Is this worth it?

[tyrindor]

I currently have 39 drives aging between 1 year and 5 years old in 2 different unRAID servers, 109TB total. I am really debating dropping 3 grand on 10x 8TB reds, condensing all this down into 1 large server. This would still leave 14 empty drive bays in my Norco 4224, and I really doubt i'll ever need 24x8TB (192TB) in the near future.

 

Sure, the 8TBs have more platters but 39 drives with those lifespans are more prone to failure. I should be able to sell most these used drives, and the other server's harder/case (see below for specs of the server I could sell). Not to mention my power bill would be better.

 

What do you guys think?

[ashman70]

I wouldn't consider the 8TB Reds yet, they are too new and the price is too high. I would either wait and begin replacing your oldest drives before they fail, or wait until they fail, or consider the Seagate 8TB archive drives instead of the Red's.

[tyrindor]

I wouldn't consider the 8TB Reds yet, they are too new and the price is too high. I would either wait and begin replacing your oldest drives before they fail, or wait until they fail, or consider the Seagate 8TB archive drives instead of the Red's.

 

The price is more or less the same price per gig as the 6TB reds.

8TB: .0425 cent s

6TB: .0401 cents

 

Archive drives don't interest me, their transfer rates are abysmal after the cache which is a nightmare with dealing with 50GB files. Preclears take ages.

 

The problem i'm having with replacing my oldest drives before they fail is that, the server with the oldest drives does not have an immediate need for free space. The server that's low on free space, has much newer drives. It's pretty annoying to manage two different servers, and it doubles the electric bill.

 

I do have 10 4TB red drives in the current servers, I'd probably keep them because they are still pretty big and fast. That'd give me 40TB, which means I'd need roughly 8 8TB reds to replace the 28 1-3TB drives I have.

[ashman70]

What is the point of two servers? Is one active and the other backup? What do you use them for?

[tyrindor]

What is the point of two servers? Is one active and the other backup? What do you use them for?

 

I needed that much space. 24 drive slots when drives were only 2-3TB was not enough space, so I had to build another server. Now we have 8TB drives, so I could double my current space while condensing down to 1 server if price was no object (24x8TB).

[ashman70]

Storage for what? Media? So you use both servers for active storage? No backups?

 

I have three UnRaid servers, my largest acts as a backup for one of my NAS's and one of my UnRaid servers.

[tyrindor]

Storage for what? Media? So you use both servers for active storage? No backups?

 

I have three UnRaid servers, my largest acts as a backup for one of my NAS's and one of my UnRaid servers.

 

I have offsite backups for everything, in theory I don't even need parity drives.

 

My main worry is when 4K BD takes off if I would regret going down to one server instead of just running 5-6 drives in each server, with plenty of expansion slots for the future. I'm using about 102TB of data now, and 192TB (24x8) might come quickly if adding lots of high bitrate 4K content.

[jwegman]

Archive drives don't interest me, their transfer rates are abysmal after the cache which is a nightmare with dealing with 50GB files. Preclears take ages.

 

To play devil's advocate; SMR's may very well be the wrong choice for you, but I don't think for the two reasons that you assert.  I haven't yet seen anyone demonstrate a faster preclear with a WD 8tb red vs Seagate Archive 8tb SMR; they both should take *days*.  Nor, I think,  would you find an abysmal write speed of large 50GB  (or larger) files. 

 

Disclosure; I have 8 of the 8tb SMRs, and 0 of the WD 8TB PMRs.  For my 'write once; ready many' media server use case (I'm still in the fill 'er up phase), the SMRs have been a great choice *for me* considering the price point.  However the jury is out on longevity, so I could see that as being a large CON in a decision against them.  As would use cases calling for general, and small random write IO, etc.  If a person needs lots of space to fill up, then once full, add more space to fill up again; these SMRs are hard to beat at the moment.

[tyrindor]

Archive drives don't interest me, their transfer rates are abysmal after the cache which is a nightmare with dealing with 50GB files. Preclears take ages.

 

To play devil's advocate; SMR's may very well be the wrong choice for you, but I don't think for the two reasons that you assert.  I haven't yet seen anyone demonstrate a faster preclear with a WD 8tb red vs Seagate Archive 8tb SMR; they both should take *days*.  Nor, I think,  would you find an abysmal write speed of large 50GB  (or larger) files. 

 

Disclosure; I have 8 of the 8tb SMRs, and 0 of the WD 8TB PMRs.  For my 'write once; ready many' media server use case (I'm still in the fill 'er up phase), the SMRs have been a great choice *for me* considering the price point.  However the jury is out on longevity, so I could see that as being a large CON in a decision against them.  As would use cases calling for general, and small random write IO, etc.  If a person needs lots of space to fill up, then once full, add more space to fill up again; these SMRs are hard to beat at the moment.

 

That's not what I observed, the 8TB archive Seagates were vastly slower. This amazon review (not my review) explains the issues I had with them:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1RLMSXM94JIBM/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00XS423SC

[JorgeB]

Most unRAID users, including myself, are very satisfied with the SMR drives performance, I only notice a slowdown when copying many small files, like mp3, but 95% of my data is movies/TV series, and for those performance is the same as WD Green/Reds.

 

See here for more:

 

Seagate 8TB Shingled Drives in UnRAID

[tyrindor]

Most unRAID users, including myself, are very satisfied with the SMR drives performance, I only notice a slowdown when copying many small files, like mp3, but 95% of my data is movies/TV series, and for those performance is the same as WD Green/Reds.

 

See here for more:

 

Seagate 8TB Shingled Drives in UnRAID

 

Well, 80TB for $2149 is far more appealing than 80TB for $3403 (current Amazon prices). According to that thread, parity checks only take ~16 hours? That's how long my "best" server takes with a mixture of 3TB greens, and 4TB reds. That's pretty impressive if true, considering it'd have to be 2x faster.

