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Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

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Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#101

Post by _cenw »

dragontamer wrote: post #35
aftbit wrote: post #34

I've been considering "de-enterprising" my home storage stack to save power and noise and gain something a bit more modular. Currently I'm running on an old NAS 1U machine that I bought on eBay for about $300, with a raidz2 of 12x 18TB drives. I have yet to find a good way to get nearly that much storage without going enterprise or spending an absolute fortune. I'm always interested in these DIY NAS builds, but they…

I have to imagine that the best NAS build is simply a 6-core or 8-core standard AMD or Intel with a few HBA controllers and maybe 10Gbit SPF+ fiber or something. "Old server hardware" for $300 is a bit of a variation, in that you're just buying something from 5 years ago so that its cheaper. But if you want to improve power-efficiency, buy a CPU from today rather than an old one. -------- IIRC, the "5 year old used m…

For AMD Zen, they have power consumption overhead on all chiplet designs, even if the chip only has one core complex, the separate IO die makes it hard to get idle power consumption under 30W.

Usually the chips with explicitly integrated GPUs (G-suffix, or laptop chips) are monolithic and can hit 10W or lower.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#102

Post by _cenw »

toast0 wrote: post #40
aftbit wrote: post #34

I've been considering "de-enterprising" my home storage stack to save power and noise and gain something a bit more modular. Currently I'm running on an old NAS 1U machine that I bought on eBay for about $300, with a raidz2 of 12x 18TB drives. I have yet to find a good way to get nearly that much storage without going enterprise or spending an absolute fortune. I'm always interested in these DIY NAS builds, but they…

If you want 100TB, you need a bigger NAS than most, and that makes most of the DIY NAS not so good. 2-4 drives seems to be where DIY shines. These days motherboards often stop at 4x sata, so you'll need a HBA or USB (eww). Personally, I just don't have that much data, 24TB mirrored for important data is probably enough, and I have my old mirror set avaialable for media like recorded tv and maybe dvds and blu-rays if…

We run 48TB (after redundancy, 3 striped mirrors) over a USB enclosure (TerraMaster D6-320) and it's honestly not as bad as people say. The only failure this system experienced in the past few years was due to noisy power causing a reset, and the ZFS root (not the data pool) becoming read only due to a write hole caused by a consumer NVMe (Crucial P3 Plus) lying about being synced (who could've expected that).

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#103

Post by mmaunder »

userbinator wrote: post #91

Reading the part about using foam to make these drives quieter, and the link to the author's other article about putting drives on foam, makes me write this obligatory warning: hard drives do not like non-rigid mounting. Yes, the servo can usually still position the heads on the right track (since it's a servo), but power dissipation will be higher, performance will be lower, and you may get more errors with a non-ri…

Thanks, very interesting. TIL.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#104

Post by bakugo »

beala wrote: post #24
leobg wrote: post #19

I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in. The author is using a ThinkPad T430. Any experiences?

The official TrueNAS docs recommend against using USB drives [1]. My understanding is that between the USB controller, flaky connectors and cables, and usb-to-sata bridges of varying quality, there are just too many unknowns to guarantee a reliable experience. For example, I’ve heard that some usb-to-sata controllers will drop commands and not report SMART data. That said, there are of course many people on the inter…

These shucked USB adapters from WD Elements external drives are pretty reliable, from my experience. They kinda have to be, since otherwise it would affect the reputation of WD's external drives as a whole.

Obviously, direct SATA is still better if possible, but if not, these are probably the next best thing.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#105

Post by smartbit »

cerved wrote: post #67
leobg wrote: post #19

I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in. The author is using a ThinkPad T430. Any experiences?

I own this and it's worth it's weight in gold https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-H-T... Yes. It's pricey but it's never been a problem. It can connect like 12 HDDs with 256GB ram and has 10GBe and runs at a tiny TDP. Has IPMI. Fits in a tiny case. The only issue I had with this motherboard was that it was difficult to find someone who sold it. Love it Also I don't see the built-in UPS. The exter…

How much power does it use?

