baked into ZFS. Blind trust is a dangerous thing.
 
Yes, zfs self healing capability. I am not refering to blind trust, but to research. Several researchers have independently examined zfs data correction abilities, for instance, injected artifical errors of different kinds - zfs detected all errors, and corrected them. Otoh, no one has researched for instance, btrfs snapraid, etc. so using them is "blind trust" because the users trust some developer who assures them tha refs, btrfs, and what not are safe. When no one have examined their data correction ability.

I prefer science and research, to blind trust or religion. If you do that too, zfs it is. There is no other choice.
 
tycoonbob said:
Sorry for the rambling. I'm currently considering the Toshiba MD04ACA400, though. I've got several Toshiba DT01ACA200's and DT01ACA300's, that have been running over 2 years now without issue. I like Toshiba, and they have been pretty solid in my experience. I'd love to get WD RE's, or HGST Ultrastars, but I don't think paying the additional money is really worth it. So go for the MD04ACA400? Something else?
Click to expand...

I'm currently running the math on using WD Greens for my future Raid 10 build. I am currently running 4x 3TD that offers services to about 5 machines and I'm not running into performance issues.
 
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Trimlock said:
I'm currently running the math on using WD Greens for my future Raid 10 build. I am currently running 4x 3TD that offers services to about 5 machines and I'm not running into performance issues.
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You probably don't want to use Greens for your RAID build. You're better off with Reds or Red Pros, as they're spec'ed for it.
 
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ep0x73 said:
+1
Solid but a bit slower then I thought they would be once they reach 50%.
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Most drives the outer tracks are almost 2 times the STR of the inner tracks. For example have drives that are nearly 200 MB/s in the outer tracks and a little over 90MB/s in the inner tracks.
 
Correct but the HGST NAS was on the slower side when they were brand new, putting them in raid1 which is the point of NAS slowed them down even further.
With the higher platter density I was expecting better then what I am seeing.
Still good drives which have been solid, just expected a bit more.
 
Chas said:
You probably don't want to use Greens for your RAID build. You're better off with Reds or Red Pros, as they're spec'ed for it.
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That's right. If you're going to do a RAID, do not buy WD Green drives

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/26-ho...al-green-hdds-raid5-no-tler-huge-problem.html

as they lack TLER which is mission critical for a RAID. Without it, your drives are going to drop out of the RAID array like flies one after the other.

If you're going to put forth money for this, get WD Enterprise drives if you are going with Western Digital. These drives are designed to be run 24/7 in datacenters, have higher operating temperatures/tolerances, have WD Black performance, have much more load/unload cycle specs (than Red drives), and best of all have FIVE YEARS of warranty. The cost difference; 96 USD for 2TB Red - 130 USD for 2TB Enterprise / 2 years difference in warranty = you are paying 17 USD per year or 34 USD extra for two additional years of warranty while benefiting from better performance and higher-grade specifications designed to be used in mission critical live production.

Also, consumer-grade drives (aka anything not WD Red or Enterprise) are not designed to be in configurations where you have multiple drives in close proximity due to vibrations -- such as adjacent 3.5" drive bays -- while WD Red and Enterprise are through better construction and additional measures against local proximity vibrations. Take a look at this, specifically pay attention to how close the read/write head is to the platter: http://www.tekbasics.com/dirtysecrets.html

hard-drive-head-gap2.jpg


Do you really want to risk it?

I use to use WD Green drives until they started dropping out one after the other months after putting more and more drives into the same chassis.
 
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as they lack TLER which is mission critical for a RAID. Without it, your drives are going to drop out of the RAID array like flies one after the other.
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Hmm. Less than 1/3 of my 75+ drives that I have here at work mostly configured in raid6 or raidz2/3 arrays have TLER and some of them have been running for 6+ years 24/7/365 with absolutely no drop outs to speak of. However I am using zfs and linux software raid for these. Although none of the drives are green. All drives are 7200 RPM.
 
drescherjm said:
Hmm. Less than 1/3 of my 75+ drives that I have here at work mostly configured in raid6 or raidz2/3 arrays have TLER and some of them have been running for 6+ years 24/7/365 with absolutely no drop outs to speak of. However I am using zfs and linux software raid for these. Although none of the drives are green. All drives are 7200 RPM.
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I'm aware there is WDIDLE and another tool for modifying TLER, but according to posters in the link I provided they say these tools don't work on newer WD Green drives/latest revisions of same part.

Ultimately this comes down to risk. Since we know Western Digital essentially rigged their drives and we've got mixed reports of TLER-modifying tools working + not working (therefore uncertainty if when you buy WD Green drives if those tools will indeed work or not), are you really willing to take the risk on WD Green drives at the possibility of losing your entire array? If that does happen, you spent a lot of money you won't be able to get back and don't have the hardware to have a RAID array. (Money is also synonymous with time.)

Alternatively, you could try software-based RAID.
 
