Best 2 TB drive around $80 for ZFS? (not-4k sector size)

[sofakng]

What's the best 2 TB drive for around $80 to be used in an eight disk RAID-Z2 array?

I've been told that 4k drives don't work well with ZFS so I'd like something with the regular 512 byte sectors. (and not 4k with 512 byte emulation)

Anyways - I'm looking at buying eight of these:

Hitachi Deskstar 5k3000 2 TB

Are these 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM? Are they "eco" drives? (Surprisingly I can't seem to find any information on that...)

Anybody have any other suggestions? This is only going to be used for a home fileserver box.

 

[VirtualLarry]

It's questionable whether or not the 5K3000 and 7K3000 series use Advanced Format. IBM's docs claim 512byte/sector, but that might be emulation. They don't say anything about Advanced Format anywhere, but elsewhere on their site, they have a link to general information regarding Advanced Format drives, and an alignment tool.

If they're not using Advanced Format in their leading-edge 3TB HDs, then where are they using it? Ergo, they are using Advanced Format in those drives.

I picked up eight 7K2000 drives, which are NOT advanced format, according to my googling. You might want to look for those. (They have retail-boxed at Microcenter for $110 now.)

 

[fleshconsumed]

5K3000 are "eco" drives. I do not remember exact speed, but it's somewhere from 5400 to 6100 RPM I believe.

And why would 4k drives not work well with ZFS? Is is data integrity problems, or speed, or something else?

 

[ncalipari]

ZFS doesn't work well with Advanced Format? Where did you read this?

 

[BonzTM]

The Hitachi 5k3000's are 512 byte drives. I checked them out myself as I will be moving to ZFS in a day or two. I have 5 of the 5k3000's and can verify that they are not 4k drives.
http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/tech...6A273D0862577D50024EC1D/$file/DS5K3000_ds.pdf


According to this source, the performance of 4k drives with a standard ashift=9 is barely less than actually creating the pool with ashift=12 (aligning with 4k sectors).
http://digitaldj.net/2010/11/03/zfs-zpool-v28-openindiana-b147-4k-drives-and-you/

 

[AdamK47]

What's the best 2 TB drive for around $80 to be used in an eight disk RAID-Z2 array?

I've been told that 4k drives don't work well with ZFS so I'd like something with the regular 512 byte sectors. (and not 4k with 512 byte emulation)

Anyways - I'm looking at buying eight of these:

Hitachi Deskstar 5k3000 2 TB

Are these 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM? Are they "eco" drives? (Surprisingly I can't seem to find any information on that...)

Anybody have any other suggestions? This is only going to be used for a home fileserver box.

I generally consider "Eco" or "Green" labeled drives as marketing spin for "Slow".

 

[fffblackmage]

What's the best 2 TB drive for around $80 to be used in an eight disk RAID-Z2 array?

I've been told that 4k drives don't work well with ZFS so I'd like something with the regular 512 byte sectors. (and not 4k with 512 byte emulation)

Anyways - I'm looking at buying eight of these:

Hitachi Deskstar 5k3000 2 TB

Are these 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM? Are they "eco" drives? (Surprisingly I can't seem to find any information on that...)

Anybody have any other suggestions? This is only going to be used for a home fileserver box.

I think the 5K3000 part indicates the drive as being 5400rpm or something similar, but that's just my guess.

I have three WD20EARS in a RAIDZ configuration. I've had them for just a few months, but no problems so far. Sustained transfer speeds are typically in the 20-40 MBps range.

I generally consider "Eco" or "Green" labeled drives as marketing spin for "Slow".

You'd be surprised. The Samsung F4 "Eco Green" 2TB (5400rpm) is nearly as fast as the F3 1TB (7200rpm).
Even the WD20EARS isn't that far behind.

Source: http://club.myce.com/f138/samsung-f3-1tb-2tb-hd-tune-graph-crystaldiskmark-results-309392/

Source: My F4EG

Source: My WD20EARS

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

ZFS doesn't work well with Advanced Format? Where did you read this?

You get a performance penalty because ZFS doesn't natively work with 4k drives well. You can do some workaround and have it more compatible, but I wouldn't call those workarounds stable... and I wouldn't trust my data with that.

The performance degradation is very limited. Maybe it's like 10%. I use 6x2TB Samsung F4EG drives and it works very well.

Honestly, if you look at the ZFS talk on [H], it's pretty unanimous that people are still picking the Samsung drives. I'd steer clear from the WD EARS drives. It's not they're bad, but Samsung just does a better job...

BTW, can you tell me about your system plans OP? I'm curious what build setup you're using... board, cpu, etc?

I have a 6 drive array right now, but using 1/3 of it for redundancy pisses me off Maybe increasing to an 8 drive array might be suitable. I'm still finalizing my build (fixing out bugs) so I haven't copied all my data yet. I can rebuild the array if I decide to go with 8 drives instead of 6.

