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Need several TB of storage, concerned about 2TB drive reliability

F

faxon

Platinum Member
So i recently started ripping all of my music and DVDs that i have been collecting for the last 5 years, and my 1TB RAID1 i set up for storage is already full of HD content from my itunes library. I'm considering getting 4 of the WD Caviar Green 2TB drives and finally making my RAID5 file server, but we get a lot of returns on 2TB drives at frys right now due to DOAs (mostly bad sectors) and im concerned about their reliability. I know WD has their advanced format drives coming down the pipe soon as well though, and i was wondering if anyone who has the current 2TB drives could comment on their reliability now vs waiting on the new drives and getting a 4x1TB Sharespace NAS instead
 
Yea the issue is capacity. If I didn't already have 900gb on my F1 RAID1 I would just get 4 HE103UJ or RE4 1tb drives and call it a day, but I could fill that in a weekend. Having 4 2tb drives would give me the overhead I need. I think im going to do some more thinking and get my NAS instead for now unless someone has a better idea.
 
Try the 2TB Hitachi's. Fry's has them on sale for $149.99 this week (same as Microcenter). They were a super deal at $129 a few weeks ago. I've been pounding on my 6 on different Adaptec cards over the past two weeks or so and they have been holding up great.
 
i know they're on sale, i work in that department 🙂. they're also loud as all hell, i got a couple a while back and returned them because i couldnt stand the noise compared to my other HDDs. we also get a ton of returns on the 2TB version for DOAs, which brings me back to my original concern about 2TB drive reliability.
 
That's interesting. I bought the 2TB Hitachi Simple Drive (USB External) on sale at Frys $139!. It runs great with the Turbo (much better transfer rate over my IOMEGAs, but you need the turbo software). The drive is not noisy at idle. But if you are doing a lot of accessing & R/W it does sound a bit like an older drive would (eg, heads accessing - something like a drive from 2002), but to me it's not that objectionable. The important things are that its reliable & has decent speed.
 
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internal seems to be the worst, probably because people dont use their external drives on as much. we get a lot of returns on 2TB caviar greens and seagate barracuda LPs (5900RPMs) though as well, and seagate still seems to be having problems with the firmware on their drives since we still get a ton of complaints about this problem on 500gb and 1TB 7200 RPMs, and 1.5 and 2TB 5900 RPMs (no 7200 RPM 1.5 or 2TB cept from hitachi)
 
hmm. i use 2TB external for D2D offsite backup. so other than a caselogic case that freeagent is chucked in the trunk/backseat and they hold up real solid. i think its a standard barracuda 7200 2TB not a constellation drive.

i always long burn the drives. i had a theory that since it takes day+ to long format a drive; it could be skipped by the manufacturer to lower cost of production.

so the onus of doing a nice long format and sdelete (secure write) is on the consumer and those that don't follow that practice usually get the timeout/remap issues early in their life.

real raid controllers have a settings 3-15s when idle scan for bad sectors proactively - i'm surprised they never added this to intel matrix raid .
 
This is actually all so interesting. When I decided on laying out my system, I separated out the requirements for archive/infrequently accessed data, internal versus external located and fast/high performance frequently accessed data/information (eg, OS & programs).

The decision to use low performance (Maxtor 300GB 4500 rpm) expensive drives for archiving but which would run internal/continuous (ie, when the system is in operation) turns out to be a good one at least regarding reliability. After many years, the only drive lost was one of the high performance internal system drives WD 120GB 7200 rpm). The low performance ones were selected because independent analysis & review studies (Tom's HW) indicated that the drives run luke warm (even after much R/W operation) & thus were felt to not even require independent cooling.

I would guess that if one is going to run a drive as archive in an external enclosure for infrequently accessed data, then it doesnt matter really what is used. Cost & size will probably be the major deciders.
 
