Which one would you choose Seagate Barracuda Compute vs Seagate Ironwolf NAS

[Jannov]

Hi All, I am wondering if I should get the 7200 rpm Barracuda Compute ST2000DM008 or the 5900 rpm Ironwolf ST2000VN004 for my RAID 1 config file server? I will be using different brand for my "clone" drive.

[mariushm]

I'd say neither.

Unless you really need 2 TB, I'd suggest going for a 960GB-1TB SSD.

Use the existing mechanical drive as a weekly backup or whatever, for the SSD.

 

anyway... let me do your homework

 

baracuda compute datasheet: https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/3-5-barracudaDS1900-7-1706US-en_US.pdf

 

4096 byte sectors,  256 MB cache, 220 MB/s sustained rate, 2 year warranty , 2400 power on hours per year , 55 TB workload per year

 

ironwolf datasheet: https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/ironwolf-12tbDS1904-9-1707US-en_US.pdf

 

512 byte sectors (?), 64 MB cache, 5900 rpm, 180MB/s sustained rate, 8760 hours, 180 TB workload per year, 3 year warranty

 

So the Ironwolf is a bit slower but is rated for continuous use, for more work, and has 3 years warranty... go with ironwolf.

 

 

 

[Jannov]

4 minutes ago, mariushm said:

I'd say neither.

Unless you really need 2 TB, I'd suggest going for a 960GB-1TB SSD.

Use the existing mechanical drive as a weekly backup or whatever, for the SSD.

 

why so? I am building a brand new PC, with my old PC about 10 years old

[5x5]

If you absolutely need spinning rust, go for a WD Red or Purple. 

[mariushm]

see my post above, i edited and explained why choose between the two.

 

personally I'd go with HGST Deskstar NAS, that's my last purchase. You may have a hard time finding them, as HGST is owned by WD and they started some time ago to transition the HGST drive models under WD labels and brands.

 

raid 1 is basically redundancy, a drive is full copy of the other drive.. so doesn't help with speed.

A mechanical drive starts aging the moment it runs ... and most will only live around 4-6 years of 24/7 use... and they consume more power, around 5-8 watts continuously regardless if you read data or not.

A SSD doesn't have moving parts, so it will last for a much longer time... in theory it could work even 20-50 years. It's limited only by its endurance, how many TB of data can be written to the memory chips before the controller will no longer be able to be 100% certain those memory cells can safely retain data, so it makes those cells as read only and will stop accepting new data.

it uses way less power.. .around 0.2-0.5w to function and read data from drive, and bursts of 3-5w only while writing to memory chips.

It makes sense to have weekly backups because SSDs in general tend to fail sudden and definitive, compared to mechanical drives, which tend to report errors in SMART and gradually go worse so you have a few days in most cases to move data or pull the drive out and replace it.

If a SSD dies, usually the SSD controller chip inside dies or a memory flash chip, and it's more difficult to recover data. For example, if you have some power surge, lightning strike etc the SSD controller and maybe the flash memory chips will be burnt, damaged. In contrast, on a mechanical drive, only the circuit board be damaged and in theory it can be replaced with a circuit board from another identical mechanical drive (and you move a memory chip from board to the other) ... or you can go with the mechanical drive to a specialized store to recover data from platters.

also a SSD will be much faster in read and write speeds and has lower seek times, so your server may even feel faster with a SSD.

 

[Jannov]

37 minutes ago, 5x5 said:

If you absolutely need spinning rust, go for a WD Red or Purple. 

Spinning Rust it is, but that's the most affordable one for me at the moment with a big capacity. Hahaha

[5x5]

2 minutes ago, Jannov said:

Spinning Rust it is, but that's the most affordable one for me at the moment with a big capacity. Hahaha

Save up a bit more then. At least get decent rust rather than low end junk like the Barracuda. 

[Jannov]

56 minutes ago, mariushm said:

I'd say neither.

Unless you really need 2 TB, I'd suggest going for a 960GB-1TB SSD.

Use the existing mechanical drive as a weekly backup or whatever, for the SSD.

