Using Consumer Drives Instead of NAS Ones?

[GeekaWhat]

My new PC will be having 1 4 drive RAID 10 array (4 x 2TB drives). I was looking at the WD Red drives and realised to get 7200RPM I would need to step up to the Red Pro's. I have had a basic NAS with 2 1TB Barracuda's in for around 2 years and had no problems. The Barracuda drives are significantly cheaper so is it worth taking the risk on 4 barracudas as a pose to Red Pro 7200RPM NAS Drives? (I will be buying all new drives and not using my exisiting ones)

 

Thanks,

James

[GeekaWhat]

5 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

You have redundancy with RAID 10 so you could go with WD Blacks for cutting edge speed or HGST Deskstars for more space and better reliability.

Yeh, I looked at blacks, they're just not massively supported RAID wise, not by WD anyways

[79wjd]

What are you doing that you think you need more speed than the standard 5900rpm Reds? Reds are much better for RAID arrays due to supporting TLER (which basically stops the entire array from taking a shit when it runs into a small error).

[GeekaWhat]

7 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

What are you doing that you think you need more speed than the standard 5900rpm Reds? Reds are much better for RAID arrays due to supporting TLER (which basically stops the entire array from taking a shit when it runs into a small error).

It was just speed really, 7200RPM is ~30% faster. I've noticed the seagte bad drives are much cheaper, should I go nas drives and WD reds or the cheaper seagate ones?

[scottyseng]

9 hours ago, GeekaWhat said:

My new PC will be having 1 4 drive RAID 10 array (4 x 2TB drives). I was looking at the WD Red drives and realised to get 7200RPM I would need to step up to the Red Pro's. I have had a basic NAS with 2 1TB Barracuda's in for around 2 years and had no problems. The Barracuda drives are significantly cheaper so is it worth taking the risk on 4 barracudas as a pose to Red Pro 7200RPM NAS Drives? (I will be buying all new drives and not using my exisiting ones)

 

Thanks,

James

You might just stick with the Reds....the speed isn't that much different. My WD 4TB Red: 160MB/s on sequential read / write. My WD Re 4TB SAS: 180MB/s on sequential read / write. RAID10 with four WD 4TB Reds will net you roughly 350MB/s on read/write (At least that's what I benched on my RAID card).

 

You should check out the HGST NAS drives though, those are 7200RPM. There's also the WD Se lineup (Entry level enterprise), those are 7200 RPM as well. But honestly I'd stick with the Reds because they run way cooler. I can't even touch my WD Re drives (They get to 48C+ under load...Where the reds run at 36-40C).

 

Barracudas would work though. Regardless of what drive you end up getting, make sure you do a through test of the drive (Extended Test on WD Lifeguard for WD drives, Seatool's full scan for Seagate) before committing them to an array (It sucks to realize you have a DOA drive after you waited a day to build the array).

 

Edit:

4TB WD Red ($140ish when I bought it):

http://i.imgur.com/CFs7p7J.jpg

 

4TB WD Re SAS ($250 when I bought it):

http://i.imgur.com/9JKXkBE.jpg

[GeekaWhat]

14 hours ago, scottyseng said:

You might just stick with the Reds....the speed isn't that much different. My WD 4TB Red: 160MB/s on sequential read / write. My WD Re 4TB SAS: 180MB/s on sequential read / write. RAID10 with four WD 4TB Reds will net you roughly 350MB/s on read/write (At least that's what I benched on my RAID card).

 

You should check out the HGST NAS drives though, those are 7200RPM. There's also the WD Se lineup (Entry level enterprise), those are 7200 RPM as well. But honestly I'd stick with the Reds because they run way cooler. I can't even touch my WD Re drives (They get to 48C+ under load...Where the reds run at 36-40C).

 

Barracudas would work though. Regardless of what drive you end up getting, make sure you do a through test of the drive (Extended Test on WD Lifeguard for WD drives, Seatool's full scan for Seagate) before committing them to an array (It sucks to realize you have a DOA drive after you waited a day to build the array).

 

Edit:

4TB WD Red ($140ish when I bought it):

http://i.imgur.com/CFs7p7J.jpg

 

4TB WD Re SAS ($250 when I bought it):

http://i.imgur.com/9JKXkBE.jpg

Wow, that is a great help! Because my array will be in my PC (i'm a one man youtuber) and the X99 mobo I am going to get will support RAID 10 just fine, would you still recommend a RAID card, or could I get a card later on to save money?

[scottyseng]

7 hours ago, GeekaWhat said:

Wow, that is a great help! Because my array will be in my PC (i'm a one man youtuber) and the X99 mobo I am going to get will support RAID 10 just fine, would you still recommend a RAID card, or could I get a card later on to save money?

I would use the onboard RAID. A proper RAID card (With the battery backup) isn't cheap / is too overkill for your use. They run in the $500-700 range as well.

 

RAID 10 isn't calculation heavy like RAID6, so the onboard RAID is fine.

 

Do note that the speed of the array will drop as you fill it up a lot (like 20% free space...It's just the nature of hard drives).

 

Have you considered the 4TB drives though? They still have the best GB per dollar ratio. The 4TB and capacity drives are faster. You might get slightly slower results with the 2TB ones (Not by much though...probably 5-10MB/s less).

[GeekaWhat]

On 3/6/2016 at 9:40 PM, scottyseng said:

I would use the onboard RAID. A proper RAID card (With the battery backup) isn't cheap / is too overkill for your use. They run in the $500-700 range as well.

 

RAID 10 isn't calculation heavy like RAID6, so the onboard RAID is fine.

 

Do note that the speed of the array will drop as you fill it up a lot (like 20% free space...It's just the nature of hard drives).

 

Have you considered the 4TB drives though? They still have the best GB per dollar ratio. The 4TB and capacity drives are faster. You might get slightly slower results with the 2TB ones (Not by much though...probably 5-10MB/s less).

Yeh I did, its just I want the write speed of RAID 10 and am on a budget so cant get 4TB drives just yet