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LTT Storage Rankings Topic Welcome to the LTT Storage Rankings! The purpose of this topic is to show off cool storage builds, to inspire with what you show and be inspired by what you see. And of course, also talk about those builds, ask their owners questions and all that good stuff. Criteria System capacity of 10 TB or more 5 storage drives or more: We don't count OS drives, we also do not count cache drives, nor external USB drives. External SAS enclosures connected via SFF-8088 count, however. Drobos, Thunderbolt enclosures etc.: If they have a management interface which makes them somewhat autonomous, they count. It does not matter whether your storage drives is an SSD or an HDD, as long as it is used for storage. Don't forget to indicate vendor and drive size for all your drives for our statistics (see also below). For cases not covered here, we reserve the right to adjust the rules as needed to protect the spirit of the thread. It has to be a single system (everything running off of a single motherboard). Do not post your company server (except the ones from Linus Media Group ;)), this is for private systems. Pictures of the hardware required. That's the primary point of this thread, after all. Use looney's post as a template. Write a nice post about your system, give us some details on the nitty gritty inner workings of your beast. Make sure to give all the needed info for the statistics (Operating system, storage system, HDD vendors and sizes etc.) Ranking System The rankings are based on ranking points, which are calculated as follows: ranking_points = system_capacity ⨯ ln(system_drive_count) with ln(system_drive_count) being the natural logarithm of the number of drives in the system. Rationales Minimum Requirements Having both the 10 TB and the 5 drive minimum rules allows us to prevent being spammed by systems with a single or two huge HDDs (10 terabyte HDDs are a reality now, after all), while still allowing systems which were put together with smaller drives (or SSDs) to get into the list. Ranking Points Basically, this thread is about awesome storage systems, and we think that capacity isn't the only thing which determines how cool a storage machine is. Chances are that a system with a bit less capacity but quite a few more drives might be more interesting to look at. Therefore, the number of drives also counts. However, we don't want somebody buying a ton of small cheap drives to outrank somebody who's bought a hugely expensive system with fewer big drives, which is why towards the upper end of the scale, the number of drives starts to no longer matter as much (see examples below). Example for Large Systems System 1: 100 TB capacity, 50 ⨯ 2 TB drives: 391.2 ranking points System 2: 150 TB capacity, 30 ⨯ 5 TB drives: 510.2 ranking points Amount of drives required for system 1 to surpass system 2, assuming capacities for both systems and drive count for system 2 stay the same: 165 drives, resulting in 510.6 ranking points. Capacity weighs much heavier than drive count as it grows, the influence of the number of drives on the ranking points falls prey to the law of diminishing returns. Example for Smaller Systems System 3: 14 TB capacity, 7 ⨯ 2 TB drives: 27.2 ranking points System 4: 15 TB capacity, 5 ⨯ 3 TB drives: 24.1 ranking points Drive count has a higher weight for such systems, system 3 ranks ahead of system 4 despite having less total capacity. Identical Ranking Points For systems with identical ranking points, post date is the ranking factor (more specifically: post number). Since no posts can have the same number, this is sufficient for unambiguous ranking. Script The rankings and plots are generated by a Python script, which can be found on alpenwasser's github here. Capacity Calculation We count raw storage as advertised on the drives. So, if you have 10 ⨯ 1 TB drives, that counts as 10 TB of storage. Smaller Systems Not everybody needs a big server, and even smaller systems can be cool and interesting (or noteworthy, as we put it below). For such systems we have a secondary list, so feel free to post your machine even if it doesn't quite meet the ranking criteria outlined above. Please still use the template post for your system, and stick to the rest of the criteria as applicable to your machine. External Sites This thread is inspired by the one on the [H]ard Forum, where you can find many huge systems as well. The Dutch thread on Gathering of Tweakers is also worth a look, although it is in Dutch, obviously. Serve the Home is also a great place for all things storage. Support/Bugs At the moment, @alpenwasser is the primary maintainer of the script and stats, so contact him about that kind of thing.

So I need another hard drive. I very often fill up my 2.5tb of storage. I have a 2tb and a 500gb. Is there any good deals for another 2tb, or more so I can add? I also would want good read and write speeds for games like FH5. thanks for your recommendation. Thanks!

