Storage upgrade ideas requested

[porina]

To set the scene, I have two boxes running Unraid.

 

Box 1: 4x 3TB drives with 1 set as parity: 9TB usable. 4 physical bays with 4 used.

Box 2: 4x 8TB + 1x 6TB with 1 8TB set as parity: 30TB usable. 8 physical bays with 5 used.

 

Box 2 is my main storage unit. It has lifetime worth of personal videos (I don't do movie rips etc.), photos and random stuff I never got around to sorting out. It's also nearly full and has under 5TB left. Box 1 is used for random backups and currently has less than 3TB on it. Neither box is up 24/7 and is only turned on as required, which is infrequent. As I make videos, I generate typically tens of GB per week which needs to go somewhere.

 

I'm thinking of temporarily combining the two. Move anything I want to keep on box 1 to box 2, then transfer the disks over too. With that many data drives I think I'd prefer a 2nd parity drive, but I'd need another 8GB to do that. I'm also not sure how many SATA ports I have left in that system and might need a HBA card. I kinda want to retire the 3TB drives as they must be pretty old now. So maybe I wont do this, and I don't really want to buy drives as small as 8TB to add here as the cost per TB gets better a bit higher up.

 

However I do that, I'll have a spare Unraid box and I'm thinking to starting a new array with bigger capacity disks. Then it comes down to a cost/capacity optimisation. Must be CMR and not SMR, which rules out the really cheap disks. Seagate are quite a bit cheaper than others, but Seagate. I prefer Toshiba these days (NAS or Enterprise series), since WD Red Pro is more expensive. Also I prefer 7200rpm drives. Ideas? I'm based in UK. 

[Kilrah]

Don't know about the UK specifically, but Seagate Exos between 16-20TB are the best $/TB in many places these days. Toshiba can be around the same sometimes.

[porina]

Just now, Kilrah said:

Don't know about the UK specifically, but Seagate Exos between 16-20TB are the best $/TB in many places these days. Toshiba can be around the same sometimes.

It was the Exos 16TB that caught my eye as it was priced not much more than 8TB models. But I'm still hesitant to go Seagate due to repeated experiences with them over the years. Haven't seen any Toshiba approaching it for cost.

 

Oh, forgot to say, I believe there may be a problem with buying OEM drives in that drive manufactures may require you to go through the seller for service and you can't go direct. I took a chance on it in the past with Enterprise drives.

[johnt]

Don’t forget you need sata power cables without the 3v wire for most modern enterprise drives or adapters. 

[Kilrah]

Eh they're enterprise grade, not your shitty Barracuda from 2005...

 

 

[podkall]

11 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Eh they're enterprise grade, not your shitty Barracuda from 2005...

 

 

is the Seagate which-hunt related more often than not because of experience with their outdated models?

[Kilrah]

IMO it's mostly a self-perpetuating meme from issues with consumer models a decade or more ago, yeah. 

 

All my HDDs have been Seagate since 2019 (15 of them) and they've been flawless, Exos/Ironwolfs are popular for obvious reasons in NAS circles and there doesn't seem to be out of the ordinary numbers of failure reports...

 

I've seen one case of someone with multiple of them failing but it turned out after some prodding to be "yeah well they're held with one screw in a shitty case and kinda rattling around"

[porina]

51 minutes ago, johnt said:

Don’t forget you need sata power cables without the 3v wire for most modern enterprise drives or adapters. 

Is that a thing, if so, got a reference for it? Since the SATA connector is standard, the 3.3V contact could be ignored if present and not needed. I've only ever encountered the opposite where some mSATA drives needed 3.3V rail to work, but it wasn't provided with the USB adapter I was using. Worst case I can cut the cable.

 

I've used Toshiba MG series Enterprise drives with consumer PSUs fine.

 

Edit: they changed the SATA spec so it does something it didn't used to do. Great thinking. Reading up more on it now.

https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/collateral/tech-brief/tech-brief-western-digital-power-disable-pin.pdf

 

Edit 2: It looks like the change happened in 2016 with the SATA 3.2 spec update.

 

39 minutes ago, podkall said:

is the Seagate which-hunt related more often than not because of experience with their outdated models?

31 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

IMO it's mostly a self-perpetuating meme from issues with consumer models a decade or more ago, yeah. 

I guess this is a problem in that if you've had repeated past problems with a company, you don't want to use their products. As such, even if they change for the better, how do you know?

 

The last Seagate drives I bought were a couple of SSHDs, and they were fine apart from horrible performance of SMR on one of them. Suffice to say I didn't keep them long. According to my Amazon history, the older one was bought in 2013. Any other Seagate HDs I've owned must be older than that. So, yes, that falls into the decade+ category.

 

31 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

All my HDDs have been Seagate since 2019 (15 of them) and they've been flawless, Exos/Ironwolfs are popular for obvious reasons in NAS circles and there doesn't seem to be out of the ordinary numbers of failure reports...

On second inspection the cheap EXOS drives I saw earlier were refurbished models. Pass. Still I'll give new offerings a closer look.

[johnt]

50 minutes ago, porina said:

Edit: they changed the SATA spec so it does something it didn't used to do. Great thinking. Reading up more on it now.