 

anyway... let me do your homework

 

baracuda compute datasheet: https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/3-5-barracudaDS1900-7-1706US-en_US.pdf

 

4096 byte sectors,  256 MB cache, 220 MB/s sustained rate, 2 year warranty , 2400 power on hours per year , 55 TB workload per year

 

ironwolf datasheet: https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/ironwolf-12tbDS1904-9-1707US-en_US.pdf

 

512 byte sectors (?), 64 MB cache, 5900 rpm, 180MB/s sustained rate, 8760 hours, 180 TB workload per year, 3 year warranty

 

So the Ironwolf is a bit slower but is rated for continuous use, for more work, and has 3 years warranty... go with ironwolf.

 

 

 

@mariushm whoa, I missed the warranty part, and apologies of not seeing the 1TB "SSD", I was reading on the go. Thank you for your deep insight.

[Jannov]

31 minutes ago, mariushm said:

see my post above, i edited and explained why choose between the two.

 

personally I'd go with HGST Deskstar NAS, that's my last purchase. You may have a hard time finding them, as HGST is owned by WD and they started some time ago to transition the HGST drive models under WD labels and brands.

 

raid 1 is basically redundancy, a drive is full copy of the other drive.. so doesn't help with speed.

A mechanical drive starts aging the moment it runs ... and most will only live around 4-6 years of 24/7 use... and they consume more power, around 5-8 watts continuously regardless if you read data or not.

A SSD doesn't have moving parts, so it will last for a much longer time... in theory it could work even 20-50 years. It's limited only by its endurance, how many TB of data can be written to the memory chips before the controller will no longer be able to be 100% certain those memory cells can safely retain data, so it makes those cells as read only and will stop accepting new data.

it uses way less power.. .around 0.2-0.5w to function and read data from drive, and bursts of 3-5w only while writing to memory chips.

It makes sense to have weekly backups because SSDs in general tend to fail sudden and definitive, compared to mechanical drives, which tend to report errors in SMART and gradually go worse so you have a few days in most cases to move data or pull the drive out and replace it.

If a SSD dies, usually the SSD controller chip inside dies or a memory flash chip, and it's more difficult to recover data. For example, if you have some power surge, lightning strike etc the SSD controller and maybe the flash memory chips will be burnt, damaged. In contrast, on a mechanical drive, only the circuit board be damaged and in theory it can be replaced with a circuit board from another identical mechanical drive (and you move a memory chip from board to the other) ... or you can go with the mechanical drive to a specialized store to recover data from platters.

also a SSD will be much faster in read and write speeds and has lower seek times, so your server may even feel faster with a SSD.

 

I didn't know the mechanical hard drive consumes so much power on idle. I, unfortunately need 2 TB for the server and another for redundancy for my HDD. I am also planning on setting up off site backup server. That is why I need to skimp out on the SSD as it is very costly. I do however consider boosting both of the HDD using optane and the boot drive using NVMe M.2 drive (small capacity one).

[mariushm]

Don't waste your money on optane in a file server

 

optane caches the most often accessed files in it. If your server's gonna run 24/7, the operating system will load very rarely, so the optane drive will not get a picture of these dll files or system files being important, in order to cache them... therefore it will not really improve the performance of your operating system. Those files are simply not read from mechanical drive often, they're read when operating system starts and then they're cached by the OS in memory.

Also, once the operating system is started, the optane would be pointless anyway, as most important system files of the operating system will still be held in RAM and accessed from RAM (cached by the operating system).

So basically, the optane drive will simply cache 16-32 GB worth of the most often accessed files from your mechanical drives... anything less relevant will be read from the mechanical drive. The operating system will do the same job with system RAM, will cache most often accessed files in ram.

 

Nah, you don't really need a nvme drive for the OS... the startup sequence of an OS is not multithreaded enough and there's not a big enough volume of data that is read from drive, so that a nvme drive would make sense over a regular ssd.

You can use even a cheap QLC drive or a 32-64 GB TLC for the OS, as long as you're making sure to have the logs and whatever does writes to the mechanical drive. Small capacity SSDs have limited endurance.. ex ~ 40TB for a 64GB ssd, 50-70 TB for a 120GB SSD... you don't want logs and temp files to chew through the lifetime writes of a small ssd.

 

Optane's mostly a gimmick anyway... Intel needed some way of dumping the small capacity memory chips they made and invented a market for them. It was simply a way for them to see a working product, a proof of concept... now that they know that it works and the fabrication steps are known and all that, they can work on making higher capacity optane chips, which would actually be usable in various products... in particular in enterprise markets.