Large HDD's for a NAS/Server for RAID

[Stereodude]

So, I'm thinking to upgrade the drives in my my main server. Not because I need more space or more speed, but because the drives in the nightly backup server are ~10 years old and should be refreshed since they're starting to throw some errors. My thinking is to get a new drive set and put them in the main server and move the drives from the main server to the nightly backup server. Right now the main server has 10x 6TB Toshiba enterprise grade SATA 7200RPM drives in RAID-6.

My thoughts are to get the 8x 14TB WD Ultrastar HC530 in SATA and use them also in RAID-6. Here's how I arrived at this drive selection.

• not shingled
• not 9 platters (newish tech)
• not energy assisted (new tech)
• HGST drives have consistently low failure rates in Backblaze reports (which this WD Ultrastar is, just rebranded with this generation).
• $$$ per gig is pretty flat across all capacities so no reason to get more of smaller drives
• Enterprise grade with 1 in 10e15 error rate, not 1 in 10e14.
• price is competitive with others 14TB from other manufacturers

Am I off my rocker, or is this a solid choice?

 

[Chewy509]

IMHO, your logic is sound...

Live long and prosper...

 

[jtr1962]

Just quickly checking prices and price per GB your reasoning is fine. Only question is we're talking about close to $3K here. A lot of money in my book, even if you're making a good salary. Back in the few years where I managed to make 6 digits, I still kept my hobby spending probably under $250 a month on average.

Another question coming from someone who has only 4.4 TB total in my primary box is how on Earth can anyone fill up that much space? At best I have 1.5TB of unique data, although it may well be less than that. And this is saving everything of importance since I first got into PCs in the late 1990s.

 

[Stereodude]

Just quickly checking prices and price per GB your reasoning is fine. Only question is we're talking about close to $3K here. A lot of money in my book, even if you're making a good salary. Back in the few years where I managed to make 6 digits, I still kept my hobby spending probably under $250 a month on average.

Well, I didn't say I was buying them this week. It all depends if I can figure out what's wrong with the old nightly backup server and why its misbehaving (beyond the array drive issues). I'm getting BSOD's. But yeah, more than $3k since I'd buy 9 to have a matching spare and the best price I've found on the drive is ~$360. My hobby spending ebbs and flows. It probably does more flowing than ebbing though. I'm not living paycheck to paycheck and I'd rather spend it on myself than "give" it to the gov't later in life.

Another question coming from someone who has only 4.4 TB total in my primary box is how on Earth can anyone fill up that much space? At best I have 1.5TB of unique data, although it may well be less than that. And this is saving everything of importance since I first got into PCs in the late 1990s.

You're not trying very hard.

For example, I have 7.5TB of HDTV that I recorded OTA over the past ~5 years. I'm not backing that up, nor am I likely to rewatch it. If I was tight on space most of it would go since it has limited rewatch potential, but since I'm not tight on space it sits there.

If I were to rip all my DVDs & blu-rays I'd run out of space real fast. To date I haven't done that. A few hundred gigs in pictures, a few hundred gigs in ripped SACD's and DVD-A's. Hundreds of gigs of ripped CDs. It starts to add up ripping my personal physical media getting it all "online" (on my network). You also need a fair amount of spindles to get the read/write speeds up. So arrays tend to be quite large if you're using modern drives.

But the short version is that it's nice to know that I basically have an amount of storage that I can't fill up (at present).

 

[Handruin]

Sounds like a reasonable plan to me also. I've been very happy with my HGST drives over the years and I'd buy them again.

What are you planning to buy/build to manage the drives? Are you going with a hardware RAID controller? Would you consider something like zfs on linux and a JBOD controller? That would get you bitrot protection and instant snapshot abilities.

 

[Stereodude]

What are you planning to buy/build to manage the drives? Are you going with a hardware RAID controller? Would you consider something like zfs on linux and a JBOD controller? That would get you bitrot protection and instant snapshot abilities.

They'll go on a LSI (Broadcom?) HW Raid controller in RAID-6. The same one I'm using now. Since I'm not replacing any of the PCs, just the arrays I'm going to stick with the Windows setup I'm using now.

 

[snowhiker]

Linus is critically low on drive space. He only has 20TB left!!!

 

[sdbardwick]

Decent write up on fio benchmark tool at ArsTechnica.

 

[Handruin]

Decent write up on fio benchmark tool at ArsTechnica.

FIO has been my go-to for years when profiling storage performance within the projects/products at work. I haven't used it in some time, so I want to read through their writeup and see if there are new tips I can leverage.