It's been a while... Suggestions on 5TB drives please

[CRD]

Hi guys,

 

My server is still running very strong and rock solid after all these years. Quite unbelievable actually. My hardware is as follows:

M/B: Supermicro C2SEA Version 1234567890 - s/n: 1234567890

CPU: Intel® Celeron® CPU E3300 @ 2.50GHz

Memory: 4 GiB SDRAM (max. installable capacity 4 GiB)

 

My last upgrade was six years ago when I replaced 4x 1Tb - 2TB green drives with "WD Red 5TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD50EFRX" which have also been very rock solid. I still have 4 more 1TB - 2TB WD greens to replace. I can't believe they have not yet died after ten years. What are the go-to drives currently recommended by the UnRaid community? Thank you very much.

[mmagl]

I prefer Seagate Exos drives. They're somehow cheaper than Iron Wolf and WD Reds, with a longer warranty and faster speeds. Have dozens of them in all my servers and they run great. And super cheap on ServerPartDeals.com or Amazon. I'm not a fan of shucking drives when new NAS optimized drives are relatively cheap these days, but that's an option, too. 

 

FYI - new and factory recertified drives are great but I stay away from refurbished on ServerParts and Amazon. Those are hit-or-miss. 

[Lolight]

On 9/30/2022 at 6:46 AM, mmagl said:

I'm not a fan of shucking drives when new NAS optimized drives are relatively cheap these days, but that's an option, too.

Shucking does still make sense as long as the external Seagates sell at discount to the standalone new Exos/Ironwolf variety.

It makes sense because those externals all come with Exos (Enterprise) or Ironwolf (NAS) drives on the inside, if purchased in big enough capacities, starting with 12TB.

In addition, the shucked drive is guaranteed to be well protected while in shipping even when the retailer fails on packaging.

 

[Lolight]

On 9/30/2022 at 6:39 AM, CRD said:

I still have 4 more 1TB - 2TB WD greens to replace. I can't believe they have not yet died after ten years. What are the go-to drives currently recommended by the UnRaid community?

It's really more of a preference.

Just stay away from SMR drives - a CMR type is what you need.

Preferably aim for NAS/Enterprise rated ones (all of those are CMR).

Seagate, Western Digital, HGST, Toshiba

Doesn't make much of a difference as long as they're designed for NAS/Enterprise.

In the above post I've described what has been the cheapest way to obtain such drives in the form of an external consumer drive.

All you need to do is just open it up (plenty of videos on youtube) and remove the drive.

e.g. Seagate Expansion external.

 

[CRD]

Thank you @Lolight and @mmagl. I've primarily used Seagates and WDs in the past 20 years and for the first ten years I've had significantly more issues with Seagate drives than WDs. I've been loyal to WDs for the past ten years and sticking to them I've had no regrets. I can't believe my ancient WD greens are actually still running well.

 

I'll stick to the WD Reds (Plus and Pro only). The SMR CMR advice is very sound also, I will make sure they are CMR drives. Thank you also for teaching me about Shucking.

[tucansam]

On 9/29/2022 at 4:46 PM, mmagl said:

I prefer Seagate Exos drives. They're somehow cheaper than Iron Wolf and WD Reds, with a longer warranty and faster speeds. Have dozens of them in all my servers and they run great. And super cheap on ServerPartDeals.com or Amazon. I'm not a fan of shucking drives when new NAS optimized drives are relatively cheap these days, but that's an option, too. 

 

FYI - new and factory recertified drives are great but I stay away from refurbished on ServerParts and Amazon. Those are hit-or-miss. 

 

After a couple of years of shucking, and after learning the truth about SMR and realizing more than half my array is built from SMR drives, I just picked up four 12tb refurbs rom serverpartdeals.com -- will arrive mid-week and I will begin swapping out my SMRs.  Thank you for the recommendation, they were WAY cheaper than amazon.  I'll see how many power-on hours they have when the arrive; hopefully not much.  My current 8TB reds, dual parity, have nearly 6y of power on time on them.....

 

[Lolight]

9 hours ago, tucansam said:

 

I just picked up four 12tb refurbs rom serverpartdeals.com -- will arrive mid-week and I will begin swapping out my SMRs.

I'll see how many power-on hours they have when the arrive

Personally, I've never been brave enough to purchase and install any of the refurbs into my systems.

But I'd be genuinely interested to learn about your findings.

Edited October 10, 2022 by Lolight

[tucansam]

They have a warranty (90 days), and I'm going to be downgrading the number of disks in my array, so there will be a lot of copy/move and parity build/check sequences to blast the disks to death and test their overall health.

 

Right now I have some WD Reds going on six years of continuous spinning.  A few years ago I threw away my last Conner and Maxtor IDE 254MB disks from the dark ages of computing  -- they would still power up and read/write data, although they were LOUD, I found some old documents on them from when I was a kid.  And I've had dozens of 80s and 90s era unix workstations with 1 and 2GB Barracuda's that ran and ran and ran.  Hopefully modern disks have a similar lifespan.

 

 

 

[tucansam]

I just popped two 12TB refurbs in, I'm swapping out my 8TB Reds.

 

The new refurbs have 17 hours on them.

 

17 hours.

 

I'll advise what the other two have once parity is sync'd and I start swapping data drives.