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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

#141

Post by userbinator »

justinclift wrote: post #122
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…

Meanwhile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

I guessed what that would be before clicking. Yes, HDDs are extremely sensitive to any vibration.

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

#142

Post by userbinator »

ranma42 wrote: post #107
mmaunder wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem isn't just slower seeks; it's when vibration causes the head to go off-track and write data where it shouldn't, faster than the servo can correct. Track pitch in modern hard drives is only a few dozen nanometers.

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

#143

Post by justsomehnguy »

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…

As someone with a bit of experience on this topic:

HDDs doesn't like micromovements. If you put it on a pink foam mat (both a computer and yoga ones) it wouldn't matter. If you 'rigid mount' it but your screws would came lose then your HDD wouldn't like it because it wo&ld result in microvibrations from the self induced oscillations.

Rubber washers are good because they eat those microvibrations. The hard foam which is talked about in the linked article is not good because it is bad from the all aspects - too hard to eat up microvibrations, too soft to be a rigid mount.

The worst thing you can do is to rigid mount an HDD to a case which is a subject to a constant vibration load eg from a heavy duty fan or some engine.

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

#144

Post by justsomehnguy »

ranma42 wrote: post #107
mmaunder wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think OP is talking about something quite different.

Can you give a pic or link on what you are using?

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

#145

Post by userbinator »

cm2187 wrote: post #109
userbinator wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

Endurance and retention are inversely correlated, and as I mentioned in my original comment, enterprise DC drives are designed to advertise the former at the expense of the latter. The industry standard used to be 5 years retention for consumer and 3 months for enterprise, after reaching the specified TBW. The wear level SMART counter reflects that; "96% remaining" on an enterprise drive may be 40% or less on a consumer one having written the same amount, since the latter is specified to hold the data for longer once its rating has been reached.

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

#146

Post by justsomehnguy »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #130
matt-p wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you need this you are far better off buying SSDs than wasting time on these silly ideas.

How much would 18TB of SSDs cost compared to 18TB of HDDs? Probably a big reason why many go for HDDs still today.

SSDs are still roughly 3x per $/Tb. You can get a 8Tb QVO SATA drive for a like ~$300 so... ~$40/Tb

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

#147

Post by Aurornis »

markerz wrote: post #21
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason you don’t see videos arranged by product is because everyone knows not to trust unknown creators telling you how great a product is. Viewers want to see opinions from specific people they’ve come to trust, not the first video that comes up for a product.

Alternatively, unknown creators have less incentive to falsely promote or lie. It’s the reason I tend to trust random strangers on Reddit than popular YouTubers who have achieved monetization and sponsorship.

No, that’s the opposite of how it works.

I’ve seen how PR firms interact with creators. It’s much easier to get the small time creators to take your product and make a positive video because getting some free product is the biggest payout they’re getting from their channel. They will always give positive reviews because they have more to gain from flattering the companies that send them free stuff than from the $1.50 they’re going to earn in ad money.

The PR firms who worked with the company I was at had a long list of small time video creators who would reliably produce positive videos of something as long as you sent them a free product. The creators know this game.

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

#148

Post by cm2187 »

userbinator wrote: post #145
cm2187 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

Endurance and retention are inversely correlated, and as I mentioned in my original comment, enterprise DC drives are designed to advertise the former at the expense of the latter. The industry standard used to be 5 years retention for consumer and 3 months for enterprise, after reaching the specified TBW. The wear level SMART counter reflects that; "96% remaining" on an enterprise drive may be 40% or less on a consu…

Retention is offline retention. Not online. So not sure what point you are trying to make. If it is that SSDs shouldn't be used for cold storage, yeah I agree, and enterprise SSds aren't designed for cold storage. But you seem to be linking retention to TBW, which are largely orthogonal metrics. If you are going to use the SSDs in a NAS, which by definition are running all the time, why would you even care about the rentention rating?

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

#149

Post by _kb »

aftbit wrote: post #139
_kb wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of a trend of vendors packaging mobile CPUs in desktop form factor which are a good candidate for this. Rather than the prebuilt mini PCs this also includes mini-ITX boards. Personally I use the Minisforum BD795i SE, but there are others too. Check for PCIe bifurcation support. If that's there you can pop in a PCIe to quad M.2 adapter. That will split a PCIe x16 slot into 4 x M.2s. Each of those (and th…

This sounds like a really nice setup. Which M.2 to SATA adapters are you using? I've heard some of those are dodgy and others are alright.

I don’t at the moment. This setup is new and my current hot storage needs are pretty minimal so I’m all in on NVMe. When that changes though thats the expansion plan. ASM1166 based boards seem to be an ok choice, but don’t have any personal recs there (yet).

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

#150

Post by LorenPechtel »

dragontamer wrote: post #37
LorenPechtel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAID. Preferably RAID 6. Much, much better to build a system to survive failure than to prevent failure.

Don't RAID these days. Software won rather drastically, likely because CPUs are finally powerful enough to run all those calculations without much of a hassle. Software solutions like Windows Storage Spaces, ZFS, XFS, unRAID, etc. etc are "just better" than traditional RAID. Yes, focus on 2x parity drive solutions, such as ZFS's "raidz2", or other such "equivalent to RAID6" systems. But just focus on software solutio…

Software or hardware, it's still the same basic concept.

Redundancy rather than individual reliability.

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