Hard Drives for Home Servers

[Xtreme Gamer]

Ok, BIG question for ye. I need a few HDD's for a home server. They all need to be enterprise grade, reliable, atleast 1-3TB of capacity, 3.5 in, affordable, and at LEAST 7200 rpm. Which HDD from which manufacturer is best?

 

Thx to anyone who helps me out!

[Andi]

affordable enterprise grade? that dosen't exsist.

[Xtreme Gamer]

affordable enterprise grade? that dosen't exsist.

 

ok then, averagely how much is the lowest enterprise grade hdd?

[Eve]

Do you really need enterprise grade HDDs? what is your use case going to be? 

[Eric1024]

Hold up a second. What are you going to be using this home server for? If it's just for media serving and backups then getting enterprise drives is a huge waste of money.

 

A single WD Red (which is a 5,400 RPM, consumer, nas-grade drive) can saturate a gigabit network without a problem, so unless you have 10GbE or infiniband running through your entire house, then you're going to just be wasting money. For reference, I have 6x WD reds in raid-z2, which is basically software raid 6, and the array can read at 340MB/s and write at 390MB/s, which is leaps and bounds ahead of gigabit.

 

Now, that all being said, if you DO have a need for that kind of speed and you DO have a high speed home network, then the drives you should be looking at are WD SE drives. They're enterprise sata drives, and the 3TB version is going to run you a little under 300$ each. For comparison, WD Reds are 150$ for the same capacity.

[WoodenMarker]

You could also grab a 3TB seagate barracuda for only $120. They're quite reliable and have great performance as well.

They're not enterprise grade but are great and affordable. 

[Xtreme Gamer]

Hold up a second. What are you going to be using this home server for? If it's just for media serving and backups then getting enterprise drives is a huge waste of money.

 

A single WD Red (which is a 5,400 RPM, consumer, nas-grade drive) can saturate a gigabit network without a problem, so unless you have 10GbE or infiniband running through your entire house, then you're going to just be wasting money. For reference, I have 6x WD reds in raid-z2, which is basically software raid 6, and the array can read at 340MB/s and write at 390MB/s, which is leaps and bounds ahead of gigabit.

 

Now, that all being said, if you DO have a need for that kind of speed and you DO have a high speed home network, then the drives you should be looking at are WD SE drives. They're enterprise sata drives, and the 3TB version is going to run you a little under 300$ each. For comparison, WD Reds are 150$ for the same capacity.

 

My media server is for backups storage and streaming. I chose to use enterprise grade hdds because linus and everyone else I read from says they last longer and /or are more reliable. Can you give me any more reasons why I shouldn't choose enterprise grade? Other than "waste of money"? Because I've heard that one more than my fair share. And I would like to hear some other reason for a change...

[wpirobotbuilder]

My media server is for backups storage and streaming. I chose to use enterprise grade hdds because linus and everyone else I read from says they last longer and /or are more reliable. Can you give me any more reasons why I shouldn't choose enterprise grade? Other than "waste of money"? Because I've heard that one more than my fair share. And I would like to hear some other reason for a change...

Because enterprise drives are designed to last for 5+ years running at 100% all the time with dozens of other drives placed very close to them. By contrast, your home server (depending on how much streaming is done) will not utilize your drives in any remotely similar way. You can get the same performance and reliability in your home server using much cheaper drives. Unless you plan to use the same hard drives for the next 10 years, never once upgrading for more capacity, save yourself the money now and upgrade down the line.

 

On a side note, Linus has enterprise grade drives because he's running part of his business on his server. He really does need the reliability and warranty those drives provide.

[Xtreme Gamer]

Because enterprise drives are designed to last for 5+ years running at 100% all the time with dozens of other drives placed very close to them. By contrast, your home server (depending on how much streaming is done) will not utilize your drives in any remotely similar way. You can get the same performance and reliability in your home server using much cheaper drives. Unless you plan to use the same hard drives for the next 10 years, never once upgrading for more capacity, save yourself the money now and upgrade down the line.

 

On a side note, Linus has enterprise grade drives because he's running part of his business on his server. He really does need the reliability and warranty those drives provide.

 

I forgot to add something...

 

The Drives WILL be ALWAYS ON and streaming a bit more than occasionally.

Here is one off topic question (Don't answer if you don't wan to.), Which CPU is best for streaming HD (1080p) vids, transcoding with little to no lag/buffer, and can handle/sort through big storage?

[Guest]

I forgot to add something...

 

The Drives WILL be ALWAYS ON and streaming a bit more than occasionally.

Here is one off topic question (Don't answer if you don't wan to.), Which CPU is best for streaming HD (1080p) vids, transcoding with little to no lag/buffer, and can handle/sort through big storage?

