Which 3 TB drive should I buy?


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Not quite true.  3T drives DO work with unRAID.  But you have to follow special procedures to configure them to be only 2.2T.  When unRAID is enhanced to support 3T drives, you will be able to restore the drives to their full size.

 

With the price of these drives falling to under $170 US (that is $113 dollar adjusted for a 2T drive size), and knowing that it will make your remaining disk slots go 50% further, it might be worth considering.

 

So, for example, if you only have 3 more slots before you have to start swapping out your smaller disks, you'd be able to grow by 9T vs 6T with 2T drives.

 

And when you start replacing smaller disks with larger ones, your money doesn't go nearly as far.  Upgrading 3 1T drives to 3 2T drives (which gives you 3T extra space) would cost you $210 (with very cheap $70 2T drives)

 

See THIS THREAD

 

Update, since this was written the sale price of 3T drive has falled to $129 from Newegg and $109 from Microcenter.

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  • 3 months later...

As of 5.0b7, 3T drives are supported by unRAID.

 

I recommend the Hitachi "Coolspin" (5400 RPM) Green Drives.

 

And the Hitachi Deskstar 7200 RPM for non-Green Drives.

 

I have no experience with any other 3T drives, good or bad.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The Hitachi compatibility guide lists a wide variety of motherboards and controllers that are compatible with the 3T drives.  Some promise models are listed.

 

It does NOT list things known to be incompatible - so if it is not on this list, you can't assume it doesn't work.

 

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/EA3C2532A751C279882577DF0059E290/$file/Deskstar_7K3000_CompatGuide_final.pdf

 

(Users might want to save a copy of this PDF file, as these Hitachi resources may get pulled after the WD acquisition is complete)

 

 

Also, here is a limited set of motherboards and controllers that I have personally tested that appear compatible with 3T drives.

 

SEE THIS POST for details.

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so any 3TB Drive will work now without hardware modification? I'm building one from the ground up and would love to bite the bullet and but 5 3TB drives.

 

is the drive of choice Hitachi?

 

What do you mean "hardware modification"?  No soldering iron is going to provide support for 3T drives in older versions. ;)

 

3 TB drives work with the latest 5.0 beta.  There are a few issues, most importantly unRAID is not recognizing the preclear signature for quick add of 3T drive to an array. This would not prevent you from setting up the array, just add time if you wanted to add another drive to the array once it was established.  Next beta should be out soon and author has said this problem is fixed in that release.

 

You do need a compatible controller that support large disks.  Most motherboards and add on controllers do support them, but a few don't.  See the link in my prior post for Hitachi brochure that lists many compatible motherboards, controllers, and chipsets.

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so any 3TB Drive will work now without hardware modification? I'm building one from the ground up and would love to bite the bullet and but 5 3TB drives.

 

is the drive of choice Hitachi?

 

What do you mean "hardware modification"?  No soldering iron is going to provide support for 3T drives in older versions. ;)

 

3 TB drives work with the latest 5.0 beta.  There are a few issues, most importantly unRAID is not recognizing the preclear signature for quick add of 3T drive to an array. This would not prevent you from setting up the array, just add time if you wanted to add another drive to the array once it was established.  Next beta should be out soon and author has said this problem is fixed in that release.

 

You do need a compatible controller that support large disks.  Most motherboards and add on controllers do support them, but a few don't.  See the link in my prior post for Hitachi brochure that lists many compatible motherboards, controllers, and chipsets.

 

sorry as you can tell it's my first post. I'm new to unraid, in fact I haven't even built mine yet but from what I gather by reading here, one needs to jump a 3TB drive in order for it to be usable at a lower capacity. this was all that i was referring to.

 

thanks for clearing up my concerns! ;)

 

...as for the controller card, wont SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8 PCI Express suffice? the link is a little unclear to me :|

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Yes, that controller is compatible, and the morherboard ports probably are as well.

 

With older versions of unRaid, you could use a trick to reduce the size of a 3T drive to 2.2T. That was software not hardware trick. Sorry I didn't connect that to what you were asking.

 

I like the Hitachis. Haven't tried other brands though.

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Yes, that controller is compatible, and the morherboard ports probably are as well.

 

With older versions of unRaid, you could use a trick to reduce the size of a 3T drive to 2.2T. That was software not hardware trick. Sorry I didn't connect that to what you were asking.

 

I like the Hitachis. Haven't tried other brands though.

 

Thanks again, after reading some reviews on newegg about this controller card, it seems it does not support 3TB drives is there another option at this time or is it simply premature?

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I documented compatibility in the post I linked earlier in this thread and have multiple 3T drive in my array right now, with one of them on this controller.   I updated the firmware a long while back.  If some people are complaining of incompatibility, it could be they need to update. 

