4TB Hard Drives, Any Suggestions on Model and Best Price

decr on 28/10/2017 - 10:11

I am finding myself running out of storage and need to upgrade my ZFS pool from 4x2TB drives to 4x4TB or some such on my HP ML10v2 (from a previous OzB deal). It's a solid server for the price but my current ZFS pool of 5.3T is running out of capacity unfortunately. Smaller sized consumer grade drives have been easy enough to source from elsewhere but 4TB+ drives seem hard to find so I might actually have to buy some. It seems WD/Seagate hover around $150-$190 depending on model.

I have no recent experience with consumer grade drives so I'd like to hear some ideas/experiences/recommendations etc. I manage systems with 1000s of disks at work, they are "enterprise grade", and as such way too expensive for home use. The plan is to gradually replace the four 2TB drives with 4TB+ drives, however 6TB drives are getting out of budget.

I have one 4TB WD black as a spare, so sticking with 4TB would be good, providing a decent capacity expansion while keeping the cost down.

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

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Comments

  • kipps on 28/10/2017 - 11:23

    What sort of ZFS pool is it? Raidz1/raid5 is bad for reasons described online (risk of drive failure during a resilver unacceptably high for large drives). Personally I would go 2x cheapest 8TB drives and put them in a mirror configuration & have another backup. (Ie use 4tb with a nightly rsync).

    I use 2x8TB cheapies in mirror with a regular rsync to a 3x4TB in raidz1 for backup only.

    • decr on 28/10/2017 - 16:21

      Yeah I'm well aware of that, I'd like to move to raidz2 but can't justify the cost/capacity ratio. I use raidz3 at work spread across 3 enclosures so even losing one (48 disks) isn't the end of the world. So far I am willing to risk the data on it for capacity (raidz1). Funnily enough I didn't even consider doing a mirror on larger drives, just installed some 10TB ones at work the other day. I suppose this is just one of the things where you do your best at work and when it comes to home stuff you don't really care as much…

      • kipps on 28/10/2017 - 16:28

        Agreed re raidz2 is expensive. I also don't want to run the risk of losing the pool if I do something stupid.

        Out of all the trashing of non-TLER drives, I thought I would have problems with the Seagate SMR's (2x8TB in mirror as above), yet they have been running along just fine. SMART says they've been powered on for about 9-10 months. Admittedly though I am not writing to them very often.

        As to my raidz1 backup array, it has 2x WD Reds and one ordinary Seagate without TLER. No issues in the 4 years I have been using it.

        I would simply grab cheap, larger capacity drives. At least with the larger drives you might be able to spin drives some down and reduce power usage too. I think WD Reds are overrated.

        • decr on 28/10/2017 - 16:57

          Thanks for your comments. Yes, agreed on the reds (just don't touch the greens). I don't think TLER is a thing with software raid, or ZFS in this scenario. As for larger drives that's probably more suitable as the port count is limited on the ML10v2 anyway, although a mirror always seems like a waste but if you value your data then meh.

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