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What high capacity 2.5" hdd? Bigger than 1TB

L

Lil'John

Senior member
Subject states it.

Short: Found Seagate in 4TB size. Their reputation scares me.

Long: Creating a large file server with room for twenty four hdds that are 2.5". Goal is media storage so very high read and reliability are a must.

OS and file system are still in flux. I was considering FreeNAS. Drives controlled by LSI card with SuperMicro backplane.
 
What part of media storage requires high read?

If all Seagates were as bad at AT makes them out to be, Backblaze wouldn't keep buying them by the truckload. I've been running nothing but Seagates in my two storage systems for many years. That said, those are all 3.5" drives.
 
XavierMace said:
What part of media storage requires high read?

If all Seagates were as bad at AT makes them out to be, Backblaze wouldn't keep buying them by the truckload. I've been running nothing but Seagates in my two storage systems for many years. That said, those are all 3.5" drives.
Click to expand...

When I say high read, I am thinking 80% of IO will be reading. Not exactly high concurrent read... maybe feeding two or three media streams at once.

For Seagate, I was talking about non-Anandtech reviews 😉. Some make it sound like merely looking at one make them catch fire.

Granted, people with bad experiences scream the loudest.
 
That's because people don't actually read the data in stuff like Backblaze, they just see Seagate and go OMGWTFBBQBURNTHEMATTHESTAKE. Seagate's definitely had certain (meaning specific models) bad drives. Some people also don't understand that hard drives that don't die (figuratively) don't exist in the consumer world any more. Hard drives dying is a fact of life, especially if you have a lot of them. I've got 16 spindles right now, all Seagates and they've all been Seagates for many many years. I've had 3 drive failures in the past 5+ years.

Backblaze's dataset for Seagate is normally drastically higher than WDC/Toshiba. I'll give you HGST consistently is more reliable but they're also more expensive. For example if you look at their Q1 2017 data for 4TB drives, the Segate ST4000DM000 accounts for 2.9 million drive days, 3 times that of the next closest drive and has a 3.27% annual failure rate. It's half the price of the HGST HMS5C4040BLE640. The Toshiba and WDC drives combine for less than 15,000 drive days. With that kind of sample size disparity, I wouldn't expect the numbers to be even. The only drive that's really out of line is the ST4000DX000. I would absolutely say avoid that specific drive. But ALL the drives are under 4% annual failure rate.

Is it worth twice the price to you to drop it from 3.2% to 1.4%? For me personally, no it's not. I've got backups and RAID. The failed drives have 40,000+ hours on them. That's perfectly acceptable to me.
 
Seagate's 3.5" suck, but their 2.5" HDDs have been solid (though to be fair, a lot of their 2.5" are Samsung rebadges)
Some folks have built arrays out of the 4TB 2.5" ST4000LM016 (PMR drives), and I use several of them as portable backups without issues.

The ST4000LM024 is a new model introduced ~Dec 2016 that ups the max size to 5TB, but uses SMR.
No idea on the performance, but anything SMR is a POS to me.
 
XavierMace said:
That's likely too thick for the drive bay on the Supermicro case.
Click to expand...
Probably not. 15mm is the "standard" size, at least afaik, for 2.5" HDDs in rackmount enclosures. Laptops use smaller sizes.

IMO, having that many spinners in a home server is just a systadmin looking for something to do with their spare time. Get a quartet of 8TB drives, install unRAID, and add in more drives as needed.

Media storage isn't really stressing the read capabilities of a single drive, let alone some big old array. Reliability will just go down the more spindles you have running. You want data security, back it all up.
 
XavierMace said:
That's likely too thick for the drive bay on the Supermicro case.
Click to expand...

How thick is too thick? I couldn't find a spec for the SuperMicro 2.5 hotsaps. It seems like 15mm is standard for larger drives.