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#106

Post by smartbit »

oceanplexian wrote: post #99
Aurornis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also prefer having a large number of high capacity SSDs so I could replace my spinning hard drives. But even the cheapest high capacity SSD deals are still a lot more expensive than hard drive array. I’ll continue replacing failing hard drives for a few more years. For me that has meant zero replacements over a decade, though I planned for a 5% annual failure rate and have a spare drive in the case ready to g…

This is going to be a huge anecdote but all the consumer SSD I've had has been dramatically less reliable than HDDs. I've gone through dozens of little SATA and M2 drives and almost every single one of them has failed when put into any kind of server workload. However most of the HDDs I have from the last 10 years are still going strong despite sitting in my NAS and spinning that entire time. After going deep on the…

What file system are you using? ZFS is written with rotation rust in mind and assumingely will kill non-enterprise ssd.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#107

Post by ranma42 »

mmaunder wrote: post #103
userbinator wrote: post #91

Reading the part about using foam to make these drives quieter, and the link to the author's other article about putting drives on foam, makes me write this obligatory warning: hard drives do not like non-rigid mounting. Yes, the servo can usually still position the heads on the right track (since it's a servo), but power dissipation will be higher, performance will be lower, and you may get more errors with a non-ri…

Thanks, very interesting. TIL.

I've been mounting my 3.5" hard drives on those "fad" rubber band 5.25" drive bay adapters for decades and have not noticed any increased failure rate at all. Sure, seek time may be worse, but the reduced noise has been worth it for me.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#108

Post by cerved »

smartbit wrote: post #105
cerved wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own this and it's worth it's weight in gold https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-H-T... Yes. It's pricey but it's never been a problem. It can connect like 12 HDDs with 256GB ram and has 10GBe and runs at a tiny TDP. Has IPMI. Fits in a tiny case. The only issue I had with this motherboard was that it was difficult to find someone who sold it. Love it Also I don't see the built-in UPS. The exter…

How much power does it use?

Not a lot. Idk 25W TDP for the 16 core?

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#109

Post by cm2187 »

userbinator wrote: post #88
cm2187 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find cheap used enterprise SSDs on ebay. But the problem is that even the most power efficient enterprise SSD (SATA) idle at like 1w. And given the smaller capacities, you need many more to match a hard drive. In the end HDD might actually consume less power than an all flash array + controllers if you need a large capacity.

Used SSDs, especially enterprise ones, are a really bad idea unless you get some really old SLC parts. Flash wears out in a very obvious way that HDDs don't, and keep in mind that enterprise-rated SSDs are deliberately rated to sacrifice retention for endurance.

Agree on SSD for cold storage, that's not a good idea. But you would be surprised by how little used are typical used enterprise SSDs on ebay. This article matches my experience:

https://www.servethehome.com/we-bought-1347-used-data-center...

I bought over 200 over the last year, and the average wear level was 96%, and 95% had a wear above 88%.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#110

Post by adrian_b »

aftbit wrote: post #34

I've been considering "de-enterprising" my home storage stack to save power and noise and gain something a bit more modular. Currently I'm running on an old NAS 1U machine that I bought on eBay for about $300, with a raidz2 of 12x 18TB drives. I have yet to find a good way to get nearly that much storage without going enterprise or spending an absolute fortune. I'm always interested in these DIY NAS builds, but they…

If you want instant access to any bit of the 100 TB content, you need a wide NAS.

Otherwise, you can have a couple of HDD racks in which you can insert HDDs when needed (SATA allows live insertion and extraction, like USB).

Then you have an unlimited amount of offline storage, which can be accessed in a minute by swapping HDDs. You can keep an index of all files stored offline on the SSD of your PC, for easy searches without access to HDDs. The index should have all relevant metadata, including content hashes, for file integrity verification and for duplicate files identification.

Having 2 HDD racks instead of just 1 allows direct copies between HDDs and doubles the capacity accessible without swapping HDDs. Adding more than 2 adds little benefit. Moreover, some otherwise suitable MBs have only 2 SATA connectors.

Or else you can use an LTO drive, which is a very steep initial investment, but its cost is recovered after a few hundred TB by the much cheaper magnetic tapes.

Tapes have a worse access time, of the order of one minute after tape insertion, but they have much higher sequential transfer speeds than cheap SATA HDDs. Thus for retrieving big archive files or movies they save time. Transfers from magnetic tape must be done either directly to an NVME SSD or to an NVME SSD through Ethernet of 10 Gb/s or faster, otherwise their intrinsic transfer speed will not be reached.

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