Most effficient way (economically) to fill my server with hard drives...

R

roach9

Limp Gawd
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Jan 17, 2012
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So, I think we are at a very interesting crossroads, in regards to the valuation of hard drives. I know for a fact that the hard drive prices will fall... fast! and yet I am going to be purchasing some drives to fill up my server in the coming days.

Ideally, I'd like to fill every port I can. What would you guys do if you had 14 hard drives to purchase? I'd like to spend the LEAST amount of money as possible, of course, but I'd also like to maximize the space of my file server! It makes for a tricky situation... :p

Hitachi 4TB drives?
Samsung HD204UIs?
 
can you do 2 or 3 drives now and the rest later? i mean really how fast are you gonna fill these up? if you have a bunch of drives youre already backing up, then yeah you just have to bite the bullet. if youre amassing data slowly then just get a few now, run your power and data wires to where they need to go, and then just buy more as you need them/as they go on sale and pop em in. they will definitely be coming down, a lot. i dont know if its going to be fast though. but at those numbers if you can save about $30-50 per TB by waiting then its gonna add up. as for capacity, right now i think 3TB are the way to go. 2TB are good too, but 4TB are just too much still. if you want to maximize your capacity without paying out the ass then i think 3TB drives are your best bet. :)
 
I'm actually selling my 20TB file server that has 15TB filled on it... I plan on transferring all of my data onto my new server. So yes, I need the space ASAP unfortunately. :p
 
Dude....I'm sure can do the math. You know which will cost less. You know you only have so many ports. If you can't wait, make a decision and live with it.

I went with only 3tb drives when I was expanding, but they are too expensive now. I just bought 2 2tb drives because I'm feeling cramped.
 
I'd say go for 3TB drives because a solid 3TB drive is roughly 7.6 cents a gig. A solid 2TB drive is roughly 8 cents a gig. So a 3TB drive is slightingly cheaper on a cost per gig basis if we're talking about solid drives.

So grab six 3TB drives for now which gives you a total of 18TB if doing a straight storage setup with no form of RAID. That should be enough to cover your current needs until you need more space or when drives become cheaper, whichever comes first. With that said, if using 3TB drives, I hope you're using a robust file server OS/file system because that's a lot of data to risk off a few drives.
 
One other thing to consider is the "opportunity cost" of filling up those slots in your new server. That really depends on how big you expect your array to expand to in the future, and how many slots you have though.

A quick google shows a few Hitachi 4TB drives (internal) at ~8.75C a TB (350 for 4TB). Definitely pricier, but still within the ballpark from the 3TB values (which would otherwise be the default based on price).

If you could fill up your current system completely with 3TB drives and the space would be sufficient for the expected lifetime of your system - then the 3TB are a no-brainer. But if having those 3TB drives would force you to either replace them or deprecate the entire system earlier - due to lack of space, then the extra cost of the 4TB drives now might make sense.
 
2TB drives are $135 so $.065/GB.

I would use 2TB drives becasue I am using Windows XP. (I have 8 2TB drives and space for 8 more drives. I just reinstalled the OS and all applications. I should have installed Windows 7 so I could use 3TB drives but ...)

----

If you believe that the price of drives is going to fall, put off buying them as long as you can.

If you believe your time has value, buy the largest drives you can so that you do not need to replace them as often.
 
GeorgeHR said:
2TB drives are $135 so $.065/GB.
Click to expand...

While there are 2TB drives that are around that price range, the problem is that the Newegg reviews for those particular 2TB drives haven't been that good. The only solid 2TB drive in that price range is the Seagate ST2000DL003 2TB. However it only has a one year warranty compared to Samsung's 3 years and has compatibility issues with hardware RAID cards.
 
Newegg Review = Grain of salt

My question is...why are RAID cards so selective on their HDD's? If mobo manufactuers have figured out how to deal with RAM...RAID card makers can figure out how to deal with HDD's.
 
10-15 years ago I had a RAID using 2 cheap WD drives. It worked well.

The current issue is that testing different hard drives to ensure that they work in combinations is not worth the effort of the RAID card makers.

So they test drives that they know will work well. And they ignore drives that are difficult to work with.

Just business.
 
GeorgeHR said:
Most people don't give to much credability to the reviews.
Click to expand...
Trepidati0n said:
Newegg Review = Grain of salt
Click to expand...
Fair points and I've made those arguments myself in the past. With that said, if you take them with a grain of salt, they have some value when it comes to hard drives at the very least. At keast in regards to DOA rates. Though I more or less discount Newegg reviews for PSUs for obvious reasons.

Trepidati0n said:
My question is...why are RAID cards so selective on their HDD's? If mobo manufactuers have figured out how to deal with RAM...RAID card makers can figure out how to deal with HDD's.
Click to expand...
In addition to what GeorgeHR said, with RAM and motherboard chipsets, there's a set of specifications (JEDEC for RAM and chipset specifications) that RAM and motherboard manufacturers have to adhere to for their products. AFAIK, there's no such standard per se for hardware RAID controllers and hard drives. Not to mention there is that small chance of RAM incompatibility with motherboards.

However, it's not totally the RAID card either: WD and Seagate disabled TLER like features in their consumer grade drives long ago in order to promote their server edition drives. As such, that made a majority of consumer grade drives from WD and Seagate incompatible with many RAID controllers. In addition, different hard drives comes with different firmware and thus will behave differently.
 
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