A year, I bought two 5TB WD Reds to replace the 2TB parity drive and one 2 TB data drive in my array.  Now I am considering replacing other 2TB data drives and find that the 5TB Reds are unavailable or hard to find.  The 6TB Reds seem to offer the most "bang for the buck" price wise now.  The 5 TB Reds might be described as somewhat "dated".  What 5+ TB drives are you buying that are not the latest and greatest but won't be dated too quickly?   

It all depends on your reasoning for going with the WD REDS. Did you buy them because they are NAS drives, or because of the warranty or was it the price, were they on sale? There are plenty of 5TB options, it just depends on your personal preference when it comes to drives in your server.

 

You could look at HGST or Seagate or Toshiba, all of these manufacturers make NAS or desktop drives of varying price and warranties.

I bought the WD reds because they are good drives.  Wasn't really thinking about the warranty aspect of it though.  Will consider drives from other manufacturers when it is upgrade time.  Will a 5TB drive from Seagate or HGST have the same or smaller total capacity than my 5 TB WD Red parity drive? 

Will a 5TB drive from Seagate or HGST have the same or smaller total capacity than my 5 TB WD Red parity drive?

 

Not sure I understand this question.A 5TB drive is a 5TB drive, no matter who the manufacturer is.

 

Not sure I understand this question.A 5TB drive is a 5TB drive, no matter who the manufacturer is.

 

Incorrect. I believe what he is asking is that although 5TB is 5TB to you or me, when you get right down to the bits of each individual drive, they can be different. Meaning if he buys a drive from xyz manufacturer, it may in fact be smaller than all his others thus not allowing him to use it as a parity drive because it is no longer as large or larger than his largest data drive. Although I haven't run into this myself, it has been noted on the forums in the past.

 

 

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A 5TB drive will be 5,000,000,000,000 bytes or larger. The "or larger" is the possibility that one manufacturer or another will have a few 'extra" bytes of space. With raid controllers, there is a setting to round down the size of any drive to help cross vendor support. Some round down 1GB or 10GB.

 

The bigger happening here is the potential of a HPA. This can make a drive look like it is less than the expected size.

 

HPA can be reported via

hdparm -N /dev/sdb

 

Not sure I understand this question.A 5TB drive is a 5TB drive, no matter who the manufacturer is.

 

Incorrect. I believe what he is asking is that although 5TB is 5TB to you or me, when you get right down to the bits of each individual drive, they can be different. Meaning if he buys a drive from xyz manufacturer, it may in fact be smaller than all his others thus not allowing him to use it as a parity drive because it is no longer as large or larger than his largest data drive. Although I haven't run into this myself, it has been noted on the forums in the past.

 

 

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Actually the sizes are VERY standard.  A 5TB drive from ANY manufacturer will almost certainly have EXACTLY the same number of bytes  -- EXCEPT if it is marketed as an external drive.  In that case, some makers will, as C3 noted, add a small HPA for a variety of reasons, which will make the drive a few bytes smaller than the standard size.  But if you buy it as a bare drive packaged for internal use, it will almost certainly have exactly the same byte count regardless of the manufacturer.

 

I was actually aware of the difference between internal and external drives as we have seen cases of external drives varying slightly in capacity, but I was referring to internal drives in my original comment.

HPA appear from several sources, not just external. Gigabyte is famous for adding them.

HPA appear from several sources, not just external. Gigabyte is famous for adding them.

 

Yes, but that's a system generating the HPA => it's NOT a difference in the drive sizes.  You can also add HPA's manually if you want to "fool" a system into thinking a drive is a smaller size for some reason.

 

HPA appear from several sources, not just external. Gigabyte is famous for adding them.

 

Yes, but that's a system generating the HPA => it's NOT a difference in the drive sizes.  You can also add HPA's manually if you want to "fool" a system into thinking a drive is a smaller size for some reason.

 

No HPA changes the actual drive size, even on externals.

I'm well aware of what an HPA is => my point is that the HPA created by a Gigabyte motherboard's automatic BIOS backup isn't changing the real size of the drive -- it's simply creating an HPA to store the backup.  It's trivial to remove that HPA with any of several free utilities, or even built-in Linux commands.    That's not always true of the external units that aren't reporting a standard size, as they sometimes use other means to make that change that don't show as a simple HPA.