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faxon said:
internal seems to be the worst, probably because people dont use their external drives on as much. we get a lot of returns on 2TB caviar greens and seagate barracuda LPs (5900RPMs) though as well, and seagate still seems to be having problems with the firmware on their drives since we still get a ton of complaints about this problem on 500gb and 1TB 7200 RPMs, and 1.5 and 2TB 5900 RPMs (no 7200 RPM 1.5 or 2TB cept from hitachi)
Click to expand...
While your inside information is interesting and valuable, I still think that many HD returns (and the explanations/reasons given) are due to user error, user misinformation, or just plain stupidity. The worst part of any computer is the user.

It is interesting that your wording seems to imply that there are more 2TB WD green returns than the Seagate variety. There's a lot of Seagate bashing these days. I've got 5x1TB drives of mixed Seagate 5900's and WD greens. They all work fine, but the WD's are getting terribly loud after only 1 year.
 
Emulex said:
i always long burn the drives. i had a theory that since it takes day+ to long format a drive; it could be skipped by the manufacturer to lower cost of production.

so the onus of doing a nice long format and sdelete (secure write) is on the consumer and those that don't follow that practice usually get the timeout/remap issues early in their life.
Click to expand...
Of course, doing very long burns of the HD can also cause them to fail faster. Parts do wear out, and they are all using cheaper and cheaper parts.

Normally, I do a full format+ write every sector and if that passes with no issues, then the drive is usually OK..
But I still backup the most important stuff onto multiple media types...HDs just have a bad habit of failing at the worst possible time. That includes ALL HDs, green/blue/black.

I would gladly pay another $30-50 if they would use higher quality parts, but I am not holding my breath for anyone doing that.
 
Heat is an issue that causes drives to fail. I cloned my main drive to another, ran tests on it, everything checked out. Computer would crash every now and then. Now the drive is literally laying outside the case on it's side, everything has been fine for 2 weeks. Sticking drives on top of each other cooks them in the case, even if you have fans blowing. Seagate claims that most drives sent in are fine, and I agree. When my drive heated up, it became un-recognized until it cooled down.
 
Elixer said:
Of course, doing very long burns of the HD can also cause them to fail faster. Parts do wear out, and they are all using cheaper and cheaper parts.
Click to expand...

Bathtub failure curve for hard drives. The point is to weed out the initial downslope before you put data on.
 
Blain hop over too hardforum in the storage section. A guy there putting 48 drives in a server or nas set up. He is looking to get around 90TB of storage when he is done setting it all up with drives and a couple of 24 port Raid cards.

insane.
 
I'm looking at samsung 2tb drive or the hitachi 2tb hdd. I'm very skeptical with the seagates too buy anymore of them this upgrade time.
 
faxon said:
So i recently started ripping all of my music and DVDs that i have been collecting for the last 5 years, and my 1TB RAID1 i set up for storage is already full of HD content from my itunes library. I'm considering getting 4 of the WD Caviar Green 2TB drives and finally making my RAID5 file server, but we get a lot of returns on 2TB drives at frys right now due to DOAs (mostly bad sectors) and im concerned about their reliability. I know WD has their advanced format drives coming down the pipe soon as well though, and i was wondering if anyone who has the current 2TB drives could comment on their reliability now vs waiting on the new drives and getting a 4x1TB Sharespace NAS instead
Click to expand...

Here's what I would do if I was in your shoes...and I was just there.

4 2TB drives will cost you about $720. You'll get 6TB total storage and not be able to upgrade unless you replace all your drives. Kind of like you have now. What are you going to do with the 2 1TB drives you have now?

I would build an Unraid System (http://lime-technology.com/)

Instead of building a RAID5 and having all the drives spinning, worrying about heat, etc., you can build a very nice storage system that is future proof. It'll be a little more upfront, but maybe not much depending on if you have any parts laying around.

