Building 24 Terabyte Media Server - Which 1TB HD for Raid5?

[odditory]

Hey guys, I am in the process of building a 24 Terabyte storage server, and I've got all the other components worked out but am not sure which 1TB harddrive to get. I'll be using dual 16-port raid controllers so I'll have 2x150GB Raptors in Raid1, 16x1Tb drives in RAID5 and 8x1Tb drives in another RAID5.

I'm torn between the Western Digital 5400RPM ("green power") 1TB drive and the Seagate 1TB drive. I like Seagate's 5-year warranty for the sake of not having a 250-dollar paper weight when a drive dies (much higher likelihood with 24 drives). I've also heard Western Digital has some kind of TLER bug that doesn't let it play nice with raid controllers - i.e. the drive tries to do its own error correction and the raid controller kicks the drive(s) out of the array.

Since I'm primarily looking at long-term storage of data not frequently accessed, 5400rpm seems like a good choice, but then again this server will be sitting in an area and in a case where noise or cooling aren't an issue, so I guess I couldn't go wrong with extra performance of 7200rpm, although factoring in a high-end RAID5 controller who knows if the extra performance will even be noticeable.

http://www.supermicro.com/a_images/products/Chassis/4U/SC846TQ-R900B_spec.jpg

Thoughts? If anyone has a link to a killer deal on 1Tb drives right now, please post as well! There was a $219 deal for a 1Tb external drive utilizing a WD greenpower 1tb drive inside, was on buy.com a week ago and i missed it.

[XS Janus]

WOW talk about future proof!

I would look into the whole Raid issue with WD drives.
Maybe you should ask them directly, say how many u plan to use maybe that will soften them up maybe U can even get a discount :D

The reason I'm saying is this cause if you plan on using so many of those drives you WILL really see a benefit of lower consumption and it would be a shame to miss on this opportunity now.
cca. 2.4kW a day in savings is a lot of $$$ in a year, even if the waranty proves to short.

[Lev]

i suggest http://www.amazon.com/Solar-Energy-Projects-Evil-Genius/dp/0071477721/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198544493&sr=8-1

cover your house's roof with solar panels and youll be set...

[Monkeywoman]

id go for the seagate. 7200rpm, and faster then the raptor.

[Polizei]

I would go Seagate just based on the warranty. Yeah, RAID 5 with lotsa data security, but still. They perform well too.

[mak1skav]

You can have a look at the new Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB Hdd.

[cantankerous]

Why not the Hitachi 7K1000?

[Spoudazo]

Western Digital!

Too many bad experiences with other driver makers. :p

[catsarecute]

id go for the seagate. 7200rpm, and faster then the raptor.

i can a 7200 rpm drive could be faster than a 10 000 rpm drive??:shrug:

[Starscream]

i can a 7200 rpm drive could be faster than a 10 000 rpm drive??:shrug:

it has faster reads and writes then a raptor but the raptor stil has faster access time

[catsarecute]

And a faster access time mean its faster no?

[Pudi]

in terms of visual effect this case would be much better choice :rofl:

http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/5174/dsc05233xo7.jpg

http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/6291/dsc05238uv9.jpg

[XS Janus]

^ Holy server batman!

[Lev]

holy crap thats a lot of hard drives, i didnt even know that even SERVER motherboards had THAT many sata ports..

[The_Beast]

very nice :up:

[SNiiPE_DoGG]

Get the Hitachi Ultrastar drives, they are rated to a ridiculous amount of lifetime 1.6 million hours IIRC

[XS Janus]

@ Pudi: what case is that in your pics and is the build yours?:D

[Pudi]

@ Pudi: what case is that in your pics and is the build yours?:D
Yes and no :D pictured case isn't mine, but I have the same case only slightly bigger :D

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y75/pudi/P1010080.jpg

[Death^Dread]

holy crap thats a lot of hard drives, i didnt even know that even SERVER motherboards had THAT many sata ports..

motherboard raid controllers usually aren't up to snuff.
anybody serious enough to have an array that large wouldn't be using motherboard controllers anyway.

