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Efficiency versus Redundancy

Bigtruck747

I'm willing to guess this is a question that possibility has no right answer.  But I'm certain there are contributors out there that are very knowledgeable, and I'm hoping to get their advice.

 

How does a person balance efficiency with redundancy when planning a server/nas build?  Meaning if you know you want your target storage capacity to be approx. 30 TB, is it better to go with 15 x 2 TB drives, or say 3 x 10 TB?

 

With 15 x 2 TB you might have more redundancy but you're also spinning 15 drive motors.  Yes you're spending less per HDD, but I wonder if the per TB cost is higher!?

 

With 3 x 10TB you might have less redundancy but you're spinning 3 drive motors.  Likely your per TB cost is lower (??)

 

Is there a perfect balance??

 

Thanks to everyone for your help and advice!!

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2 minutes ago, Bigtruck747 said:

Is there a perfect balance??

Of course there isn't. "Perfect balance" is an oxymoron. A reasonable solution depends on a lot of things, like e.g. what the budget is, what are the performance-requirements and what will the system be used to store/share, power-requirements and so on.

 

Now, technically, the fewer the drives you have, the fewer components you have that can fail, so that's a thing to keep in mind for reliability. Having lots of drives, but keeping only a few in active use and the rest as spares would increase reliabilty even further. Fewer, higher-capacity drives makes sense for reliability and this is especially important, if you have a failed drive: to replace the drive, you need to resilver the RAID-array and resilvering is a very long and heavy process -- the more drives you have, the higher the chance that you'll have another failure during resilvering and, depending on what RAID-implementation you went with, could render the entire array unusable and unrecoverable.

 

Personally, I'd recommend as few drives as possible and of as big capacity as possible, within one's budget, and using a software-based RAID, like e.g. ZFS or Btrfs, since those are nowadays both more reliable and more flexible than hardware-RAIDs.

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9 minutes ago, Bigtruck747 said:

I'm willing to guess this is a question that possibility has no right answer.  But I'm certain there are contributors out there that are very knowledgeable, and I'm hoping to get their advice.

 

How does a person balance efficiency with redundancy when planning a server/nas build?  Meaning if you know you want your target storage capacity to be approx. 30 TB, is it better to go with 15 x 2 TB drives, or say 3 x 10 TB?

 

With 15 x 2 TB you might have more redundancy but you're also spinning 15 drive motors.  Yes you're spending less per HDD, but I wonder if the per TB cost is higher!?

 

With 3 x 10TB you might have less redundancy but you're spinning 3 drive motors.  Likely your per TB cost is lower (??)

 

Is there a perfect balance??

 

Thanks to everyone for your help and advice!!

Cost per GB you can easily either find an online calculator or do this very simple in google sheets. If you want 30 TB of space, I would recommend at least 2 discs of redundancy, so I would look into using 6 or 8 TB drives... and dedicate 2 of them to redundancy. Can also go for 10's.

 

There is a lot of that that can go into this in terms of time to rebuild and % of drives failing etc. A 10TB drive will take a lot longer to rebuild than a 4, to the chance another drive dies during the rebuild goes up. That said, I wouldn't worry toooo much about those issues. I would get what makes most sense, which is typically 6-10 TB drives. As far as cost of them running, you can look up the power draw of the drives and calculate that as well, but they don't cost all that much in electric.

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