December 15, 201411 yr I'm looking for direction on how to proceed with hard disk purchases. Basically, please look at my servers, their fill rate, current parity disk, available slots, etc, and make a case for your idea. server I Azza 14 bay (Limelight): Capacity: 2.9TB down from 3.43TB on October 20 Current parity: 2TB Available slots: zero (two 5in3 and one vertical 4 slot cages) Disks in warranty: 0 of 14 Disk stats: 14x 2TB server II Azza 15 bay (Subdivisions): Capacity: 4.35TB down from 4.64TB on October 20 Current parity: 2TB Available slots: 2 (three 5in3 cages, but no more SATA ports) Disks in warranty: 2 of 12 Disk stats: 4x 2TB, 7x 1TB, 1x 1.5TB server III Supermicro 24 bay (Freewill): Capacity: 1.4TB down from 1.7TB on October 20 Current parity: 3TB Available slots: 13 Disks in warranty: 7 of 11 Disk stats: 7x 3TB, 2x 1TB, 2x 500GB Disks on hand: 2x 3TB (expire in 2016-08), 2x 2TB (expire in 2015-04) Obviously I want to spend wisely. In almost four years, I've bought 26 disks to feed these servers. So I'm not averse to buying more. I would just like some opinions on possible paths to take. I think the toughest thing to justify is installing two new 3TB parity disks and getting ZERO extra space. Then I would need to keep three 3TB disks on hand for warms spares. See how it adds up? Thanks for any advice you might have.
December 15, 201411 yr The strategy I take is every time i need to add a disk I add the second to biggest one on the market.. So we now have 8TB's, I would buy a 6TB. I would then make that the parity disk and use the ex-parity disk as new data drive.. When you buy smaller drives and just add to the server (what you did) then that is cheaper every single time but once in a team you end up making a "loss move" where you indeed need to buy big parity disks that you cannot use...
December 15, 201411 yr I'm looking for direction on how to proceed with hard disk purchases. Basically, please look at my servers, their fill rate, current parity disk, available slots, etc, and make a case for your idea. server I Azza 14 bay (Limelight): Capacity: 2.9TB down from 3.43TB on October 20 Current parity: 2TB Available slots: zero (two 5in3 and one vertical 4 slot cages) Disks in warranty: 0 of 14 Disk stats: 14x 2TB server II Azza 15 bay (Subdivisions): Capacity: 4.35TB down from 4.64TB on October 20 Current parity: 2TB Available slots: 2 (three 5in3 cages, but no more SATA ports) Disks in warranty: 2 of 12 Disk stats: 4x 2TB, 7x 1TB, 1x 1.5TB server III Supermicro 24 bay (Freewill): Capacity: 1.4TB down from 1.7TB on October 20 Current parity: 3TB Available slots: 13 Disks in warranty: 7 of 11 Disk stats: 7x 3TB, 2x 1TB, 2x 500GB Disks on hand: 2x 3TB (expire in 2016-08), 2x 2TB (expire in 2015-04) Obviously I want to spend wisely. In almost four years, I've bought 26 disks to feed these servers. So I'm not averse to buying more. I would just like some opinions on possible paths to take. I think the toughest thing to justify is installing two new 3TB parity disks and getting ZERO extra space. Then I would need to keep three 3TB disks on hand for warms spares. See how it adds up? Thanks for any advice you might have. I do not keep spares. I do buy when the price is good and therefore often have a couple of disks available. I just recently installed my last two HGST 4T drives and have none in reserve now. Am waiting to decide on next drives to purchase. I would recommend using the 2 3T drives in the newest server. When the space is used up consider the drive size then. Given the large number of 2T drives you have in the other servers, I could see keeping the 2 extra 2T drives as spares, because buying more 2T drives wouldn't be economic and buying a larger one would mean updating parity. There are a lot of larger disk options appearing, but for me the #1 consideration is reliability. In today's market I would stay with the 4T HGST's if I had to buy one today. Perhaps in 3-6 months, the 6T HGST prices would h ave fallen or the 8T Seagate SMR drives proven themselves.
December 15, 201411 yr Personally I'm still buying 4TB disks since they are the cheapest per gigabyte at the moment, so I would just buy 4TB drives as required and use the drives that come out as new data disks.... I generally buy a new disk when I get down to 1TB free space.... unless I see a good deal. I also never keep spares and just buy disks when they fail or more space is required.
December 15, 201411 yr Author Do you guys just shut down the server that needs a disk replacement until the new disk arrives and is pre-cleared?
December 15, 201411 yr I leave mine up. Since it never gets turned off I would worry that another disk may die if I leave it off for several days.... I play fast and loose with most of my data since it is media and I can just re-rip if needed.... the important stuff is backed up elsewhere.
December 16, 201411 yr Do you guys just shut down the server that needs a disk replacement until the new disk arrives and is pre-cleared? I leave it up.. But I AM aware of the fact that this leaves me in a bit of a dangerous condition..
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