Has anyone tried using a pair of 5 TB drives in RAID0 as parity? They are not much more expensive than 4 TB drives at the moment (while still being significantly cheaper than 6 TB). While somewhat wasteful, this would get round the truncation problem of many of the cheaper raid controllers.

 

Alternatively, has anyone tried using the Seagate ST6000AS0002 SMR drive as a data drive? These could be used with any one of a number of conventional 6 TB drives as parity without having to use RAID. It's the cheapest 6 TB drive I could find, so there's the potential for some saving, though not a lot.

 

There's no reason it shouldn't work => it would simply give you a 10TB parity "drive"  (although possibly a few bytes less than a "standard" 10TB drive will have if the controller is truncating a few bytes).

 

As for the 6TB SMR drive => that should also work fine; although with standard 6TB standard PMR drives available I don't see any reason to use a shingled drive.

 

What is the partiton size of a 6 TB drive. I have 2 3 TB drives in RAID0 on an ARC1200 and disabled truncation. Would this volume be big enough for 6 TB drives. Its size is 5,860,532,172 KB.

What is the partiton size of a 6 TB drive. I have 2 3 TB drives in RAID0 on an ARC1200 and disabled truncation. Would this volume be big enough for 6 TB drives. Its size is 5,860,532,172 KB.

 

Only one way to be sure; introduce a 6TB drive to the array and see if it complains that it is larger than the parity volume.

 

I am running 2 x 4TB in RAID0 and have successfully added a SMR 8TB drive.

Both musings were about cost, really. Two 5 TB drives + cheap RAID controller I can get for less than two 4 TB drives + one of the RAID controllers that can be configured not to truncate. Or, abandoning the idea of using the 8 TB Seagates for data and sticking with 6 TB drives, of the several from which to choose (and they are are all rather more expensive per gigabyte than 5 TB ones) the Seagate Archive drives are the cheapest. I'd happily use them for data but I'm still not convinced SMR drives are a good choice for parity, despite others here reporting success. I'm relatively new to data hoarding so I'm still in the process of writing stuff to my array, thrashing my parity drive. Once I've filled it up and can relax and watch my movies and browse my photos the parity drive will have a much easier life... Except that won't happen because I'll want to add more storage!

When you factor in the cost of a quality PC, the cost of the data you're going to store; and the time involved in processing it, indexing it, etc., I'm not at all convinced it matters whether you're paying $30, $35, or $40 /TB of disk storage ... buying high quality NAS-rated drives is simply a good investment in reliability IMHO.

 

If you don't have enough older/smaller drives to backup your array, then buy the cheapest drives to supplement your backups -- but for the fault-tolerant array I'd use WD Reds or HGST NAS units.

 

When you factor in the cost of a quality PC, the cost of the data you're going to store; and the time involved in processing it, indexing it, etc., I'm not at all convinced it matters whether you're paying $30, $35, or $40 /TB of disk storage ... buying high quality NAS-rated drives is simply a good investment in reliability IMHO.

 

If you don't have enough older/smaller drives to backup your array, then buy the cheapest drives to supplement your backups -- but for the fault-tolerant array I'd use WD Reds or HGST NAS units.

 

I am not convinced that they have to be NAS related drives. I still use regular desktop drives from Hitachi and the drives that caused most downtime on my server were the WD REDs.