What drives would you buy nowadays for use as parity and cache drive?

[dikkiedirk]

With all the different brands joining together it seems there are only a few left. Purely looking at performance and reliability what would be your best bet. And looking at price/performance, warranty and Customer Support? Here in Europe I could get a replacement from WD and then send the defect one back. Even though that is great service, I would rather avoid it. Having a drive die is a real PITA, I think.

[marcusone]

I'd get either a WD black again for parity or the new REDs (black you only get a minor increase in speed. I got it more for warranty reasons)

 

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[theone]

I bought a new 3TB parity drive WD30EARZ (replaced a 2TB which was moved to data drive).

Main reason was green and price !!! Newegg deal at $139.99.

 

whatever you buy make sure you get at least a 3TB drive for future upgrades.

 

[Frank1940]

Well, I have an opinion and not really backed up by facts since getting reliable statistics on hard drive rates is virtually impossible.  And those few that are out there are for drives which we consumers can't get because they are not longer in production.

 

Basically, there are only two manufacturers today-- WD and Seagate.  With only two, there will be little or no incentive to offer extended warranties which some buyers were using to determine which drives had better quality.  However, I doubt that if was ever the case.  To the manufacturer, reliability 'was what it was' and the costs of replacing drives under warranty was a marketing cost. Another factor which affected the length of the warranty was the general economic conditions: When drive sales were 'slow', they would extend the warranty without increasing the drive price. After all, any costs associated with this action would be in the future and NOT in the current financial quarter. 

 

Now for story about something that happened back in the 1960's.  A very larger US retailer sold auto batteries that they had produced under their own brand name from a single manufacturer.  The retailer offered several lines of batteries with various prorated warranty periods-- 24 months, 36 months and 48 months.  And the advertising for these stated that the three lines were good, better, best and the prices reflected the good, better, best description.  When some people started looking at these batteries what they found was startling-- The only difference between the three batteries was the label applied at the end of the production line.  The average life for the 24 month battery was the same as the 48 month battery!  Plus, the guy who had purchased the 48 month battery was very likely to purchase another battery from the Retailer so as to save a few dollars from the prorated warranty.

 

Reliability in a complex product like a hard drive is a combination of good design and a good bit of luck.  The drive has to inexpensive to manufacture or it won't sell.  Would you really pay $1000 for a 3TB hard drive that will operate for ten years with less than a .01% failure rate or would you actually buy a 3TB drive for $150 that had a 10% failure rate in three years. 

 

After any new design has been out for a few months, the manufacturer will have a good idea what their reliability issues are going to be with that design.  They will probably tweek the design (or manufacturing process) to address issues in some problem areas.  After all, they put $.02 into product cost to save $.25 in warranty costs, they have added $.23 per drive to their bottom line.  So there are real  incentives to increase product reliability.  However, there is no incentive to add $1.00 to manufacturing costs to save that same $.25. 

 

The drive manufacturers are not going to tell us what the reliability figures on their drives really are.  Plus, developing truly meaningful numbers are expensive and take a long period of time to compile.  (Why do you think NASA uses processors that are 15 to 20 years old in their long term mission projects.  Because, they are have solid reliability numbers for those design, not some projection of reliability based a small sample size over a short period of time.)  It is my opinion that they only have a good handle on the figures on a particular design about the time that manufacture of that design is about to cease because it now obsolete!

 

Looking at online user reviews are another way to see if one drive is more reliable than another.  The problem here is two fold: First, people with problems are more likely to complain than someone without an issue.  Second, if one drive is more popular than another drive with identical reliability, the more popular one will have the most complaints.  Another factor is that hard drives are physically fragile.  I shutter at the way hard drives have been packed when they were shipped to me.  I know how packages get handled by UPS, USPS and FedEx.  How much latent damage has been inflicted which is beyond the control of the manufacturer?

 

I think the only way for the buyer to keep his sanity is to always buy behind the curve.  Don't be the first one to buy into a new line of drives.  Don't be the first one to buy into the latest technology that will boost drive capacity by 25%.  Don't be the first one to buy that new 5Tb drive when it hits the street.  As an example, I would not be buying the WD Red drives at this time.  I would wait six months and allow some time for all of the bugs to be worked out. 

 

EDIT: FINAL THOUGHT--- Remember the old, old saying--- It is not IF your hard drive is going to fail, it is WHEN...

 

[Nathaniel]

I work for a major computer hardware manufacturer (not hard drives), and everything Frank says is right. At the moment the WD Red drives look very interesting, but they are also a brand new product line. I can guarantee you the engineers who built that drive are poring through lots of data so that they can change the manufacturing/assembly/packaging to increase reliability. 4-5 months after a new product line like that is out, it's unlikely any more changes will get made unless a glaring huge is discovered.

 

Warranty lengths are a marketing/accounting decision, they don't have any relationship to the reliability of a product from any major manufacturer.

