INTERACT FORUM

2TB!

I bought 1.5TB drives for $120 a while back--they were resting there last I checked...bought quite a few of them.

That's actually not such an amazing deal.  Both the 2TB WD Caviar Green and the Seagate 2TB LP drive are currently $139.99 with free shipping at Newegg.  The 2TB Caviar Green is very similar to the Seagate LP drive that I'm sure Microcenter is selling here.  The Seagate is a tiny bit faster than the WD low-power drive in general performance, but it has it's own problems (Random Write transaction rate problems and IOMeter problems typical of Seagate drives), but overall is a good drive.  I'm still leery of Seagate drives after all of the problems they had with data corruption and bricked drives on their 1TB models last year and the year before, though.

Here's a review of the Seagate LP 2TB drive: http://techreport.com/articles.x/17708/1

I'm in once they're closer to $200.

$ 200 used to be my threshold for disk drive purchases.  Now it is $ 100.

$ 140 for 2 TB does give me a twitch though.

Bill

I want a 2TB Caviar Black.  But they're still hard to find and really expensive.

I'm in once they're closer to $200.

I have three of them on order for a RAID-5 volume for my new MacPro (2 x 4-core Nehalem Xeons is going to rock).  I'm looking forward to it, but the drives are backordered 4 weeks out...

The key is not inexpensive storage prices, it's inexpensive/rapid restore & recovery options.

But thanks to cheap drives, most everyone can afford to go with Raid1 and freeware SMART monitoring software.  Almost anything else is a serious, error-prone PITA.

No thanks on RAID for me.  It doesn't protect against most of the problems that require recovery.  2 real backups fit my needs - one on-site and one off-site.

My experience with modern hard drives has been quite good.  Drive failure or loss has not been common for me but when it happens, I'd better have be prepared with a backup that works and a plan.

Bill

Can we discuss a bit about storage space in a context of a multimedia center? For collectors but otherwise normal people . Which don't need $1000 RAID controller, don't need +400MB/s transfer speed since you gonna kill any gigabit connection long before, etc. I need lots of (preferably contiguous) space - 20 to 40TB - and recovery (or anything that brings the risk of losing data to acceptable/manageable levels, meaning I can compensate without spending 6 months re-ripping Blu-Rays). Within these need/don't need parameters - what works best?

BTW I moved on the WD green ones at $139 but this not being perfect timing for me, I only ordered 4 to see what's what (never had a WD HDD in a very long while) and to deal with the more immediate needs. It took me an hour or so to find the TLER utility for them (planning to see how they behave in various RAID setups).

Also got a Crucial SSD. I guess those guys at Newegg were waiting just for me to be the last buyer at that price, 'cause they dropped it $14 this morning. The irony...!

+1 - Raid is not a Backup solution.  I use a compact 5 drive WHS to backup all my data on OS partitions from all PC's in the house (which I can unplug and take away offsite if needed).  Raid is great if you need the performance gain or uptime that RAID can deliver.

I agree that RAID is not a backup solution.  However, it can make it far less likely that you will actually need the backup, and even cheap onboard RAID5 can provide substantial random read performance benefits.  I run a RAID5 volume for my main media drive, but I also back it up daily to an external drive (and monthly to an offsite location).  I have certainly lost drives before due to hardware failure, but this system protects me well.

The 3x2TB drives I mentioned above on order are for a video editing workstation where I need the read/write performance and the data redundancy.

x3 on raid is not a backup solution.  A backup, to be useful, MUST be disconnected and removed from the source machine.

remember though that your hot swap drives are ageing out at the same rate as your in-use drives.

remember though that your hot swap drives are ageing out at the same rate as your in-use drives.

Drive "aging" is not just a function of the length of time the spindle has been spinning.  In fact, the spinning spindle is probably the least significant physical factor that leads to drive failure (generally only affecting drive bearings that wear out).  Bit-rot (the physical sectors becoming damaged over time due to write/re-write cycle usage) and the servo drive head seeking mechanism are far more likely to be the culprits in drive failures.  In fact, in always-on systems, a constantly spinning disk is less hard on the bearings than one that parks constantly.  The startup and spindown are what causes the most wear-and-tear on the bearings.  Once it is spinning at full speed, it takes very little additional energy to keep it going.  Momentum does most of the work.

Now, before you mention it... I am certainly aware that Google released a study that showed that age is the primary factor (over heat and usage patterns) in drive failure.  They found that drives under 1 year old and over 3 years old were far more likely to die than those between 1-3 years old, and that heat and usage patterns were not a statistically significant factor in predicting drive failure (the bathtub curve).  However, as the Google researchers readily admit in the PDF itself, the Google data usage patten on the drives they tracked was quite specific to their business, and does not correlate well to wider usage models.  Substantial questions can be raised over whether their "datacenter style" usage patterns represent the usage patterns of most multimedia enthusiasts that would be interested in this discussion here.  For example: Google's drives were used very heavily for reads, and very lightly for writes, and most writes done were random-access and relatively small in size.  This certainly does not match the pattern of my use of my RAID-5 media volume.

