Media Server -- which drive would you go with?

[GCS]

Narrowing things down a bit just looking for other people's input.

Media Server - sole purpose is storage of our movie collection (DVD rips and BR rips). Not using it as a DVR. All rips can be redone but would hate to have to go to that much work. All critical, can't lose stuff is on a separate drive which will be backed up.

Going to run Flexraid with at least 2 parity drives.

Going into a Norco 4224 (holds 24 drives will not being getting that many to start with). Currently it houses 20 2TB drives.


Would love 4TB drives but just not sure that's doable at the moment (price wise that is)

WD 3TB retail drives (essentially green drives) 5400RPM - 2 year warranty - $90 each

Toshiba/Hitachi 3TB retail drives 7200RPM - 3 year warranty - $100 each

WD Red 5400RPM drives - 3 year warranty - $130 each

last but not least ...

Seagate 4TB (not the NAS version) 5900 RPM - $125 each - no warranty as they were pulls from external enclosures


Anyway I am sure I am just beating myself up with this decision and just need to click the buy button and move on with life but I would still like to hear from the masses.

TIA

Greg

 

[dave_the_nerd]

How much data do you actually have, and what's your growth rate? I mean, my collection of DVD rips is <250GB. (I just don't watch that many movies.) Are you filling the rest of that array with porn? Work data? Torrent seeds for all the warez in the western hemisphere?

Whatever the application, if you don't need much more than the 36TB you presumably already have (2TBx(20-2)) and your likely needs won't outstrip that in the next ~5 years, then simply doing a 1:1 replacement with the 3TB WD retails would be the lowest $/GB. $1800 would get you 54TB of space, and you can stripe in 12TB more later.

Since this doesn't sound like it'll be super-performance-critical, I'd avoid the 7200rpm drives for heat/power/noise reasons. For the same reasons, I'd go with the Greens over the Reds. the NAS optimizations are nice for performance, but that's not important here.

As for the warranty, odds are if the drives last the first two years they'll last 36 months + 1 day.

 

[smitbret]

I've been using 2TB Samsung Barracudas (7200.14) as the data drives and a 2TB WD Green EARS for the parity drive in my FlexRAID setup for more than a year. Had one little blip on one of the Seagates 6 months ago but a Low Level Format fixed it and haven't had a problem before or since. The Barracudas run only about 1 degree warmer than the Green and they are a great deal faster.

I'm going to be expanding the array this spring though and I think, based on the BackBlaze info that's being passed around, I am going to try to dig up some Hitachis or some consumer grade Toshiba drives. I'm toying with the idea of going with a couple of 3TB drives and replacing the Green with the bigger drive so I can use 3TB drives moving forward. I thought about 4TB, but I'm afraid the rebuild times may be just too long. Right now with the 2TB drives, they take about 13 hours.

In summary, with FlexRAID, anything should probably work. According to BlackBlaze, the Hitachis seem to be great and the WD & Seagate drives with 500GB platters are extremely unreliable. I just keep everything on a rotation of every 3 to 4 years and don't worry about it.

You also mentioned that you are using FlexRAID. You realized that with FlexRAID, the data isn't striped and any drive that doesn't fail retains its data, entirely readable by Windows outside of the array? I just mention this because you said you planned on using 2 parity drives. My server sounds like it is purposed almost exactly like yours. Most of the space is BR and DVD rips and then critical docs, photos, etc. that are backed up daily to an external destination. I considered multpiple parity drives, but in the end I couldn't justify it since everything is completely recoverable if I lose a drive. It would just be a simple matter of restoring and re-ripping/encoding just the files on only the drive that failed. The other drives would just be reimported back into the array with the data intact. My entire array is only 8TB, anyway.

I guess it depends on headache vs. $ and whether the time needed to restore is worth more than the investement in the 2nd or 3rd parity drive. I guess if I were going 4TB drives, though, the investment really starts to lean the way of the extra drive.

 

[Fallen Kell]

I thought about 4TB, but I'm afraid the rebuild times may be just too long. Right now with the 2TB drives, they take about 13 hours.

That is why you need to be thinking RAID 6 at this point so that you still have data fault tolerance during the rebuild process.