 

[SViscusi]

You get a performance penalty because ZFS doesn't natively work with 4k drives well. You can do some workaround and have it more compatible, but I wouldn't call those workarounds stable... and I wouldn't trust my data with that. The performance degradation is very limited. Maybe it's like 10%. I use 6x2TB Samsung F4EG drives and it works very well. Honestly, if you look at the ZFS talk on [H], it's pretty unanimous that people are still picking the Samsung drives. I'd steer clear from the WD EARS drives. It's not they're bad, but Samsung just does a better job... BTW, can you tell me about your system plans OP? I'm curious what build setup you're using... board, cpu, etc? I have a 6 drive array right now, but using 1/3 of it for redundancy pisses me off Maybe increasing to an 8 drive array might be suitable. I'm still finalizing my build (fixing out bugs) so I haven't copied all my data yet. I can rebuild the array if I decide to go with 8 drives instead of 6.

The workarounds are stable. Sub.zero has posted a hell of a lot of info on ZFS on this, HardOCP, even repackaging bsd with a custom WebGUI for Zfs at www.zfsguru.com.

The advanced formating doesn't affect stability, only speed, and only in cases where the partition is misaligned.

Basically just run RAIDZ1 with 3 or 5 drives, RAIDZ2 with 6 or 10, and it's perfectly fine. Alot of people do that, I'm running 6 F4 drives in a RAIDZ2 config and the only problem I ever experienced was with the nic.

 

[ChrisBenn]

You get a performance penalty because ZFS doesn't natively work with 4k drives well. You can do some workaround and have it more compatible, but I wouldn't call those workarounds stable... and I wouldn't trust my data with that.

The issues is that the drives report as 512 byte drives - not an inherent 4k issue, but because the drives are 4k internally and 512bytes externally ("512e") you get into boundary cases where you pay a penalty for the emulation.

When a manufacturer releases a 4k drive which reports 4k sector sizes it should work fine. (But no one has these now).

Honestly, if you look at the ZFS talk on [H], it's pretty unanimous that people are still picking the Samsung drives. I'd steer clear from the WD EARS drives. It's not they're bad, but Samsung just does a better job...

I would disagree with that (the unanimous part) - the hitachi drives are actually a very popular choice as they are all true 512 drives (the only hitachi adv. format stuff is their laptop drives).

 

[ChrisBenn]

The workarounds are stable. Sub.zero has posted a hell of a lot of info on ZFS on this, HardOCP, even repackaging bsd with a custom WebGUI for Zfs at www.zfsguru.com.

The advanced formating doesn't affect stability, only speed, and only in cases where the partition is misaligned.

Basically just run RAIDZ1 with 3 or 5 drives, RAIDZ2 with 6 or 10, and it's perfectly fine. Alot of people do that, I'm running 6 F4 drives in a RAIDZ2 config and the only problem I ever experienced was with the nic.

Does your zpool available space display correctly? I had read some issues with people using the ashift12 pools having incorrect available space reports.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I would disagree with that (the unanimous part) - the hitachi drives are actually a very popular choice as they are all true 512 drives (the only hitachi adv. format stuff is their laptop drives).

Their 3TB desktop HDs are NOT advanced format? Can you document that?

 

[dorion]

Their 3TB desktop HDs are NOT advanced format? Can you document that?

ArsTechnica has a Massive thread on ZFS, with the last couple pages being about 512byte sector drives. http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=37779

In short Hitachi designed a 64bit LBA controller that allows them to still use 512byte sectors even on their 3tb drives. Its speculated that's why Hitachi's hard drive division was bought by Western Digital.

 

[Silenus]

I've had good luck with the Samsung F4's (HD204UI). I have a 9 drive RAID Z2 NAS with the Samsung drives at the office I work at and we hammer on it every day. It been up and running smoothly for almostd 2 months now and has been flawless. No drive errors of any kind, auto-scrub each week has shown no errors and system has been entirely stable.

I have used sub.zero's ZFSguru live CD to build the pool with the 4K alignment option, export the pool, then imported the pool on a Nexenta system which is what our NAS is running. This does not use the ashift ZFS patch that has been considered dangerous but uses a different method. It works.

PS- if you do go for the Samsung's make sure you run the firware update on the drives!

 

[SViscusi]

Does your zpool available space display correctly? I had read some issues with people using the ashift12 pools having incorrect available space reports.

I haven't noticed any errors.

media 15 RAID5 (single parity) 10.9T 7.42T (68&#37 3.45T ONLINE destroy

3.45 free seems correct

edit: I should add that that doesn't include redundancy. It's actually 2.19 once redundency is factored in.

 

[ChrisBenn]

Their 3TB desktop HDs are NOT advanced format? Can you document that?

http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/desktop/deskstar/deskstar-7k3000
click on specifications, sectors size - 512.

(Most of the new advanced format drives are listed as 512e (emulated) - for instance:
http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/mobile/travelstar/travelstar-z5k500
click on specs, 512e)

I haven't noticed any errors.

Good to know, and thanks for checking.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Are the Seagate 2TB LP drives Advanced Format? This thread, the second post, seems to indicate that they are not. The specifications on Seagate's web site, leaves out the sector size information entirely (not a good sign).

http://www.mediasmartserver.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=9814

Microcenter has them, retail-boxed even, for $80 right now.

http://www.microcenter.com/single_pr...uct_id=0334239