Which numbers on the hard drive identifies which batch it is from?

[Elbow]

So my plan is making a raid 10 consisting of 4 x 6 TB reds for 12 TB storage space, question is that I've heard (and had it explained) that it's good to buy drives from different production batches since otherwise there's a higher likelihood of several of your drives failing at once thus kinda invalidating the whole purpose of investing into safeguarding your data from failure. I've made sure to order mine from different dealers to lower the risk but I'd like to cross-check to make sure, and if I have a couple from the same batch I can spread them out to different raid 1s before combining them into raid 0.

 

So as said in title my question is, what of the text here shows which batch it's from? I tried using evil censorship company Google but as usual it misdirects me into miscellaneous stuff with no relevance to my original query. Providing a picture so you guys can see the information I'm talking about.

[paddy-stone]

IIRC it'll be the date to the right of "made in Thailand", combined with the M/N.

[Electronics Wizardy]

33 minutes ago, Elbow said:

a raid 10 consisting of 4 x 6 TB reds for 12 TB storage space,

seeing the price of the 8tb and 10tb external drives, id just get those instead if it was me, I woulnd't pay extras for the reds.

 

34 minutes ago, Elbow said:

can spread them out to different raid 1s before combining them into raid 0.

Normally you make a single raid 10 in the raid controller/software, nesting raid with different softare or hardware is normally a bad idea.

Id probably personally go raid 5 if they were my drives, Id use the extra space.

 

 

 

I really wouldn't worry about the different batch thing, its not a big issue, and if it gets really bad, just restore backups. You got a warranty to swap drives if something happens to them aswell.

 

 

[Elbow]

3 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

IIRC it'll be the date to the right of "made in Thailand", combined with the M/N.

The R/N is the same and there isn't anything called ''M/N'' on it. If you mean S/N then yeah they're different. The dates are also 3 days apart but I'm not sure how long a production cycle lasts over there and if it guarantees being different?

 

3 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

seeing the price of the 8tb and 10tb external drives, id just get those instead if it was me, I woulnd't pay extras for the reds.

Yeah they're a fair bit cheaper where I live but I imagine it being a pain making a raid out of them rather than just backupping shit. The externals have a tendency to use random drives from a selection of the cheapest they could find and you shouldn't use different drives to create a raid, not to mention the issue of cracking up the casing if you wanna put them in your chassi which means zero warranty.

3 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I really wouldn't worry about the different batch thing, its not a big issue, and if it gets really bad, just restore backups. You got a warranty to swap drives if something happens to them aswell.

As said I've tried to avoid it by buying from different retailers but in the worst case that I got a couple of similar ones then I can just put them in different raid 1s, so even if I lose them at the same time my data is still likely to be fine. And yeah I do get a 3 year warranty for them which is pretty nice.

3 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Normally you make a single raid 10 in the raid controller/software, nesting raid with different softare or hardware is normally a bad idea.

Id probably personally go raid 5 if they were my drives, Id use the extra space.

Raid 5 was already getting outdated a decade ago wasn't it? Seeing as almost all drives have a URE rate of 1^14 or once every 12TB, if I make a raid 5 and have a drive fail and have to restore data with 3 x 6TB drives probability says I'm very unlikely to succeed in restoring it. That's why raid 6 has been a thing since it uses two drives for parity so even if you have one fail you can still afford one URE showing up.

 

Why not just use raid 6 then you might ask? Partly because a shared trait between it and raid 5, namely that the recovery process takes a hell of a lot longer with parity drives rather than backup drives, and the longer you have to use in order to rebuild the data (1+ days isn't unlikely for large drives) the larger the chance of something going wrong during the process and you being unable to complete it. Basically the larger the drives are the worse they are to use for parity drives, personally I would stop to consider them an option once you start using drives over 4TB or have a very large total filesize (which is where technology is driving which makes raid 6 increasingly irrelevant).