I have an 8tb seagate baracuda at the moment as my main storage drive, its very new so im not concerned about failure anytime soon (fingerd crossed), though it doesnt have any redundency. My need is simply more storage, and i thought of a nas, but they seem very expensive, and building one also seems too expensive for my use case as well. I have about 1.6tb free on that drive, i would like to double total capacity to 16tb, with redundency as well. All i need is more space, i dont need to access my files while out and about. Its mainly movie and tv shows ripped from bluray at full quality, no reencoding. I just move the stuff i want to watch or what i may want to watch to a 2tb external hdd i have connected directly to my tv. Nas drives seem quite a bit more expensive, and i dont want to spend a whole load more money on the convenience of not needing to shuffle files around if i want to watch them, 2tb is plenty for many movies and even full series taking 100s of gb, so it itsnt a massive inconvenience, nor is not being able to stream them on the go. If i want to watch it on my phone, i simply reencode with handbrake using nvenc, so its super snappy. What would u recommend?

So I was wondering what capacity ssd and hdd to get. I would be using my ssd as a boot drive and to store a few small programs like iTunes and stuff and the hard drive to hold big programs like games and stuff. I'm gonna be using the phanteks enthoo evolv itx which has space for 2 hard drives, a ssd, and a choice of a ssd or hard drive, which means I have limited room to upgrade and I would rather spend my money on a good mix of mom much I will use and cost. I'm estimating a 120gb ssd ($50) and a 2tb hdd ($70)

After Linus did the 1 petabyte storage setup, I thought He should do a 1 terabyte project for ram. Share your thoughts!

Hello all, At my place of work, we deal with larger file sizes from AutoCAD. Typically anywhere between 3-5+ gigs. There are two main locations we work from, with a pretty decent 50/50 fiber connection shared between the two, we run into problems when transferring files from one office to the next. It ends up capping itself to around 350 kb/s, which is very frustrating and extremely time consuming. Our storage box (which is acting kind of like a server for our computers to upload/download files too) is losing connection randomly (I believe to be due to a hardware issue) and we need a longer term solution. Unfortunately, the budget isn't particular high so a Storinator solution isn't viable. We have about 10 TB of storage, which would be expanded upon in the future. Our normal file server for the rest of the company is roughly 2TB and there are no plans due to expense to upgrade that one. This has to be a separate solution. I've had a couple of ideas which might help, however I'm unsure which path to take and would appreciate any input/suggestions. 1.) Build two storage desktops that would act like one server. Bridge them together so when one file is upload, it would be mirrored in the other office location to be used by those employees. Problem: 350 kb/s transfer speed between the two offices. 2.) Get a used server and load it up with storage and put into our server racks. Again problem: 350 kb/s transfer speed. 3.) Cloud storage. Problem: Most bottleneck upload/download speed, regulates cost in time Thanks, Sam

Planning to offer some Dedicated NAS storage servers as part of an upcoming business I've been working on. Planning to offer five rates ranging between 5TB-100TB (5, 10, 25, 50, 100) Haven't found any info on the best CPUs for small to large scale RAID configs Would anyone mind drafting out some specs for 5TB model? I plan to offer the model as a storage solution, but I don't want an absolute crap CPU. Would you use a low end consumer CPU like a Celeron or Pentium or splurge on a Xeon E3 v 5? (preferably for the higher models; need a pratical ROI time) Best regards,

Back when I built my computer, my dad had gotten me a 3TB hard drive. After I installed Windows and all was said and done, I noticed that my C drive was only 2TB in size. When I looked it up, everyone was saying that Windows could only be installed on an NTFS-formatted drive, and that NTFS supports up to 2TB. So the next thing I did was I tried to take that unallocated 750GB(you know by 3TB they don't mean REAL 3TB) and allocate it to a separate partition. As you can see, that's not possible. Does anyone know how to make it possible? Or at the very least can someone explain why I can't take that empty space and make a new partition/volume out of it?

Seagate has demonstrated the first terabit-per-square-inch hard drive, almost doubling the areal density found in modern hard drives. Initially this will result in 6TB 3.5-inch desktop drives and 2TB 2.5-inch laptop drives, but eventually Seagate is promising up to 60TB and 20TB respectively. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/122921-seagate-hits-1-terabit-per-square-inch-60tb-drives-on-their-way

So i was going to get a WD Black for my build. Then i came across a Seagate Barracuda. I knew that Seagate had a horrible reputation, but just to save money i went for it. I took it from my office and went home. I finallt finished my build which took me 6 Months and I still need upgrades. Seems to me everything is running accordingly. I've had this for maybe a week now? It's running perfectly so my question to you is: What are your vies on the giants in storage solutions? Which is better and why? What do you use? I would love to see the community putting their part in this. Mods are glad to join in!