XavierMace said:
That's because people don't actually read the data in stuff like Backblaze, they just see Seagate and go OMGWTFBBQBURNTHEMATTHESTAKE. Seagate's definitely had certain (meaning specific models) bad drives. Some people also don't understand that hard drives that don't die (figuratively) don't exist in the consumer world any more. Hard drives dying is a fact of life, especially if you have a lot of them. <snip>

Is it worth twice the price to you to drop it from 3.2% to 1.4%? For me personally, no it's not. I've got backups and RAID. The failed drives have 40,000+ hours on them. That's perfectly acceptable to me.
Click to expand...

Good info... I'm in the geriatric range for computer equipment😉 8088

My experience has been if it lasts 30 days, it lasts for years.

My concern is getting DOA equipment.

WhoBeDaPlaya said:
Seagate's 3.5" suck, but their 2.5" HDDs have been solid (though to be fair, a lot of their 2.5" are Samsung rebadges)
Some folks have built arrays out of the 4TB 2.5" ST4000LM016 (PMR drives), and I use several of them as portable backups without issues.

The ST4000LM024 is a new model introduced ~Dec 2016 that ups the max size to 5TB, but uses SMR.
No idea on the performance, but anything SMR is a POS to me.
Click to expand...

The first model you mention is what caught my eye.

The second is what I'm eyeballing now. Is the SMR just 5TB or whole product line?
 
dave_the_nerd said:
Probably not. 15mm is the "standard" size, at least afaik, for 2.5" HDDs in rackmount enclosures. Laptops use smaller sizes.

IMO, having that many spinners in a home server is just a systadmin looking for something to do with their spare time. Get a quartet of 8TB drives, install unRAID, and add in more drives as needed.

Media storage isn't really stressing the read capabilities of a single drive, let alone some big old array. Reliability will just go down the more spindles you have running. You want data security, back it all up.
Click to expand...
Answered my question about thickness before I posted.

And you second is why I'm doing it... computer geek just screwing around.
 
@Lil'John : It's the entire product line, including their 4TB portables.

In regards to infant mortality, its why I always torture test any new / new-to-me HDDs before pressing them into service
(full read, full zero, full read, full zero). Granted, this can take awhile (days in the case of my Ultrastar He8s), but I've caught
a couple of early failures this way. The ones that pass go on ticking 24/7/365 for years until I retire them.
 
Bringing this back from the "grave".

I went with the Seagate drives and was going to focus on ST4000LM016.

I got two of them and they fit the Supermicro 2.5" hot swap trays perfectly 🙂

In some further reading, I am finding different information about the ST4000LM024. Some are claiming they are SMR and other people are claiming PMR based upon Seagate documents. I couldn't find anything Seagate that officially supports PMR for the 4TB 2.5" drives. Anyone have something Seagate supporting one claim or the other?

Also, is there any concerns over combining the two models under a single raid configuration? Raid will be either 5, 6, or 50 under LSI raid card. I'm still debating but I'm leaning toward raid6. I'm looking at 6-8 drives for IP camera storage ad 10-12 drives for media.

The reason for the followup on the ST4000LM024 is I received two of them on another order that was supposed to be the ST4000LM016.
 
Technically speaking, SMR is still a form of PMR, so the mfgs might try some wordplay in their docs.
However, the ST4000LM024 is most assuredly SMR, and why I won't touch it.
 
I've experimented with both 2TB and 4TB (ST4000LM024) models, deploying them in desktop machines. One of these is a workstation, and I used the Seagate as a backup disk for the scheduled morning Macrium imaging. The other -- the 4TB unit -- is a Win 2012 R2 Essentials server, and the drive is used exclusively for SyncBackSE daily incremental backups.

I've had no trouble with them yet.

The server has 4x 3TB HDD 3.5" drives. It would seem that a 3.5" drive consumes 300% of the power used by a 2.5" drive. If the difference between 7,200 and 5,400 RPM can be made irrelevant to server performance, converting from 3.5" to 2.5" would be a household power-saving barring the cost of replacement.

The speed in RPM can be resolved by use of a disk-caching program like PrimoCache Server edition, which adds about $100 to the one-time outlay -- adding in the cost of an SATA or NVME SSD as caching drive.

But by itself -- 4x [Price of ST4000LM024] is a realistic obstacle for now.
 
What is the budget? Would you consider SSDs?
 
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