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Cerulean said:
I'm aware there is WDIDLE and another tool for modifying TLER, but according to posters in the link I provided they say these tools don't work on newer WD Green drives/latest revisions of same part.

Ultimately this comes down to risk. Since we know Western Digital essentially rigged their drives and we've got mixed reports of TLER-modifying tools working + not working (therefore uncertainty if when you buy WD Green drives if those tools will indeed work or not), are you really willing to take the risk on WD Green drives at the possibility of losing your entire array? If that does happen, you spent a lot of money you won't be able to get back and don't have the hardware to have a RAID array. (Money is also synonymous with time.)

Alternatively, you could try software-based RAID.
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That's why I was considering them. The mention of the WDIDLE not working was very minor and could be a small sample size, I've had reds lose their raid as well.

My current set up using greens is on a SOFTWARE raid like you mentioned and I was hoping to move up to a PERC H700 using either 3's or 4's. Of course if it turns out Greens are hardlocked I won't be considering them.
 
I was getting ready to buy 4 drives, but that's when I noticed that I was about to buy the Deskstar NAS ($165 on Newegg). Is the Deskstar NAS more (or less) desirable than the Deskstar line?

I'm also curious about the Toshiba PH3400U-1I72. I have several Toshiba DT01ACA300's, and never had an issue in 1+ years. I like that this Toshiba drive has 128MB cache, instead of 64MB, but I'm not sure how noticeable that would be in my application.

If the Deskstar NAS were around $150, I'd have no problem just scooping 4 of them up right now, but $165 is enough to make me stop and rethink.

EDIT:
I just stumbled across those Toshiba drives on Microcenter. $140 for the 4TB, and $170 for the 5TB. That's enough to make me consider using 5TB drives...
 
Why 8 x 4TB drives when you can get 3 x 10TB Hitachi drives?

OK, these ones are filled with helium and speak funny, but Western Digital recently released improved datacenter drives, the low power RE+ 6TB drives that look very interesting and worth investigating.
 
Chimel said:
Why 8 x 4TB drives when you can get 3 x 10TB Hitachi drives?
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Because my design is using Ceph, which benefits from more disks, getting better I/O. Using 5TB drives, I will have 20TB usable storage per node, which is 60TB usable across 3 nodes. Likewise, 4TB drives would be 16TB usable per node, or 48TB usable across 3 nodes.

I only have ~12TB of data, right now.

Chimel said:
OK, these ones are filled with helium and speak funny, but Western Digital recently released improved datacenter drives, the low power RE+ 6TB drives that look very interesting and worth investigating.
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These are probably in the $450 range, not $150-175.
 
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HGST NAS now have a 5TB and 6TB out now which are faster then 3/4 and they doubled the cache to 128MB.

The 4TB continues to be on sale with promo codes.
 
Testing? What testing? As far as I can tell, that blog post summarizes their empirical operational data.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Please stop linking that, their testing is faulty.
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They are simply reporting actual failure rate statistics from a real deployment of 30,000+ drives over a couple of year long period. What - exactly - do you consider faulty about that?
 
I would have preferred to go with the HGST Deskstar NAS 5TB, but their price is around $220. The Toshiba 5TB are around $170, and in fact I ordered two Toshiba 5TB from B&H earlier today, for $175/ea, free shipping (and no tax, which would make Amazon's price higher).

I'll be ordering two more tonight, actually, so that makes 4 5TB Toshiba's that I should be getting later this week to do some testing with. Price per GB is just awesome on these, and they have a 5 year warranty. Also, the 128MB cache is nice.

So I guess what I'm saying is I decided to give the Toshiba a try, and if the 4 I bought work out well for a short period of time, I'll be ordering more.

Thanks again for the info everyone.
 
The post you linked, MrGuvernmet, have some pretty good comments about why Newman's article shows he doesn't understand what Backblaze reported. Funny thing is, Newman has done nothing to clarify the blog post, and hasn't responded to the comments. Why is that?

It's an opinion piece. He's not backed-up any of his opinions, which is disappointing.
 
Toshiba MD04ACA400
I would be a bit careful with HGST as most are rebranded WD models nowdays and they don't play well with HBAs etc usually.
//Danne
 
diizzy said:
Toshiba MD04ACA400
I would be a bit careful with HGST as most are rebranded WD models nowdays and they don't play well with HBAs etc usually.
//Danne
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I don't think that's correct. Toshiba's are mostly rebranded HGST drives. WD does own part of HGST, but I believe WD sold off some 3.5" consumer drive resources of the old HGST to Toshiba.

Regardless, I ended up buying 4 Toshiba PH3500U-1I72 5TB drives, which are just MD04ACA500's in retail packaging. I paid about $175/ea, free shipping, and bought two from two difference sources (for a total of 4). All were packaged well, all are showing 100% healthy, and performance is identical across all 4 drives.

http://imgur.com/a/UTO6T
 
WD Reds or Enterprise. The reds are falling right at 150 shipped right now...
 
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