 

I personally use a Seagate 3TB for my parity drive, because it is fast, relatively low power, quiet, and as reliable as any other drive. You could just as successfully use a WD Black or Green depending on availability, price, and priorities for noise/power/speed. I'd recommend waiting a few more months on Reds, if only for the price to come down, as well as for manufacturing and firmware changes to happen.

 

Given the state of the market, I think it would be a foolish economy to use anything other than an SSD for the cache drive. Spinning disks are still a bit pricey, but SSDs are getting bigger discounts every week. The cache drive is most likely to be operating 24/7 if you're doing any automatic downloading. A good quality 120 GB SSD can be gotten for ~$60 pretty regularly these days.

[dikkiedirk]

 

Given the state of the market, I think it would be a foolish economy to use anything other than an SSD for the cache drive. Spinning disks are still a bit pricey, but SSDs are getting bigger discounts every week. The cache drive is most likely to be operating 24/7 if you're doing any automatic downloading. A good quality 120 GB SSD can be gotten for ~$60 pretty regularly these days.

 

This entirely depends on how you use a cache drive. I have SABNZB running on it and 120 GB fills up pretty quickly. Pricing here in Europe is different. Major brands like Intel,Samsung and Corsair are still between 90 and 125 Euros for 120-128 GB. And I don't know how a SSD will handle the frequently moving data to the array and downloading.

[Frank1940]

 

Given the state of the market, I think it would be a foolish economy to use anything other than an SSD for the cache drive. Spinning disks are still a bit pricey, but SSDs are getting bigger discounts every week. The cache drive is most likely to be operating 24/7 if you're doing any automatic downloading. A good quality 120 GB SSD can be gotten for ~$60 pretty regularly these days.

 

This entirely depends on how you use a cache drive. I have SABNZB running on it and 120 GB fills up pretty quickly. Pricing here in Europe is different. Major brands like Intel,Samsung and Corsair are still between 90 and 125 Euros for 120-128 GB. And I don't know how a SSD will handle the frequently moving data to the array and downloading.

 

Are you really filling up a 1TB every eight days?  That is the equivalent of three to four Bluray disks per day!  That would mean you are using completely filling the largest possible unRAID build in two to three months.    What is your download speed?

 

I share your concern about the frequent write and rewrite cycles on an SSD.  I know that the newer ones have supposedly addressed this issue but I also know that many 'experts' are still recommending only using them to install the operating system and using a spinning hard drive for data storage.  The truth probably lies somewhere in between...

[dikkiedirk]

Sometimes it happens. I have cable internet at 50 Mbs. I mostly download mkvs and sometimes a Bluray. At the moment a Bluray of 33.5 GB which takes 90 minutes. A cache drive of 500 GB would be my minimum. Such a SSD is still too pricey. I mostly download of usenet, never use bittorrent.

 

 

Sometimes a movie is deleted after watching.

[neilt0]

Yeah, for some of us, using an SSD is not feasible. I use a 2TB drive for my cache. Every night, I have a cron script that reads off every directory and saves it as a text file on the array so if the cache drive fails I have a record of what to re-download.

 

I also have a SyncBack script running every day to copy important data from the cache drive to Google Drive.

 

So, I don't really care if the cache drive fails, as I have the important data backed up.

 

On average, I write about 3TB to my cache drive every month and it's fairly common to write 100GB overnight / 150GB a day. Most of which is eventually deleted.

[theone]

Yeah, for some of us, using an SSD is not feasible. I use a 2TB drive for my cache. Every night, I have a cron script that reads off every directory and saves it as a text file on the array so if the cache drive fails I have a record of what to re-download.

 

I also have a SyncBack script running every day to copy important data from the cache drive to Google Drive.

 

So, I don't really care if the cache drive fails, as I have the important data backed up.

 

On average, I write about 3TB to my cache drive every month and it's fairly common to write 100GB overnight / 150GB a day. Most of which is eventually deleted.

 

Can you publish the "cron script that reads off every directory and saves it as a text file on the array"

 

Thank you.

 

[TODDLT]

I use the Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB 7200 RPM drive.  It has been faster than my older Hitachi 2TB 7200 RPM drives during a parity check by around 10-20 MB/Sec.  Price points are good for a fast drive and can regularly find it for $159, sometimes $149.

 

It's a newer design drive so I guess there is a little ? on reliability, but so far ratings have been good.  In the end losing the parity drive is really not any different than losing any other and arguably better.  You are down one drive and if you lose a second you will lose data with it. I guess if you write to the array a lot it will see more power on hours than the others.

[neilt0]

Can you publish the "cron script that reads off every directory and saves it as a text file on the array"

 

Thank you.

 

Nothing more than:

 

0 4 * * * ls /mnt/cache/TV >/mnt/disk1/Backups/TV-cache.rtf
0 4 * * * ls /mnt/cache/Movies >/mnt/disk1/Backups/Movies-cache.rtf

 

My script doesn't really list every directory, but you could do that with:

 

0 4 * * * ls -a /mnt/cache/* >/mnt/disk1/Backups/cache-full-list.rtf