[ashman70]

On my monster server I am currently running UnRaid 6.2b21 and I have two Seagate 8TB drives as parity, rebuild time is anywhere from 26-30hrs.

[JorgeB]

That info is on the link above, my last rebuild:

 

Event: unRAID Data rebuild:
Subject: Notice [TOWER7] - Data rebuild: finished (0 errors)
Description: Duration: 14 hours, 55 minutes, 14 seconds. Average speed: 149.0 MB/sec
Importance: normal

[tyrindor]

On my monster server I am currently running UnRaid 6.2b21 and I have two Seagate 8TB drives as parity, rebuild time is anywhere from 26-30hrs.

 

There's people here claiming ~16 hours.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=39526.15

 

 

Are you limited by slower drives or a slower controller. To me 16 hours seems way too fast.

 

That info is on the link above, my last rebuild:

 

Event: unRAID Data rebuild:
Subject: Notice [TOWER7] - Data rebuild: finished (0 errors)
Description: Duration: 14 hours, 55 minutes, 14 seconds. Average speed: 149.0 MB/sec
Importance: normal

 

That's... freaking impressive for 8TB.. faster than my current 4TB parity checks. I wonder if my SAS2LP controllers would throttle 8 of these at max speed. They claim 600MB/s per connection, so I should get the best possible speeds.

[ashman70]

Yes I may certainly be limited by slower drives and controllers. One thing I have found though is that these drives don't play well with my older Areca controller, but that's hardly surprising considering they Areca is old and the drives are newer tech.

[tyrindor]

Well I just bought 10 of the Seagates from Amazon.

 

 

Worse case, I return them I guess but it's hard to justify spending nearly 2x more for the reds if people are getting that good of performance from them in unRAID.

[JorgeB]

That info is on the link above, my last rebuild:

 

Event: unRAID Data rebuild:
Subject: Notice [TOWER7] - Data rebuild: finished (0 errors)
Description: Duration: 14 hours, 55 minutes, 14 seconds. Average speed: 149.0 MB/sec
Importance: normal

 

That's... freaking impressive for 8TB.. faster than my current 4TB parity checks. I wonder if my SAS2LP controllers would throttle 8 of these at max speed. They claim 600MB/s per connection, so I should get the best possible speeds.

 

This is a best case scenario, server has no controller bottlenecks and uses 8TB disks only, but the point is that the disks themselves are fast for normal unRAID use, your speed will depend on controllers/board used, having other size disk(s) in the array will also slowdown parity checks/rebuilds.

[JorgeB]

ST8000AS0002 is v1, ST8000AS0022 is v2, mine are all v1, from what I remember reading performance should be the same, I believe v2 uses slightly less power.

[tyrindor]

ST8000AS0002 is v1, ST8000AS0022 is v2, mine are all v1, from what I remember reading performance should be the same, I believe v2 uses slightly less power.

 

Thanks.

[TUMS]

I've been running a few 8tb reds and like them so far.  Long term who knows?  But then I guess we could say the same thing about Seagate smr archive drives. No one really knows until they've been out a few years.  The helium tech has been pretty much proven in enterprise so if it's good enough for them it should be good enough for home nas use.

[calvinandh0bbes]

Two weeks ago, my case was full (drives, all 2 TB and under).  Finally replaced the parity and one of my 1 TB's data drives with SMR 8 TB archive drives.  On parity rebuild, once I got past 2 TB, speed was not an issue (the first 1 TB was obviously very slow).  Rebuild time was in the 20 hour range.  I read the entire thread on those drives before my purchase and didn't have any performance concerns after that. I'm happy with my decision. We'll see how they do long term, that's my only concern.

[tyrindor]

Two weeks ago, my case was full (drives, all 2 TB and under).  Finally replaced the parity and one of my 1 TB's data drives with SMR 8 TB archive drives.  On parity rebuild, once I got past 2 TB, speed was not an issue (the first 1 TB was obviously very slow).  Rebuild time was in the 20 hour range.  I read the entire thread on those drives before my purchase and didn't have any performance concerns after that. I'm happy with my decision. We'll see how they do long term, that's my only concern.

 

That's my main concern too. My 3-4TB Reds have had zero issues, and I have about 30 of them.

 

The reviews on Newegg/Amazon are pretty awful, lots of "bought 2-3, all DOA" complaints for the seagates. It's hard to know if that's shipping damage, user error, or actually the product line itself.

[BobPhoenix]

Two weeks ago, my case was full (drives, all 2 TB and under).  Finally replaced the parity and one of my 1 TB's data drives with SMR 8 TB archive drives.  On parity rebuild, once I got past 2 TB, speed was not an issue (the first 1 TB was obviously very slow).  Rebuild time was in the 20 hour range.  I read the entire thread on those drives before my purchase and didn't have any performance concerns after that. I'm happy with my decision. We'll see how they do long term, that's my only concern.

 

That's my main concern too. My 3-4TB Reds have had zero issues, and I have about 30 of them.

 

The reviews on Newegg/Amazon are pretty awful, lots of "bought 2-3, all DOA" complaints for the seagates. It's hard to know if that's shipping damage, user error, or actually the product line itself.

I would bet SHIPPER damage myself.  I only buy Retail drives now.  At least I stand a chance of getting a good drive if they load them into a box 3 times larger than it needs to be with little to NO additional packing material.  For me Amazon has done better then newegg when shipping but I think bad shipments are possible from any body.

[calvinandh0bbes]

I avoided newegg as their drive shipping has been unimpressive in terms of packing (and I have prime).  My drives from Amazon were well packed.  Obviously neither was doa.