Best 8TB Parity Drive?


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19 minutes ago, garycase said:

Note also that even if you move the drive to the array, it's still possible to fill the cache if you're doing a log of "moving around" that impacts the same disk.    MUCH less likely you'd see a problem than with a parity drive, but still possible.    However, as SSD noted above, it's very rare to see this issue with typical UnRAID usage (even as a parity drive).    I think you'll be just fine if you use a non-shingled drive as parity and relegate your shingled units to data drives.

 

once it's in the array, I'll just add my movie shares to it i.e. write once,  read many data

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi!

 

I recently traveled to the US to shoot a doco and had to pick up some extra storage  as we ended up shooting 4K.

I went to Fry's and they sold me a WD My Book Pro and 2 x 8TB HGST deskstar NAS drives.

 

Unfortunately the HGST won't be read by the WD system. WD conformed that they won't work but I'm wondering if there is a workaround?

I'm confused that they won't work as HGST is a sub-division of WD. 

 

Can anyone help come up with a solution?

Exchanging the drives is not going to work as I am now back home in NZ.

 

Many thanks!

 

Jon

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11 hours ago, JONWILD said:

Hi!

 

I recently traveled to the US to shoot a doco and had to pick up some extra storage  as we ended up shooting 4K.

I went to Fry's and they sold me a WD My Book Pro and 2 x 8TB HGST deskstar NAS drives.

 

Unfortunately the HGST won't be read by the WD system. WD conformed that they won't work but I'm wondering if there is a workaround?

I'm confused that they won't work as HGST is a sub-division of WD. 

 

Can anyone help come up with a solution?

Exchanging the drives is not going to work as I am now back home in NZ.

 

Many thanks!

 

Jon

 

What do you mean won't be read by the "WD system"? Were you trying to remove the drive from the MyBook external and replace with the HGST?

 

HGST drives should work just fine in an unRaid server.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 5 weeks later...

Well ... I've always been a big fan of the WD Reds because of their rock solid performance and very cool temperatures relative to other drives.

 

Still am ... HOWEVER, I was tempted by a sale at Newegg last month to pick up 8 of the 8TB HGST NAS units ($205 ea)  and pop them in my one remaining box full of small (1-2TB) drives ... and I have to admit that the performance of these 7200rpm guys is REALLY nice.     Doesn't make any real difference in my actual usage -- but it's neat to see the much higher write speeds (65-70MB/s to a dual parity array).   Only down side is they DO run significantly hotter than Reds ... they ran mid-40's on the first parity check (well within spec but hotter than I like).   I added a small tower fan directly in front of the server and this added airflow keeps the temps in the mid-30's, so I'm going to get some very high CFM units and redo the airflow in the case.

 

Given the temperatures these drives hit, I suspect I'll go back to Reds for my next build ... but the speed IS nice :D.   (and $205 for a good 8TB drive was a very nice price)

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  • 2 weeks later...
2 hours ago, pras1011 said:

Will the write speed of my server improve if I changed all drives from 8tb archive to 12tb ironwolf?

 

From what i've seen the archive drives are slow af. so on paper and parity checks you would see a nice bump in speed. but besides the parity check (which is dependent of read speed) i bet less than often would you notice the performance improvement yourself in real world tasks. 

Edit, and if youre using an ssd for cache you should never be waiting for data to be written to your drives, just the cache. which would be 2 to 3 times faster than the ironwolf drives. 

Edited by s_mason16
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On ‎2‎/‎6‎/‎2018 at 6:01 AM, pras1011 said:

Will the write speed of my server improve if I changed all drives from 8tb archive to 12tb ironwolf?

 

Yes,  you'd see a nice bump in write speeds.    First, the Ironwolf drives are 7200rpm, vs 5900rpm for the Archive units.   In addition to the higher rotational speed, they also have faster seek times and a higher areal density (1.5TB platters vs 1.33TB for the archives).    Each of these provides some improvement ... collectively they should make a very noticeable difference.

 

Since every write requires 4 disk operations (2 reads, 2 writes), the improved seek times and faster rotational speed are the key factors.   I'd expect roughly a 20-25% improvement in write speeds with a switch from the archive units to the 12TB Ironwolfs.

 

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Would anyone know if my current system (see signature) will support 8TB drives?  If not, what would be the largest drive that my current system supports beyond 2TB?

 

Basically the primary SATA I will be using for unRAID array will be the onboard SATA ports and the two SuperMicro SAT2-MV8.

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1 hour ago, mifronte said:

what would be the largest drive that my current system supports beyond 2TB?

 

I'm reasonably certain an X7SBE motherboard supports drives > 2TB.    As long as that's true, there's no limit on how large those drives can be => 8TB, 10TB, 12TB, or larger will all work just fine.    Simplest test is to just attach any drive > 2TB and confirm it's shown correctly in the BIOS.    As long as that's true, you don't have any size constraints.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

I just replaced my Seagate archive with a 8tb n300 and I'm very happy.  Quiet and the speed increase has been noticeable, with none of the write slowdowns I was getting with the Seagate archive as parity.

 

The Seagate is performing much better in the array - writing data in bulk was a bit painful at the start while I deliberately stuffed it.  It's got 7TB on it now, and handles the intermittent addition of new media fine.

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