You can get 5 Samsung 1.5 TB drives (it'll give you 6TB storage also - and they run cool) and it'll only cost you $550 instead of $720. That saves you $170 right there to put towards the other hardware and license you'll need for the Unraid server hardware. Take the $170 and get a pro license for $109. That'll bring you down to $60 left. Spend another $150 on top of that for the hardware and you'll be all set. So all in all, you'll spend about $150 more than with your RAID 5, but you'll get these benefits:

1. Remove your Raid 1 array. Copy the files from one of the drives to the new 6TB array and then add that drive into the array. You'll now have 7TB. You can then take your other 1 TB drive that was in your old array and add that to your new one as well. So now you have 8TB.

So, here we are with 2TB of extra storage now for that extra $150 you had to spend extra for the unraid hardware. How much is a 2TB drive?

2. Now, if you start to fill up that array and need to add more storage, you don't need to spend another $700 to build another RAID5 array. You just spend another $100-$125 and get another drive at the time. Maybe it'll be a 4TB drive down the road.

This could be a little more costlier to start, but it'll save you more in the longrun. Plus, since the data isn't spread across all the drives, the ones that are not in use (probably all but 1, will spin down, so you don't generate heat and noise). My drives run at or below approx. 30c

This has been a great solution for me thus far and I have no complaints. I'd do it again. For what you are looking to do, it'll be perfect.

Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.
 
the best part about that solution is that i already have a box i can turn into a file server, or if need be frys has cheap combos i can afford every week that would be perfect. i will read this when i get back from work tonight and then probably contact you with questions. sounds like this would be perfect for me.
 
okay, few questions after looking over how much i would have to spend to set this thing up right. first off, can you run the unRAID server in a VM, and if so could i transcode/encode on the VM side from within the host OS? what kind of controller card support does this platform have?

how does the system back the data up exactly? it is obviously redundant but what kind of footprint does this take up? is it more like WHS where each bit stored to the array is stored on 2 disks, or is it more like some type of RAID5/6, or is it something completely different?

what kind of drives would i want to use in this server? would i still gain anything by using raid drives that cost $60 more, or would using cheaper F3s, caviar blacks, my F1s, and 2 400gb 7200.10 barracudas be just fine? also, what is a good raid controller to use? im gonna be using the MSI 790FX-GD70 for its 4 PCI-e slots, so using up to 4 controllers is no problem if it gets me more ports/$ and the controllers work well. if i can set this up with 20 SATA ports out of the box that would rock, since im gonna put it in a PC-P80 armorsuit with 4x 5 in 3 ICY DOCK enclosures for future expansion, and while this is going to cost me $2000 to get the kind of capacity i want to start, if spending less money on more controllers will work better than spending more on less, im all for it. i dont really know much about what to look for in a controller, so advice on that would rock also.

if i do use up 4 PCI-e slots im going to need an x1 or pci video card. what kind of video capabilities does this server require during setup, if any?

also, more a question for the mobo forum, but are there any known issues with using raid controllers in slots originally designed for use with crossfire graphics card setups, or is a pci-e bus a pci-e bus? i have heard of issues with gigabyte boards not supporting raid controllers in the x8 slots on some boards in the past, but that doesnt make sense since the biggest offenders were x58 chipset, which was intended for servers just as much as desktops.

i will post any more questions as they come up. as is i still need a couple weeks to get paid, and i need to figure out what other hardware im going to use based on how some of these questions are answered. the biggest deciding factors will be VM support and drive recommendations since they will affect my CPU, RAM, and HDD choices, which cover about half the cost of the system and the broadest range of different choices depending on what i use the system for. for instance, if the server can be run in a VM, then i will turn this box into a local file server, an FTP server, an encoding workhorse, and maybe a folding box if i can get my additional 12 SATA connections from 2 slots on the GD70. i would want to get a 965BE instead of an x2 250 and 2x4gb of ram instead of 2x2gb. buying 6 or more hard drives speaks for itself. im hoping to start somewhere between 8 and 12tb with 1tb drives, leaving space to add 2TB or larger drives down the road when my confidence in their reliability increases to the point where owning one doesnt raise my blood pressure every time i think about data loss while im at work helping customers make the same decision
 
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