I would either go an i5 4430 or wait until the rest of the Haswell range has been released. They've got improved onboard graphics as well as lower idle power consumption which if this will be on 24/7, will be a big factor. 

 

As for the drives question, enterprise drives are designed to run in very close proximity to each other at load for long periods of time. WD Reds are still designed to have a million 

[Eric1024]

they last longer and /or are more reliable.

Yes that's true, but you have to take into conext what that's referring to. They do last longer... in hot, many-dozen drive configurations with 50-100% load 24/7.

And they are more reliable... in that they don't suffer in IOPS when there's 60mm fans at 4000rpm and 20 other drives causing vibrations. A desktop drive would not do well under these circumstances, but even a NAS drive like a seagate NAS drive or a WD red would be fine.

 

The reality of it is, unless you're taxing you're drives with that kind of a workload (which based on what you've said, you aren't), then you're not getting your money's worth. What you're really paying for is stuff like RAFF, which isn't needed with your use scenario because you're never going to come close to pushing your drives to their limits as far as sequential performance or IOPS.

 

Example: say you have an 12 drive RAID6 array, and people are using 4HD streams and 2 people are backing up at the same time, and let's say you have 2Gb NICs. Total sequential performance can't exceed 2Gb/s or 250MB/s. Since your data is striped across 10 drives plus 2 parity, that means each drive is going to be reading/writing at a maximum of 250/10MB/s, or 25MB/s, and won't be pushing more than a few dozen IOPS. Given that a WD Red (I keep using them as an example, but they're a good example because they're perfect for what you need) can push 150MB/s read and write and over 100 IOPS, you'd be barely using the drive's capabilities, thus not taxing it much and ensuring a long life time.

 

 

I forgot to add something...

 

The Drives WILL be ALWAYS ON and streaming a bit more than occasionally.

Here is one off topic question (Don't answer if you don't wan to.), Which CPU is best for streaming HD (1080p) vids, transcoding with little to no lag/buffer, and can handle/sort through big storage?

Always on does not equal 100% load. Unless you're reading/writing multiple TB/day, you're wasting money on enterprise drives. And as far as CPU, these days you don't need anything. Despite all the crys for more performance from enthusiasts, realistically, modern CPUs are stupidly fast. There are atom and arm based NASs that can handle a half dozen concurrent HD streams, so you would be plenty fine with just an i3.

 

Also, just to put this in perspective, Google uses cheep consumer drives in their servers because they're more cost effective, as do plenty of other enterprise applications, such as the online cloud storage site Backblaze.

[Xtreme Gamer]

Would a Seagate Barracuda work just as well (if not better) than the WD Red drives for my use plan?

[Xtreme Gamer]

Yes that's true, but you have to take into conext what that's referring to. They do last longer... in hot, many-dozen drive configurations with 50-100% load 24/7.

And they are more reliable... in that they don't suffer in IOPS when there's 60mm fans at 4000rpm and 20 other drives causing vibrations. A desktop drive would not do well under these circumstances, but even a NAS drive like a seagate NAS drive or a WD red would be fine.

 

The reality of it is, unless you're taxing you're drives with that kind of a workload (which based on what you've said, you aren't), then you're not getting your money's worth. What you're really paying for is stuff like RAFF, which isn't needed with your use scenario because you're never going to come close to pushing your drives to their limits as far as sequential performance or IOPS.

 

Example: say you have an 12 drive RAID6 array, and people are using 4HD streams and 2 people are backing up at the same time, and let's say you have 2Gb NICs. Total sequential performance can't exceed 2Gb/s or 250MB/s. Since your data is striped across 10 drives plus 2 parity, that means each drive is going to be reading/writing at a maximum of 250/10MB/s, or 25MB/s, and won't be pushing more than a few dozen IOPS. Given that a WD Red (I keep using them as an example, but they're a good example because they're perfect for what you need) can push 150MB/s read and write and over 100 IOPS, you'd be barely using the drive's capabilities, thus not taxing it much and ensuring a long life time.

 

 

Always on does not equal 100% load. Unless you're reading/writing multiple TB/day, you're wasting money on enterprise drives. And as far as CPU, these days you don't need anything. Despite all the crys for more performance from enthusiasts, realistically, modern CPUs are stupidly fast. There are atom and arm based NASs that can handle a half dozen concurrent HD streams, so you would be plenty fine with just an i3.

 

Also, just to put this in perspective, Google uses cheep consumer drives in their servers because they're more cost effective, as do plenty of other enterprise applications, such as the online cloud storage site Backblaze.

 

Would a Seagate Barracuda work just as well (if not better) than the WD Red drives for my use plan?

[Eric1024]

Would a Seagate Barracuda work just as well (if not better) than the WD Red drives for my use plan?

Yes and no. Barracudas are fine drives, but they don't have TLER or ERC, so using them in raid would be a ticking time bomb.