[Movieman]

Yes and no :D pictured case isn't mine, but I have the same case only slightly bigger :D

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y75/pudi/P1010080.jpg

I'm sorry but :banana::banana::banana::banana: like this isn't allowed to be shown on a PG rated forum.
Damn..:rofl:

[stevecs]

Just to add a point here as I already have a 24TB raid system (and it's nearly full, so I'm looking to go to a 48TB system as soon as I decide on a the layout). Anyway, I was 'wooed' by the lower power of the WD 1TB drives but they kept falling out of of the raid (WD just can't get raid to work right worth a damn). Luckily I was able to send those back and instead got the seagate 1TB NS drives (nearline storage). great drives, zero problems and I've been hitting them very hard for the past 2 months with burn-in testing.

another comment would be that if you DO decide to go w/ non enterprise drives (ie, WD caviar, seagate 'AS' line, et al). remember the duty cycle of the drives. WD's (and pretty much all desktop hd's) for example are only rated for 8hours/day operation. if you're going to look for a longer-term solution and if you don't have a cold-spare drive laying around you need to also consider TTR (time to replace) the drive (replace & rebuild) in which case you're vulnerable to a data-loss event as well. So say it takes a week to get a drive your risk level is much higher (chance of a 2nd drive failure is more likely right after the first one goes). I would suggest raid-6 that way you at least have some added redundancy.

[XS Janus]

Yes and no :D pictured case isn't mine, but I have the same case only slightly bigger :D

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y75/pudi/P1010080.jpg


:shocked:
Yes OK, but WHAT case (ie model, brand ) is it?

[itznfb]

i'd go with a RAID10 solution. might get less usable space, but its much less maintenance and much more performance, especially if you're connecting via Gigabit or faster. as for the drive i'd go with the seagate ST31000340NS. or something along those lines. a drive built for arrays.

[stevecs]

itznfb;2656752']i'd go with a RAID10 solution. might get less usable space, but its much less maintenance and much more performance, especially if you're connecting via Gigabit or faster. as for the drive i'd go with the seagate ST31000340NS. or something along those lines. a drive built for arrays.

Faster yes, but less reliability than Raid-6. Raid 0 < Raid 5 < Raid 10 < Raid 6
Granted not by much w/ 24 drives, raid6 is about 2x more reliable. With 24 enterprise (ST31000340NS) drives all in a single array you get MTTDL (MTTR & BER) of:

(chance data loss due to drive hardware failures (specific to 24 ST31000340NS's)):
RAID0: 3.24 years
RAID10: 25.3 years
RAID5: 14.2 years
RAID6: 33.8 years

[Pudi]

:shocked:
Yes OK, but WHAT case (ie model, brand ) is it?

Lian Li Cube PC 343B and my super chiller, I'll be selling it next week, everything brand spanking new.

Sorry for OT guys :rolleyes:

[itznfb]

i'm not all that familiar with RAID6.... wouldn't there be more "un-utilized" drives contributing to the total storage? as for failure rate on RAID10 does it matter much? a drive fails you stick in a new one and all better...

[stevecs]

RAID-10 is the least-efficient in drive space (50&#37; used for the redundancy). RAID-5 the most efficient in space (uses 1 drive for parity). RAID-6 is next, it uses 2 drives (p & q parity).

So for 24 1TB drives you'll have:
RAID0: 21.8TiB
RAID10: 10.9 TiB
RAID5: 20.9 TiB
RAID6: 20.0TiB

As for faliure-repair the 'stick a drive in' is pretty much true for all raid's. The issue w/ raid-10 is that it's actually a bunch of raid-1's stripped together (sets of two drives). so if you lose two drives of the same 'pair' you're entire array is gone. whereas in raid six you can lose _any_ two drives and still have data. (your 3rd drive failure is the data-loss event).

[XS Janus]

How well would this system perform in terms of lets say 3 users using the server and copying lots of data from and to server at the same time on a 1gb home network?

What can one expect from file copy speeds on this?

What would be the important component to maintain the most performance to the user experience?

[stevecs]

Depends, based on file size, filesystem overhead (this is probably the biggest killer of performance), and raid controllers. No hard numbers but generally files <1MiB in size if that's your average are a killer in performance. Most of my files are over 100MIB easily and I've had numerous computers on the network pulling data at the same time over GigE and fully saturating the link. Right now using samba for my striker system I normally get about 50-60MiB/sec per file (smb protocol just sucks). I can get multiple streams (or more computers) and each can do 50MiB each for two systems to the same box so it's the per-thread smb overhead that's killing that.

I don't see you having much of a problem with 3-4 users unless you have high expectations in which case you could always put a 10GbE nic in your server and have each client have GigE.