Hi all I did a quick video of this server my mate and I built about 4 years. The purpose of the video was to show everyone this insane build and the size of it. Also this system is being retired due it not being big enough (funny), both in HDD support and mobo support. A new case is being built from scratch to house new components. 3 24 bay norcos are being cut off at the drive section. These 3 front sections of 3 Norcos will then be stacked to form the front of the case. Then the mobo and other gear will go behind it all. Here is the video of the retiring case. Here is a pic to get you interested and want to watch the videos, LOL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqvoJEG61eo Also here is a quick video of some of the new components going in the new 70+ drive support case http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VcLqM_mfqA It actually has 64GB ram now

Story at /. Well this sounds awesome. I can only assume that as the Mobile market pushes such high capacity things, the Desktop/PC side will inevitably get cheaper and cheaper. This bodes well for PC gamers. Imagine SSD storage at HDD prices. Do not get overly hopeful of course. There are likely obstacles to overcome, but I can imagine this will definitely have an affect on such things, if only mild.

Hey guys, Looking to use dual hard drive in my MacBook Pro. The HGST Travelstar 7K1000 1TB and WD Scorpio Black 750GB are what I am looking at currently. These are the two best performing hard drives on Tom's Hardware charts. Typically the 7K1000 performs better than the Scorpio, according to teh charts. I'm wondering if there are any testaments on the reliability, speed, and the general satisfaction with the product, if you have any experience with them. THANKS!

So right now i only have 500gb of internal storage and i have a external 1 tb hard drive, i mostly put my games and music inside my 1 tb is it safe to plug my external always in my pc? it's not turned on 24/7 maybe around 10 hours a day