 

If you want to go with seagate, then get one of their new NAS drives (they come in up to 4TB capacity if that tickles your fancy)

 

Edit: also, seagate NAS drives (and WD reds) have anti-vibration tech built in that makes them better for use with lots of other drives. Most standard desktop drives don't have this

[Xtreme Gamer]

Yes and no. Barracudas are fine drives, but they don't have TLER or ERC, so using them in raid would be a ticking time bomb.

 

If you want to go with seagate, then get one of their new NAS drives (they come in up to 4TB capacity if that tickles your fancy)

 

I don't plan on using raid at all... Other than that, Do they match the WD Red drives enough for my specs?

[Eric1024]

I don't plan on using raid at all... Other than that, Do they match the WD Red drives enough for my specs?

Er, so you're going to make a home server without any kind of redundancy or backup? That's gonna cause some problems in the future... you should really thing about some form of raid. Go look at the FlexRAID guide that @looney made, that would be the easiest option: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/33510-how-to-install-and-setup-flexraid-on-your-windows-storage-system/

 

Alternatively you could use ZFS, chipset raid, or hardware raid. (Of these I would recommend ZFS/raidz)

 

That all being said, yes, the seagate NAS drives are perfect for your application. They may actually run at a higher RPM than Reds but I'm not sure.

[Xtreme Gamer]

Er, so you're going to make a home server without any kind of redundancy or backup? That's gonna cause some problems in the future... you should really thing about some form of raid. Go look at the FlexRAID guide that @looney made, that would be the easiest option: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/33510-how-to-install-and-setup-flexraid-on-your-windows-storage-system/

 

Alternatively you could use ZFS, chipset raid, or hardware raid. (Of these I would recommend ZFS/raidz)

 

That all being said, yes, the seagate NAS drives are perfect for your application. They may actually run at a higher RPM than Reds but I'm not sure.

 

I actually am gonna do backups. Just dunno which drive or (not inside server drive) im gonna use for it.

Which do you recommend, internal drive doing backup, or external drive doing backup? Plus which ever one you recommend, how much storage should I need for the backup drive?

[Eric1024]

I actually am gonna do backups. Just dunno which drive or (not inside server drive) im gonna use for it.

Which do you recommend, internal drive doing backup, or external drive doing backup? Plus which ever one you recommend, how much storage should I need for the backup drive?

I'd really recommend RAID of some form still, it will make your life a lot easier. RAID and backup is the best way to do it. Ideally you'd do incremental offsite backups over a network every night, but that's not always possible, so just backing up to a separate server in the same house, even if they're just in the same room/rack is a good way to do it. Backing up on the same machine isn't a good idea though. If the PSU goes or all the drives somehow overheat, then your backups are gone too.

 

More than anything though I implore you to consider RAID of some form.

[Xtreme Gamer]

I'd really recommend RAID of some form still, it will make your life a lot easier. RAID and backup is the best way to do it. Ideally you'd do incremental offsite backups over a network every night, but that's not always possible, so just backing up to a separate server in the same house, even if they're just in the same room/rack is a good way to do it. Backing up on the same machine isn't a good idea though. If the PSU goes or all the drives somehow overheat, then your backups are gone too.

 

More than anything though I implore you to consider RAID of some form.

 

Out of curiosity, Why should I do raid? idk much (if anything) about it. And for the backups, cant I just do it on an external drive?

[Eric1024]

Out of curiosity, Why should I do raid? idk much (if anything) about it. And for the backups, cant I just do it on an external drive?

 

If you didn't have raid and you had something saved on a drive that was in between backups, that file would be lost. For example say you back up every night, and say that one day you write a 10 page paper for school and then the drive that has that paper on it fails before that nights backup. There goes a whole day of work. With raid that wouldn't happen.

 

And you could use an external drive to backup, but that becomes very inefficient very quickly as your array gets bigger. I have a 12TB array that's a little over 1/3 full. I don't do backups because external drives aren't big enough. External drives are just kind of a messy solution to me but that's just my opinion

[Guest]

I would also just like to add that Linus' home server uses Seagate Barracuda's for a 10gigabit network. 

[Eric1024]

I would also just like to add that Linus' home server uses Seagate Barracuda's for a 10gigabit network. 

I was under the impression that they were Seagate enterprise drives?

[Guest]

I was under the impression that they were Seagate enterprise drives?

Nope, Barracuda's. Spoke to him about half an hour ago.. 

[Eric1024]

Nope, Barracuda's. Spoke to him about half an hour ago.. 

Huh, well shame on Linus. No ERC ):

[looney]

I would also just like to add that Linus' home server uses Seagate Barracuda's for a 10gigabit network.

If only he would post it in the 10TB topic :(

I already changed the criteria to allow Linus Media Group servers :P

Could maybe mention the topic to him and ask if he would like to post?