Trying to choose a harddrive for my ZFS build

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m1abram

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So I am looking for a good drive to use in my upcoming ZFS build. Will be doing a stripe of 2-way mirrors with a single hot spare and start with a total of 13 2TB drives.

The drives I have been looking at are the following:
HGST Deskstar 7K3000
Seagate Barracuda XT
WD Caviar Black

What is recommended given my setup? Will be doing a decent amount of concurrent writes with this system. Are there other drives that I have not looked at that I should consider, I want to keep the per drive cost at no more than $200.

Thanks
 
What will they be driven from? Are you willing to go $250 per? You can get seagate 2TB SAS nearline drives on amazon for that. Hook them up to a couple of 8-port SAS HBA (m1015 available on ebay for under $100). Depends on your enclosure, too.
 
I just did a ZFS build with 10 2TB hitachi 7k3000's on an LSI card and the motherboard ports, in RAIDz2 with freenas, AMD processor, Unbuffered ECC memory.
Liking it so far, pretty fast. Had one drive show lots of smart issues after the first 7 days, which I replaced.
I'm not positive but the one hitachi I had go bad I attribute to a power supply that had some weird voltages going on.
I went from a corsiar 400w (for 12 drives total, admittedly) to a Antec 650w, and I've been running it for a few weeks without issues now.

Previous to that I have/still have a Supermicro Intel Atom File Server with 3xSamsung/Seagate rebrand 2TB, 5x WD 1.5TB EARX, and 3-4 1TB WD EARS (from 2007?). Finally lost one EARS drive the other day to SMART errors.
I keep an offsite backup / file server with 6 7k2000's running standard windows 7. still have all 6 of those and running

At work I have half a dozen servers, pretty much exclusively with 1TB ultrastar, 1TB/2tb deskstar drives, probably 60 drives total... and knock on wood, 0 failures so far.
Also have a couple servers with Seagate ES.2 / Constellation drives. I have one server that throws one of the older ES2 drives once a month, which I have been replacing with Constellation SATA drives.
Have a few servers with WD RE3 drives in Intel RAID1 configs without issues, had those for serveral years without issue.
Also at work my P4300 SAN units all use hitachi or seagate disk drives, 16 1TB SAS 7200RPM, and 450GB 15k SAS. Have replaced one drive of the total 32 in 8 years.

I think all three brands are good.
Test your drives from the get-go and keep them someplace they won't get bumped and under ~40-45c.
Make sure to have a UPS unit with voltage regulation and surge protectors, and a strong power supply of a good brand.
I think SAS drives on SAS controllers are better in the long run, but SATA drives seem pretty reliable for my home usage.
Lastly, always have backups. Several sets in several different places.
My three file servers (above) for the most part autonomously mirror each other as I acquire new media.
 
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Will be driven by lsi 2308 based cards. Might consider the SAS drives most of them were just too pricey.
Using a supermicro chassis with redundant psu, and of course a ups. And I always say raid is not backup. I actually use crash plan with a local backup to another machine and offsite.
 
Okay so. Trying to determine if the cost is worth it between these two drives.

Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 3TB $150
or

Seagate Constellation ES.2 ST32000645NS 2TB $210

Planning on buying 13 so the price difference ends up being ~$800 and 1TB per drive. Now I do not need that extra space right now, but it would prevent me from needing sooner than later.

Now if I was doing hardware raid it would be a no-brainer get the Constellation, however with ZFS will it make that much of a difference.

Edit: Also I looked that the Constellation SAS version and it has an odd connector so not considering it, anyone know what the deal is with that connector?
 
That is what an SAS connector is supposed to look like. That is how you avoid plugging a SATA cable into an SAS drive.
 
danswartz said:
That is what an SAS connector is supposed to look like. That is how you avoid plugging a SATA cable into an SAS drive.
Click to expand...

D'oh.

But back to my orig. question.

If we now include that SAS drive it would be $1430 over the consumer 3TB drive.
 
Well, my first post gave my recommendation. I know they were > $200, but not that much, and I would prefer SAS if possible. Sorry, can't speak to the choices you asked about.
 
http://us.n c i x.com/products/?sku=66009&vpn=ST3000DM001&manufacture=Seagate&promoid=1375

remove spaces.

$132 each for the 3TB seagates. shipped free.
 
Constellation ES.2 drives are designed for 24/7 use, at 8760 hours of use per year. (source)

The Barracuda drive is a desktop class drive that is rated for 2400 hours of user, per year. (source) (AKA 300 8 hour days, a year)

From what I've read certain backplane/expanders hooked to SAS cards with SATA disks in ZFS setups have issues.


SAS drives have a wider range of acceptable signal strength.
SATA drives are more sensitive to signal strength. (Source)

SAS uses higher signaling voltages (800–1600 mV TX, 275–1600 mV RX) than SATA (400–600 mV TX, 325–600 mV RX). The higher voltage offers (among other features) the ability to use SAS in server backplanes.[2]
Click to expand...

If you're using an expander I would recommend SAS drives just to keep everything uniform. If you're planning on using it 24/7, and no expander, I'd suggest the ES.2 drives.
 
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I opted to spend a bit more for 4 constellation 1TB SAS drives in a 2x2 ZFS pool, since they are in a rackables enclosure.
 
Yeah more reading I do on the subject I am leaning more towards the SAS drives. Reliability is my top goal for this build. Speed is second, and of course cost apparently is last ;). May size down my initial 13 drives to 11 or 9. Doing 2-way mirrors with a single hot spare.
 
If budget permits, go with SAS.

That being said, I have 16 7K3000 in 2*8 disk raidz2 zpool, on Suprmicro chassis with SAS expander without issues. My tier 1 data is on 4*2 disk mirror SAS disks though.
 
dilidolo said:
If budget permits, go with SAS.

That being said, I have 16 7K3000 in 2*8 disk raidz2 zpool, on Suprmicro chassis with SAS expander without issues. My tier 1 data is on 4*2 disk mirror SAS disks though.
Click to expand...

I am planning on doing the Supermicro 846 A chassis so no expander. Will connect drives to 2 LSI 2308 cards.
 
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