Case Study: RAID Tolerance to Failure In this post I talked a lot about the pros and cons of running a RAID array, explained the different RAID levels, and some more specific aspects of RAID. In this snippet, I'd like to take a closer look at the tolerance of a RAID array to drive failures. To do this, let's consider the storage configuration given here, by our own looney: Looney has a RAID volume with 14 2TB drives, and he wants to use it for storage of media and his computer backups. Let's consider the effects of various RAID levels on this volume, and what the pros and cons are of each one. RAID 0: Without a doubt, this would be the fastest configuration. 14 drives in RAID 0 would give higher random performance and insane sequential performance. But what happens if a drive fails? Well, since a RAID 0 array has no tolerance to failure, he'd lose all his data. Best Case: Not Applicable Worst Case: Any one drive failure Tolerance: None Space: 28TB If he was using the RAID array as a recording disk, he might want a RAID 0 volume. But media playback performance wouldn't be impacted much with a RAID 0, and his home network would be bottlenecked at ~125 MB/s with gigabit Ethernet. Plus, that puts his entire movie collection at risk, as well as losing all his backups. Clearly, this isn't the choice for him. RAID 1: Without a doubt, this would be the safest configuration. 14 drives in RAID 1 would have okay performance in both writes and reads. It can also sustain the loss of up to 13 drives, so he wouldn't have much to worry about. Best Case: Not Applicable Worst Case: All drives fail Tolerance: 13 drives. Space: 2TB The problem with this configuration is that he doesn't end up with much space, so he can't have much of a media collection or many backups of his computer. This also isn't the configuration for him. RAID 5: This is the most efficient configuration. 14 drives in RAID 5 would have good read performance, but would take a hit in write performance. It can also sustain the loss of any one drive, so he has less to worry about as far as data reliability goes. Best Case: Not Applicable. Worst Case: Any two drives fail. Tolerance: 1 drive. Space: 26TB With this configuration, looney gets his space, and some redundancy. This wouldn't be a bad choice for him, but let's see what else there is. RAID 10: This configuration wouldn't impact write performance at all, and would give us some redundancy. 14 drives in RAID 10 is 7 RAID 1 arrays striped together, so we get pretty beast performance. However, in this case, redundancy has a best and a worst case. For instance, if every drive we lost came from a different RAID 1 stripe, we could lose up to 7 drives, because each stripe would still have another drive to keep it going. On the other hand, if we lose two drives from the same RAID 1 stripe, the entire RAID volume fails. Best Case: 7 drives fail, one from each stripe. Worst Case: Two drives from the same stripe fail. Tolerance: 1-7 drives. Space: 14TB With this configuration, looney gets good performance, but only gets half his maximum space. While it's true that he could tolerate a large number of drive failures, he might want to have a higher tolerance for the worst case scenario. RAID 6: Basically a safer version of RAID 5, using two drives for parity calculations. 14 drives in RAID 6 would have good read performance, but would take a very large hit in write performance. It can also sustain the loss of any two drives, so he has even less to worry about as far as data reliability goes. Best Case: Not Applicable. Worst Case: Any three drives fail. Tolerance: 2 drives. Space: 24TB With this configuration, looney gets lots of space, and even more redundancy. This would be a great choice, since much of what he does is read from his array, and backups can be run overnight, making the write performance less of an issue. RAID 50: This configuration would gives us increased performance over RAID 5, and would still gives us some redundancy. 14 drives in RAID 50 is 2 RAID 5 arrays striped together, so we get better read and write performance. Once again, redundancy has a best and a worst case. For each RAID 5 stripe we can lose a maximum of 1 drive. If we lost two drives, one from each stripe, we would still have our array. However, if we lost two drives from the same stripe, we would lose the whole RAID volume. Best Case: Two drives fail, one from each stripe. Worst Case: Two drives from the same stripe fail. Tolerance: 1-2 drives. Space: 24TB With this configuration, looney gets the same minimum tolerance as RAID 5, and more performance at the cost of another hard drive. This isn't a bad configuration, but it would require some advanced hardware to do, and it depends on his desired tolerance. RAID 60: This configuration would gives us increased performance over RAID 6, and would still gives us the redundancy of RAID 6. 14 drives in RAID 60 is 2 RAID 6 arrays striped together, so we get better read and write performance. Aaaand, on to redundancy. For each RAID 6 stripe we can lose a maximum of 2 drives. If we lost four drives, two from each stripe, we would still have our array. However, if we lost three or more drives from the same stripe, we would lose the whole RAID volume. Best Case: Four drives fail, two from each stripe. Worst Case: Three drives from the same stripe fail. Tolerance: 2-4 drives. Space: 20TB With this configuration, looney gets the same minimum tolerance as RAID 6, and more performance at the cost of two more drives. Like RAID 50, this requires advance hardware to do, but still gives us the redundancy we'd like. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- With all this in mind, how do we choose a RAID volume? We know that one requirement is that it should be redundant, since he's storing lots of data that would be hard to replace, plus backups which would be bad to lose if another of his computers went down. We also know that having high performance isn't necessary, and that he needs lots of storage space. Given these requirements, we can pick RAID 5, 6, 50, and 60 as our viable candidates. So which one should he go with? SPOILER ALERT: He chose RAID 6. Based on his choice, he might not have wanted to go with a hardware solution (expensive, and a single point of failure), or didn't need the performance of a hardware solution to provide RAID 50 or 60. He also might have wanted the redundancy of RAID 6 over that of RAID 5. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Final Thoughts: Looking at striped volumes, I think it's useful to recognize that striping nested RAID volumes does not increase worst-case redundancy, only performance, and at the cost of more drives. In a striped RAID, your array is only as redundant as the lowest RAID level. In RAID 50, that's RAID 5. In RAID 60, that would be RAID 6. In RAID 10, that's RAID 1. When chance is on your side, a striped redundant array can provide additional benefit. But for those who want to be absolutely sure, it doesn't help much. Nesting RAID volumes can increase redundancy, unfortunately there are no hardware RAID cards that support such RAID arrays, like a RAID 1 array of nested RAID 6's (RAID 61?). That would provide 4 drives worth of redundancy, but in looney's case, he would only get 10TB of space (7 drives per RAID 6, 5 drives of space available per RAID 6, only get 1 RAID 6 worth of storage). RAID 65 (RAID 5 of nested RAID 6 volumes) would be intense, but he'd only be able to use 12 drives (4 drives per RAID 6, 3 RAID 6's for the RAID 5), and would get two RAID 6's worth of space, for a total of 8 TB. Also, good-bye to write performance.