Even if you ignore all of these facts, the chances that three drives would fail at the exact same time (or four in the case of a RAID-6 volume with 1 hot spare) is infinitesimally small, barring a major physical catastrophe.  Again, I agree... RAID does not negate the need for a secondary backup mechanism.  It won't protect against natural disaster, and it won't protect against user error (deleting or overwriting files in error).  However, this doesn't mean that a well-designed RAID system isn't useful!  It certainly is!  It does effectively mitigate the primary cause of data loss - catastophic drive failure, as well as provides substantial performance benefits.

I have 2 problems.

1) With the shifting from home use to enterprise solutions. I'm a home user. Sticking with the movies for the purpose of the exercise, so far it was more or less a linear equation: rip more movies, need more space, buy new HDDs. The moment you move to an enterprise solution you stop paying for storage alone. You pay for everything, including the position of the clouds in the sky.

20 x 2TB WD Green at current (discounted) prices = $2800

Areca 1280ML -> ~$1050. Say again? Does it come with a TV, too? It's more then a third of the storage itself. I'm curious what did they put on it that's the equivalent of (arguably) 4 Xeon processors?? That chip on it that does XOR calculation, etc it's an Intel 800MHz IOP341 I/O. I'd like to know, if more knowledgeable people can explain it, what am I paying for?

Then come little aspects that you guys touched on already. Keep the array up. Well I'm not at home most of the day, so the thing will work let's say 5 hours a day daily and 24/7 on weekends. Fort the rest of time I'll just use 350-400W for... I don't know, heating the room with the array? That doesn't work in summer. But the electrical bill will get bigger regardless. More cost just to keep the elephant up all the time for no good.

Well, you power it up and down, the probability your drives will fail increases. Well there are 2 ways to look at this. You're a slave of the statistics that tell you have to go with RAID-6 for that many drives and keep them running at all times, or you don't (I acknowledge that very few people don't). Well if you're a business you'll go with the statistics; but I'm a home user. Here I have a problem. My life experience I can't find it in statistics. My mess of 15 drives, of various sizes and brands, going back to 300GB Maxtors are powered up and down around 300 times a year, for the last 5 years (the oldest) and no one failed. Including the 1.5TB Seagate that's red flagged everywhere. So, I don't dispute the statistics, but I'm wondering if there isn't some kind of psychosis induced to make you buy more expensive solutions - "YOUR DRIVES WILL FAIL!". And again, I'm not a business; remember how many hours I said I use this every day.

If the enterprise solution is the only solution I'll go with one. But I find there's some luck of interest to explore other, in-between solutions.

2) How much space. 40 TB sounds good (rounded up, assuming parity goes to some extra drives). But there is a scenario this won't do. If they start releasing series on Blu-ray. Battlestar Galactica is a 1TB affair, and that's just a 4 seasons series. I have something like 25 series already, mostly not in HD. If I'd be to upgrade them to Blu-ray specs, 40TB suddenly doesn't sound so much. Luckily I'm not one of those guys with 10000 DVD in their collection. That would really require more.

So what else is there? Backblaze and 45 drives in one case? I'm not exactly sure how they run it - port multipliers and software RAID 6 in Linux? The case, the backplanes, the dual PSU, the port multipliers make... I don't know $1500-1700 (I've no idea if they actually sell it like that, but there's at least one blog out there with a guy that used the design). And again no $1000 RAID controller.

Thoughts?

I don't have anything so fancy... I just use the Intel Storage Matrix RAID built into my P55 motherboard with four drives in an external Addonics box.  It certainly doesn't have the performance of those fancy $1500 cards, but so what... It is still better than a single SATA spinning drive!

Now I'm up to a 31.5TB server and it started with under 25% full but lately has been creeping toward 35%.

I have to wonder if there isn't some kind of paradigm: if you have the space, you will find ways to fill it up. 10 times faster than expected

Regarding the 400MB/s, I've been seeing numbers from different places listing stuff like

Read performance: 1.2 GB/s
Write performance: 350 MB/s.

on RAID-6 software on Linux, with XFS, with 20TB arrays. I'm far for being proficient with Linux to do this kind of stuff, but if it works, it seriously cuts the cost of the whole rig.

BTW, for anybody interested in easy reading , the guys over at [H]ard Forum have plenty of ideas.

2nd for total space in one chassis.  If I include all the space on all the drives around -- or simply my new and old server, that's 38.5TB.

Mehhh, I'm fine with my 31.5TB.  It's doing quite well for me and doesn't create a ton of work for me--just hums quietly and works well.