Hello.

 

I'm trying decide which hard drives to chose (getting 6)

Seagate ST3000NM0033

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/constellation-fam/constellation-es/constellation-es-3/en-us/docs/constellation-es-3-data-sheet-ds1769-1-1210us.pdf

or

Western Digital WD3000FYYZ

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771444.pdf

 

Benchmark shows both drives are going neck to neck in performance, WD drives seems to be little louder.

Since I've never used enterprise drives before, my main concern is the temperature in 3in2 ICY DOCK MB453SPF-B or iStarUSA BPN-DE230SS (also still deciding which one to go with), as I know for a fact from personal experience that high temps kill drives in no time.

 

Have anyone used both drives to be able compare pros/cons and temperature?

 

Thank you.

Is there a reason you are going with enterprise 7200 RPM drives instead of NAS specific drives?

 

I could see the faster drive on your most used data and/or the parity. This is where I purchased the fastest most reliable drives.

However for other file systems I 'usually' choose the NAS or Green type drives since I do not access them as often.

They won't be as fast, but then again, they are usually in a spin down state.

 

This is probably more specific to unRAID's media archival pattern usage vs a heavy IO fileserver.

Anyway it's just some thoughts about it.

 

As far as the removable trays. The ICY docks are nice since they have a removable fan and HDD Fail/Overheat LED.

I don't own any though.

I do have the I-Stars which I love. Since I change hard drives often, I like the tray-less facility.

Is there a reason you are going with enterprise 7200 RPM drives instead of NAS specific drives?

Reliability, warranty and performance. In this order.

Look at the HGST NAS, 7200 or Coolspin drives. HGST's are by far the most reliable drives according to the studies that have been posted. You should read the Backblaze studies.

 

They are definitely my #1 choice, and especially if I were buying a bunch at the same time, I would go for these. (You might want to stagger your purchases a little (or buy a few at a time from different places) because getting a bunch of drives from the same batch of drives can result in all drives having extremely similar lifetimes!)

 

The 7200 RPM vs ~5400 RPM decision is up to you. The extremely minor performance difference for media storage is not a consideration for most users. Do know that the lower RPM drives run cooler, so if the Icy Docks aren't great in cooling (I use the Supermicros which are great, so don't have any personal experience), that is a reason to look at the lower RPM drives.

 

If you want to set up a hardware RAID-1 pair separately from the unRAID array using a hardware RAID card, and use a couple of 7200 RPM drives in it, you'd have a high performance, albeit smaller, protected drive, and the larger unRAID array. Also, an SSD as an application and/or cache drive is a nice addition to your unRAID setup to speed up many common operations.

(You might want to stagger your purchases a little (or buy a few at a time from different places) because getting a bunch of drives from the same batch of drives can result in all drives having extremely similar lifetimes!)

 

 

This has been my experience also. Whenever we purchased a large number of drives for the webserver farms, they would start failing very close to one another.

Thank you for the replies.

 

A little off topic, noobish question:

These enterprise drives that meant to be working 24/7 do they have power saving mode (spin down)? Or other words, if a drive set as a hot spare, will it work and consume power and release heat 24/7 as the rest of drives or it will be in dormant state (no spinning) untill needed?