 

3T support is in beta at this time. I have done more with 3T drives than anyone here, and think besides a few issues I have documented in the announcement thread (that don't affect data integrity), it is solid. But it is BETA so you need the right mindset going in. 

 

To make an informed decision, you should read the beta7 announcement thread and understand the issues. Only then can decide if it is mature enough for you. 

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I documented compatibility in the post I linked earlier in this thread and have multiple 3T drive in my array right now, with one of them on this controller.   I updated the firmware a long while back.  If some people are complaining of incompatibility, it could be they need to update.

 

Would you mind confirming which firmware version are you using for the AOC-SASLP-MV8 card? I'm running with 3.1.0.21 and I'm wondering if I need to update it before moving to 3TB drives on this card. Thanks in advance.

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  • 2 weeks later...

In theory, the 5400 RPM drives would spin fewer times, and produce less heat, and therefore last longer. But truth is every disk is unique and its a crap shoot which one will fail sooner.

 

But the 5400 RPM drives are a lot cheaper, so if the last few MB/sec of write speed is not of primary importance, go with the slower ones.

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A pretty good reason to go for the Hitachi 5400 3T drives:

 

From the BackBlaze people ... (LINK).

 

"We are constantly looking at new hard drives, evaluating them for reliability and power consumption. The Hitachi 3TB drive (Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) is our current favorite for both its low power demand and astounding reliability. The Western Digital and Seagate equivalents we tested saw much higher rates of popping out of RAID arrays and drive failure. Even the Western Digital Enterprise Hard Drives had the same high failure rates. The Hitachi drives, on the other hand, perform wonderfully."

...

"Our philosophy is to plan for equipment failure and build a system that operates in spite of it. We have a lot of redundancy, ensuring that if a drive fails, immediate replacement isn’t critical. So at his leisure, Sean also spends one day each week replacing drives that have gone bad. As of this week, Backblaze has more than 9,000 hard drives spinning in the datacenter, the oldest of which we purchased four years ago. We see fairly high infant mortality on the hard drives deployed in brand new pods, so we like to burn the pods in for a few days before storing any customer data. We have yet to see any drives die because of old age, which will be fascinating to monitor in the next few years. All told, Sean replaces approximately 10 drives per week, indicating a 5 percent per year drive failure rate across the entire fleet, which includes infant mortality and also the higher failure rates of previous drives. (We are currently seeing failures in less than 1 percent of the Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630 drives that we’re installing in pod 2.0.)"

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  • 2 weeks later...
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  • 4 weeks later...

Sorry to bump this thread up, but I really need to get 3TB disks now.

 

What is the cheapest way to get the Hitachi 5K3000 in Europe, specifically German? The plain drives are 170 USD, which is a bit steep.

 

Or should I just get the Western Digital 3TB WD30EZRX drive?

Any 3TB drive should work fine

 

The Hitachi's are just the "go to" right now as they seem the most reliable.  If you can't get them for a decent price then go with your next best option.

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  • 3 months later...

I must say I was very surprised at the content of this thread. Other than citing backblaze's bias, no one has said why any drive is different from another. Remember backblaze uses port multipliers, you probably don't.

 

There are two ways to reach 3TB in a 3.5-inch drive. One is to improve areal density. Seagate was the first to reach 1TB of storage per platter with the Seagate Barracuda XT ST33000651AS three-platter drive. The platters have an areal density of 625 gigabits or 78GB per square inch. That’s the most technically elegant solution. The other way is via platter count. Western Digital has a Caviar 3TB drive that uses four platters, meaning it has 750GB of capacity per platter. The Hitachi employs five platters to reach 3TB, meaning each platter holds 600GB, with an areal density of about 47GB per square inch.

 

More platters means more power (particularly startup) and heat, but also older tech. Older tech may be cheaper, but few parts is too.

 

Over the course of a capacity lifetime, the "Brand X" "product line B" 3TB will change, perhaps just interface, or controller and cache size, and even platter counter. Therefore it is important to understand the submodel changes.

 

FYI: The difference between the 0S03230 and 0S03228 is one is part of a bulk 20 pack.

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I just bought three wd 3tb ezrx drives. One came from one store at 199.00 reg price and they other two I purchased from another store yesterday on sale @ 188 CDN.  The first drive precleared in 36 hours trouble free. The other two not so good. One drive failed at 40% pre-read with an I/O failure in the middle of the night and filled my syslog. The other drive spun down at 60% and would not spin up.

 

Tried to reboot the server and the I/O failed drive was not detected at all on the boards 6GB sata ports this time, and I was not going to take a chance on the 2nd one, I am returning them today and getting two more or hitachi's if they have em.

 

rgds,

 

Dave

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