 

So at least from my understand on which raid you should use depending on your priorities, feel free to skip this part since this is just me rambling about raids;

 

Raid 0 - For those that don't care about keeping their data intact and only want speed and the comfort of having a single drive in the system for storage

Raid 1 - For those who only use two drives and would rather ensure the safety of their data rather than have two times the storage

Raid 5 - For those who have only 3 drives of 4TB or less and don't wanna get more, an array of many smaller drives or wanna have extra storage compared to raid 6 and don't care that much about data safety or performance of the unit but would rather do something than nothing at all. Was a good option 10-15 years ago when file sizes still were fairly small but with how large they've gotten today and the likelihood of hitting at least 1 URE thus loosing all your data makes it hard to recommend

Raid 6 - For those with 5 or more drives of medium size or many smaller ones, but wanna protect themselves more compared to raid 5 but don't wanna lose as much storage as with raid 10 for the extra level of safety and performance so a middle-ground between them. Same as with raid 5 still not that great an idea to use with either large drives due to the recovery process or a large total size of the array due to the increased likelihood of hitting more than 1 URE.

Raid 10 - Basically the business standard unless they're on a tight budget, used with 4 or a larger even number of drives of any size that's poor in terms of storage efficiency (with half of it going away in syncing the drives) but much better in terms of safety and everyday performance compared to raid 5 and 6. One thing that's worse though compared to raid 6 is that with raid 6 you can lose any of the two drives in the array to disc failure/URE and still be fine, but with raid 10 you can get extremely unlucky and have the multiple failures/UREs on the same raid 1 in the raid 10 system. Still the recovery process being so much safer since you're just syncing rather than restoring data from parity and you being able to potentially lose 50% of the drives in the system and still be fine more than makes up for it so it isn't completely perfect but better. Main reason people use raid 10 over 6 is the performance though, which is the best among the options after raid 0 so it depends about what you wanna prioritize.

 

Note that there are special drives you can get with an URE rate of 10^15 rather than 10^14 which would make raid 5 and 6 look a lot better if you're using a large number of smaller drives, but seeing as the VAST majority of drives (even among new ones) out there has 10^14 this is more an exception to the rule than a factor in raid decision making. I believe WD Gold has 10^15 but that's like 1.5~2x times more expensive than my reds so yeah, not really a great option for common people building raids at home.

 

This is how I understand it anyway after reading up on it online a lot but would hardly call myself particularly knowledgeable on the subject and then there are even more raid types, but that's at least my general thoughts on the different kinds and who they're intended for.

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 minutes ago, Elbow said:

Yeah they're a fair bit cheaper where I live but I imagine it being a pain making a raid out of them rather than just backupping shit. The externals have a tendency to use random drives from a selection of the cheapest they could find and you shouldn't use different drives to create a raid, not to mention the issue of cracking up the casing if you wanna put them in your chassi which means zero warranty.

They work fine in raids, and normal red drives are found in them.

 

Also if you open the case it doesn't void the warranty in the us.

 

You can mix drives in a raid, just pick simmilar types, and you get the speed of the slowest drive.

 

13 minutes ago, Elbow said:

Raid 5 was already getting outdated a decade ago wasn't it? Seeing as almost all drives have a URE rate of 1^14 or once every 12TB, if I make a raid 5 and have a drive fail and have to restore data with 3 x 6TB drives probability says I'm very unlikely to succeed in restoring it. That's why raid 6 has been a thing since it uses two drives for parity so even if you have one fail you can still afford one URE showing up.

That number is wrong, the real error rate is much lower, ive done testing on many drives, and that number can't be true.

 

Also that ure would still be an issue in raid 10, a bit less so, but still a problem, but still those ure stuff is complete bs.

14 minutes ago, Elbow said:

, namely that the recovery process takes a hell of a lot longer with parity drives rather than backup drives,

Not really, you normally rebuid at the speed of the drives, parity takes a biggier hit in total io lost, but not really a big issue.

 

 

[paddy-stone]

17 hours ago, Elbow said:

there isn't anything called ''M/N'' on it

 

[Jarsky]

17 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

They work fine in raids, and normal red drives are found in them.

 

They stopped that quite a while ago. The ones in the Elements / EasyStore enclosures are White label He8's

[Elbow]

On 7/30/2019 at 12:19 PM, paddy-stone said:

Not your fault for seeing it incorrectly due to the sticker covering part of it but it says R/N not M/N, which I would assume stands for registry number or something like that.

[paddy-stone]

On 7/31/2019 at 1:56 PM, Elbow said:

Not your fault for seeing it incorrectly due to the sticker covering part of it but it says R/N not M/N, which I would assume stands for registry number or something like that.

Ahh whoops, my bad... thought it might stand for Manufacturing Number... so like Batch Number. Anyway, sorry for the confusion.