I am looking to replace several Seagate 3tb drives in my server, I have narrowed the selection

down to the Seagate Exos Enterprise and the Western Digital Data Center drives.

 

I am looking for opinions on these drives, also is it better to have a small number of high capacity

drives or a larger number of lower capacity drives, say for a 90tb server, should I use drives with 12-16tb capacity  or 8-10tb drives?

2 hours ago, ct1478 said:

better to have a small number of high capacity

drives

Faster, lower overall power consumption, less physical space needed, typically cheaper after you consider the cost of the extra slots for lower capacity drives, as more SATA ports can get expensive quick if you need another HBA and / or case.

 

Just some of the reasons to go with fewer drive count of higher capacity drives.

1 hour ago, jonathanm said:

Just some of the reasons to go with fewer drive count of higher capacity drives.

The only reason not to go with larger drives vs smaller is the parity check duration. On my systems (low-end microservers) the duration of a parity check is linearly proportional to the size of the parity drive.  My 4TB system take 8Hrs,  the 8TB takes 16Hrs, and the 12TB takes 24hrs.  For me this is not a concern. 

If the parity check time is important to you, going from 3TB to 8TB (2.6 times longer) or 16TB (5.3 times longer) may be an extra consideration.

Edited August 1, 20205 yr by caveum
typo

The higher data speeds of the larger drives can reduce the parity check times by some margin, but yes, the parity check overall time is largely determined by the size of the parity drive.

 

There is a plugin to pause and restart the parity check on a schedule, so you can run the check over multiple low usage time periods. My main server typically completes a check over a period of 3 days, starting after midnight and pausing at 6am.

And another thing I always say:

 

Each additional drive is an additional point of failure.

Thanks to all for the advise.