Random thoughts on redundant home bulk storage

[porina]

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12075/best-consumer-hdds

Just saw the article above pop up, titled "Best Consumer Hard Drives: Q3 2019". Consumer? The smallest drive they listed was 6TB, going up to 14TB. I do own a single 6TB drive, but the majority of my HDs are 3TB. I guess with even TB scale SSDs more affordable than ever, the need for lower capacity HD is dropping. Still, my gut feel is 3TB is still a good value point. At the time going much past that was much more expensive per capacity. Has that changed?

 

My current server has nominally 12TB usable capacity, as 6x3TB drives, with two parity in Unraid. Note I don't care about performance for backups, so the cheapest consumer drive of a given capacity will suffice.

 

If the goal is to have some redundancy, how else could I achieve 12TB of user data? Pricing taking from a single UK supplier as example.

Going straight to the opposite extreme, I could get 2x12TB drives in mirror. At £380 each that's £760. Ouch. You could also look at that as £380 for data, £380 for redundancy.

Ok, what about a 3 drive solution? 3x6TB at £150 each. £450 total, getting better. Split £300 data, £150 redundancy.

Next is 4 drives in 4x4TB at £92 each. £276 data, £92 redundancy.

Finally let's do 3TB drives, starting with 5x3TB at £67.5 each. £270 data, £67.5 redundancy. In my case I went 2 drives redundancy, so that would double to £135. You may question why my backup server (that is, a server that only exists to hold backups) needs redundancy. I guess it closes a hole that, in case of disk failure, I wouldn't otherwise have redundant backup until it is recreated. In this scenario I do have that coverage.

 

So it seems for bulk storage, the lower capacity drives around 3 to 6 GB still offer best up front cost per capacity. If scaling to bigger sizes, and/or considering power usage if left on, maybe there is more value for bigger drives. If I ever need more capacity in my setup, I could add 2 more drives, but beyond that I'd have to swap to bigger capacities.

[2FA]

I'm not familiar with prices there for externals but shucked 8 or 10TB WD drives have the best price/capacity. Sales here have had 10TB down to $160 each and 8TB $120 each.

[TVwazhere]

17 minutes ago, porina said:

I guess with even TB scale SSDs more affordable than ever, the need for lower capacity HD is dropping. Still, my gut feel is 3TB is still a good value point. At the time going much past that was much more expensive per capacity. Has that changed?.

A quick search on PCPP would determine 3TB and 6TB values are roughly equivalent, though the 6TB's are only 5400RPM if that matters to anyone

[Firewrath9]

Yeah expansion is why you get bigger drives, if you need 20TB of raw storage, getting 5x4TB drives isn't really practical for a desktop compared to a pair of 10TB drives.

Also, for capacities sub-2TB, you can just get an SSD, as the chances of an SSD failing is probably less than the chance of 2 HDD failures. (excluding DOAs)

 

in the UK, it looks like its ~200GBP for a 2TB SSD (jesus the pound is only worth 1.2 USD wasn't it like 1.5?)

so 3 of those is basically a 6TB drive

 

I run 4 6TB drives in my NAS, using RAID 10 (RAID 0 helps with higher QD and i still get 4x read speeds) i get 12TB of raw storage. I also backup important information onto the cloud (office 365). My NAS does saturate GBe easily, so hopefully I will be building a unRAID box soon

I chose 6TB as it allowed me to get 12TB of usable storage w/ Raid 10, with 4TB drives I would've had to have either a 6 bay NAS or use Raid 5 to get the same amount of information. Also, I have a spare 6TB drive in case one fails, so I can quickly swap them out.

I'm pretty sure you can also have arrays where you use a bunch of 3-4TB drives and use a single 6-10TB drive as parity

[porina]

11 hours ago, 2FA said:

I'm not familiar with prices there for externals but shucked 8 or 10TB WD drives have the best price/capacity. Sales here have had 10TB down to $160 each and 8TB $120 each.

Good point. I heard that in the past, but didn't know it was still a thing. Using PCPP below, there is a 10GB competitive with 3-8GB models but not cheaper per capacity.

11 hours ago, TVwazhere said:

A quick search on PCPP would determine 3TB and 6TB values are roughly equivalent, though the 6TB's are only 5400RPM if that matters to anyone

I didn't know they had that functionality. There's actually an 8GB Seagate Compute that is competitive at the price/GB end where I am.

11 hours ago, Firewrath9 said:

Also, for capacities sub-2TB, you can just get an SSD, as the chances of an SSD failing is probably less than the chance of 2 HDD failures. (excluding DOAs)

I've had two SSDs "sudden death". That is, not endurance related. They just stopped responding. I have a different SSD that had data corruption, but in that case I strongly suspect it was overheating as it was an M.2 drive located on mobo right under the GPU that was in use 24/7. Not good...

 

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in the UK, it looks like its ~200GBP for a 2TB SSD (jesus the pound is only worth 1.2 USD wasn't it like 1.5?)

If you go back far enough (before 2008 crash) it was $2:£1. With possible brexit looming the pound is sinking faster than our political system.

 

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I also backup important information onto the cloud (office 365).

Cloud backup isn't quite cheap enough for me to fire and forget yet, and I'm too lazy to work out what to selectively backup...

 

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I'm pretty sure you can also have arrays where you use a bunch of 3-4TB drives and use a single 6-10TB drive as parity

Not optimal for unraid. For best capacity the parity drives should be same size as data drives. Only reason for having a bigger parity drive is if you plan on increasing the size of data drives.

 

That's my usage scenario, I have a 6 drive unraid, as 4 data 2 parity. All 3TB drives as they were cheapest per capacity at the time of buying. Probably had them 2-3 years now. I don't really need more capacity yet, but I have been debating making a live storage server for off-computer storage (balanced performance/capacity). At 3TB per drive, it will be too small. With 6 or 8TB, it gets a lot more interesting as I have some spare 4 bay microservers. I want to get my network faster than gigabit before I do that though.

[TVwazhere]

3 hours ago, porina said:

I didn't know they had that functionality. There's actually an 8GB Seagate Compute that is competitive at the price/GB end where I am.

They've had the function for as long as I've been using the site at least (2016?) 

 

I'm not sure if the compute is specialized or not like the Iron Wolf is. Cant find any literature on Seagate's website about it so It might just be a rebadged Barracuda. 

[porina]

5 minutes ago, TVwazhere said:

They've had the function for as long as I've been using the site at least (2016?) 

Quite possible I missed it, as I don't use the site much.

 

5 minutes ago, TVwazhere said:

I'm not sure if the compute is specialized or not like the Iron Wolf is. Cant find any literature on Seagate's website about it so It might just be a rebadged Barracuda. 

It is a Barracuda. Looking more, Barracuda is the range but "Compute" is the application. Others being Firecuda - Gaming, Ironwolf - NAS, Skyhawk - Surveillance.

 

https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-hard-drives/hdd/

 

[hojnikb]

Just to expand on the topic. Whats the cheapest source of new or used drives ?

I'm expanding my home NAS and i'm not looking for crazy reliability (got redundancy for that).

 

The cheapest option i can find is this  clocking in at 16,8€/TB. Any cheaper options? I'm open to all ideas.