drive upgrade options

[chuga]

Hi,

 

I need to order a new drive and not sure on the best options. The 3tb and even 4tb sticky threads seem a bit out of date in regards to the best (or worst) drives to order.

 

currently my parity is 3TB and I have a few 2 or 3 TB data drives.  I can either order a new data drive, or upgrade party to 4TB and move the current 3TB to data.

 

I guess my question is - what drive would you get if you were getting a new parity ?  how about a data drive?  would it be the same or do you go for higher rpms for parity (7200?) and lower 5200/5900 for data?

 

or, as I sometimes read, do you just go for the best price and it does not matter?

 

currently on amazon/newegg for example I see a 4TB seagate NAS (ST4000VN000)  for $139.  The reds are 154$.  You can get non NAS 4TB for cheaper, and others (HGST) for more.

 

any steers on best choice are appreciated

 

thanks

[SSD]

Hi,

 

I need to order a new drive and not sure on the best options. The 3tb and even 4tb sticky threads seem a bit out of date in regards to the best (or worst) drives to order.

 

currently my parity is 3TB and I have a few 2 or 3 TB data drives.  I can either order a new data drive, or upgrade party to 4TB and move the current 3TB to data.

 

I guess my question is - what drive would you get if you were getting a new parity ?  how about a data drive?  would it be the same or do you go for higher rpms for parity (7200?) and lower 5200/5900 for data?

 

or, as I sometimes read, do you just go for the best price and it does not matter?

 

currently on amazon/newegg for example I see a 4TB seagate NAS (ST4000VN000)  for $139.  The reds are 154$.  You can get non NAS 4TB for cheaper, and others (HGST) for more.

 

any steers on best choice are appreciated

 

thanks

 

There are some 5TB Toshibas that you might want to look at at about $140. There is a thread or 2 here about them from a while back.

 

Also, Seagate has 5TB drives that I have been recently using. Mine were "hatched" from external cabinets. Usually don't recommend doing that, but the price is right for about $129 for 5T. The Seagate is an SMR. They may also be available as internal drives - not sure.

 

Another option are the Seagate 8TB SMR. They are about $250 or so for internal drives. Not bad per TB. You'd need an 8T parity and a data drive to make sense. But it would net you a lot more space.

 

The HGST are arguably the most reliable, but at the current price premium having a hard time recommending them at the moment. Best option here may be the 4T drives at about $170.

 

Decisions decisions.

[B_Sinn3d]

Hi,

 

I need to order a new drive and not sure on the best options. The 3tb and even 4tb sticky threads seem a bit out of date in regards to the best (or worst) drives to order.

 

currently my parity is 3TB and I have a few 2 or 3 TB data drives.  I can either order a new data drive, or upgrade party to 4TB and move the current 3TB to data.

 

I guess my question is - what drive would you get if you were getting a new parity ?  how about a data drive?  would it be the same or do you go for higher rpms for parity (7200?) and lower 5200/5900 for data?

 

or, as I sometimes read, do you just go for the best price and it does not matter?

 

currently on amazon/newegg for example I see a 4TB seagate NAS (ST4000VN000)  for $139.  The reds are 154$.  You can get non NAS 4TB for cheaper, and others (HGST) for more.

 

any steers on best choice are appreciated

 

thanks

I always get the biggest I can afford.  Of course getting a 6tb drive for parity would be a waste if you only have 3tb data drives.

 

Are you writing to cache drive.?  Is so you wouldn't need to worry about write speeds.  If you are concerned about read speed,  I would make data, not parity at 7200 speed.

[SSD]

I always get the biggest I can afford.  Of course getting a 6tb drive for parity would be a waste if you only have 3tb data drives.

 

Are you writing to cache drive.?  Is so you wouldn't need to worry about write speeds.  If you are concerned about read speed,  I would make data, not parity at 7200 speed.

 

B_Sinn3d, I am going to disagree a little with you, acknowledging that each user has their unique requirements and use cases. Please accept my apologies in advance.

 

Most people are concerned with $/T. Even if you can afford a 6T drive at $270, it doesn't mean that is a smarter choice than a 5T at $129. With the market choices available right now, I'd say 5T is the sweet spot, although 8T are certainly worth investigating if a large array is in your future. 6T go on sale sometimes and are worth investigating. Paying a small premium for a larger drive, especially a well regarded one, definitely makes sense. But not a huge premium.

 

Certainly you don't want to go too small. Even if you could buy a 1T drive at $15, an awesomely low $/T, I wouldn't buy them. They are too small to effectively grow an array beyond 6T-12T for most servers. Most users would find that too restrictive. I'd have a hard time recommending buying anything smaller than 3T, and more likely 4T+.

 

Concerning read speed ... read speed is not reduced by the unRaid parity system. Read speeds to a workstation are gated by the gigabit network, and so called green drives can saturate the network pretty effectively until the innermost tracks. And many array reads are  nothing more than serving media. In short, optimizing read speeds is not that important for typical unRaid use cases. I would recommend an SSD cache drive for Dockers and VMs, where read and write speed matter most, and not to worry too much at the speeds of the data drives.

 

Most users are more interested in enhancing write performance, as unRAID's parity mechanism takes a big bite out of write performance. An SSD or otherwise suitably fast cache drive is one solution, but some people (me included) would rather writes go directly to the array and benefit from the redundancy immediately. Writes are enhanced by a 7200RPM parity drive when writing to multiple drives in an array simultaneously and when writing to faster data drives. Since writes will never be faster than the slower of parity and the data disk, buying a fast data disk if you have slow parity is not going to help. You need both fast parity and a fast data disk to get the advantage. Said another way, slow parity gates writes to EVERY data disk in the array, fast(er) parity means fast(er) writes to fast(er) data drives in the array. But one slow data disk only results in slow(er) performance to that data drive, and not to every data drive in the array.

 

I say all this but the difference between slower and faster is typically not that critical for unRaid users. We are not talking about operations that finish in seconds vs minutes, while you drum your fingers waiting. We are talking about operations that finish in 60 minutes vs 70 (for example). Or 10 hours vs 12. For most people, if you're waiting that long, waiting longer just isn't worth worrying about. You just walk away and come back later, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow depending on what you are doing.

[chuga]

Thanks.  I do use ssd cache for copying and docker.    Not worried about redundancy before mover runs as I just copy (not move) files from another PC and don't delete until later

 

 

In regards to brands.    Any particular to stay away from these days?

[SSD]

Look at the BackBlaze studies. Should be a sticky in this subforum. Studies not perfect but best we have to go on. The Seagates were pretty rocky but have improved somewhat with at least some of their 4T offerings. No good stats on larger drives, just anecdotal.

 

I gave you my recommendations.