Yup  Not trying to mess with you. I just bought three WD HC530's and tried it out with my Corsair PSU. The SATA cables have 5 wires, which is the problem. None of them work (as expected) when I plugged it in directly to the PSU cables. Here are the solutions I found:

1. Snip the 3v wire if you don't care as much about your PSU
2. Get MOLEX to SATA adapters since you have so many drives and you can make use of the MOLEX wires that still come with consumer PSUs for some reason
3. Tape the three 3v pins on the HDD (look for a pin out)
4. Get SATA to SATA adapters
5. Edit: If you are good with it, you could just remove the 3v wire with small picks from the connectors (you only need to remove the pin at the PSU)

The SATA to SATA adapters are pretty straight forward. Just make sure they only have four wires going from the connectors. It just makes wiring an absolute mess inside the case. My drives came with adapters which was convenient.

[porina]

In a look around, it looks like best capacity/cost from a seller that isn't via Amazon is the Toshiba MG07 14TB, although bigger MG/Exos are not that different. I'll have to think about possible configurations.

 

Wonder if there is a site anywhere that has dug out how long it takes to do a full surface write on disks? I think that would be a useful data point. Just how bad are SMR these days?

[porina]

 

Following on "how bad is SMR" I'm looking at the Barracuda Compute 8TB. It is SMR, but really cheap. My only experience with SMR is a Seagate SSHD which, when you exceed the cache it drops down to 30MB/s which is painful. However, this Barracuda Compute doesn't look so bad according to this review: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/seagate-barracuda-8tb-hdd-review/2

 

Look at the red line. It does vary, but it doesn't drop massively. Even the lows are ok. Not the best, but ok. In their test, 900 seconds sustained write averaged 192MB/s, or 169GB transferred. That should be bigger than I'd need to do in a single session. Maybe it'll bog down as it gets full?

 

I'm just thinking I could get a single one of these for the existing array, which will keep me going a while longer at minimal cost. I'd delay the decision and cost of a bigger upgrade until much later.

[Kilrah]

SMR varies a lot between drives, some are able to recognise linear writes like what unraid does on any clear/rebuild and impact is ok if you also never write much in one go but some don't and it'd literally take a week to do a full drive write unless you babysit and pause/resume everytime the CMR cache fills.

 

Full drive read/write on my 16/18TB Seagates is about 1.4h/TB.

 

 

[johnt]

I know this isn't on topic, but your post inspired me to purchase a pin extraction tool so I can use my PSU's SATA power cables with modern enterprise drives. I just removed the 3v pin from the connector that plugs into the PSU and the wire works perfectly... no more cable routing mess in my cases!

 

[porina]

On 6/22/2024 at 5:59 PM, Kilrah said:

Full drive read/write on my 16/18TB Seagates is about 1.4h/TB.

I received the Seagate 8TB disk. Like the earlier review, I'm seeing some fluctuations in its sustained performance, both read and write. If I assume a transfer speed just over 180MB/s that's around 1.6h/TB, or over 12h per surface pass.

 

Unraid recommended to do a full read-write-read before use but I'm a bit impatient! I think I'll be happy with a write-read. The initial read I think is to pick up pending sectors and allow them to be mapped out by the write. If there are any after write-read I'll decide what to do then.

 

I hadn't figured on big drives taking forever to do full surface passes, which does put me off them a little. You're looking around a day for the 16+ TB models?

 

Now I'm thinking, are there affordable cases with more than 8 3.5" bays? Edit: I thought the Node 804 I'm currently using could only hold 8, but looking online mentions it can hold 10 so maybe this wont be needed short term.

[Kilrah]

Write-read is enough for me too.

 

And yeah those full drive operations are long... LTT had made a video about how that would be a problem that a few years ago, but... not really, just annoying.

[porina]

About 2.5 hours in to the write pass. Still holding over 180MB/s. Well, I guess I learned that SMR isn't as bad as my previous example, assuming this continues to hold.

 

Given I have 5/10 potential bays filled I got quite a bit of expansion potential before needing to start a new server. Not counting this drive since it isn't installed yet.

 

Edit: full surface write took 15 hours, or averaging 150MB/s. So must have been some drop off towards the end.

[aqarwaen29]

On 6/22/2024 at 5:54 PM, Kilrah said:

Eh they're enterprise grade, not your shitty Barracuda from 2005...

 

 

 and they are all shit,i used to work short period time in data center and most common hdd failure was seagate.

we had cases where brand new hdd failed in less than month and same thing had happened fresh replacement hdd.just avoid seagate hdd if u can

[Ryker Robb]

41 minutes ago, aqarwaen29 said:

 and they are all shit,i used to work short period time in data center and most common hdd failure was seagate.

we had cases where brand new hdd failed in less than month and same thing had happened fresh replacement hdd.just avoid seagate hdd if u can

I mean, i have to agree with you there. I don't fully understand why the ltt community tends to love seagate drives soo much, as they tend to have the worst failure rates compared to any other brand. Maybe because they're cheaper?

[porina]

The Seagate drive is now integrated into my NAS. If it fails, I'll deal with it as needed. Same goes for any other drive in there.

 

Anyone want to predict which drive will fail first? I don't have easy access to power on hours, but following are in there:

0 years old: 1x Seagate Barracuda 8TB (SMR)

3 years old: 2x Toshiba N300 (NAS) 8TB

5 years old: 2x Toshiba MG series (Enterprise) 8TB

9 years old: 1x WD Red (NAS) 6TB

 

None of the drives are powered 24/7 so I'm not worried about power-on hours.

[Ryker Robb]

27 minutes ago, porina said:

Anyone want to predict which drive will fail first?

I would guess the barracuda drive would be first to fail (since it's brand new). After it's about a year old, i would change my guess to the oldest drive (wd red).