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-rigid mount. Around 20 years ago it was a short-lived fad in the silent-PC community to suspend drives on rubber bands, and many of those who did that experienced unusually short drive lifetimes and very high seek error rates. Elasticity is the worst, since it causes the actuator arm to oscillate. The ideal mount is as rigid as possible.
Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
91–100 of 163 posts
Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uhh could you provide a hook for such a deal? I've been starving for more storage and can now handle a rack mounted system but have been avoiding dropping $1000 on a pair of new hard drives.
I just missed an ebay opportunity to get a dell r730xd with 12x 12tb drives for around 400 dollars. if you're willing to wait and bid-snipe you can find deals like that routinely; just wait to find one with the size drives you want. if you just need the drives similar lot sales are available for high power-on time zero errors enterprise drives. I bought a lot of 6x 6tb drives two weeks ago for 120 usd and they all wo…
I have a a case with several 3.5" bays and a truenas server happily running. I've been running an all-flash array because I had a bright-eyed vision of the future. At this point a very cheap pile of unreliable spinning rust is exactly what I need. Thanks for the tips.
Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
#93I admire the courage to store data on refurbished Seagate hard drives. I prefer SSD storage with some backups using cloud cold storage, because I’m not the one replacing the failing hard drives.
And I prefer to have a healthy bank account balance. Storing 18TB (let alone with raid) on SSDs is something only those earning Silicon Valley tech wages can afford.
We bought a few Kioxia 30.72 TiB SSDs for a couple of thousand in a liquidation sale. Sadly, I don't work there any more or I could have looked it up. U.2 drives if I recall, so you do need either a PCIe card or the appropriate stuff on your motherboard but pretty damn nice drives.
Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
#94I'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…
A fortune? I'm getting 14tb SAS drives "recertified" on ebay for 150usd. Substantially less than most other sources of hard drives.
Depending on your drive enclosure it should also be able to power down drives that aren't actively being used.
Recertified/used enterprise equipment is the only way to affordably host 100s of terabytes at home.
Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Don't RAID these days. Software won rather drastically RAID does not mean or imply hardware RAID controllers, which you seem to incorrectly assume. Software RAID is still 100% RAID.
And 'softRAID', like what is on for free on Intel motherboards or AMD Motherboards suck and should be avoided.
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The best advice I can give is to use a real solution like ZFS, Storage Spaces and the like.
It's not sufficient to say 'Use RAID' because within the Venn Diagram of things falling under RAID is a whole bunch of shit solutions and awful experiences.
Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
#96These drives are very likely refurbs that are unofficial. White labeling avoids lawsuits.
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Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Been using like 7 external usb drives with 40-50tb total for a few years with no issues. Not raid, just backing up drive to drive. No controller or drive issues. Mix of seagate and wd 8/12/16gb. I hate blanket recommendations like this by docs. To me, it just sounds like some guy had a problem a few times and now it's canon. It's like saying "avoid Seagate because their 3tb drives sucked." Well they did, but now they…
you say
> 40-50tb total
> 8/12/16gb
How many drives are those?
You are kidding.
Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
#98What exactly are these "white label drives"? Aren't these just normal seagate exos drives with SMART information wiped and labels removed? i.e. just a worse used drive.
The "OS" on the drive stands for "off-spec". As far as I understand, here's where they come from:
1. A large company (think cloud storage provider or something) wanting to build out storage infrastructure buys a large amount of drives from Seagate.
2. When the company receives the drives from Seagate, they randomly sample from the lot to make sure the drives are fully functional and meet specifications.
3. The company identifies issues from the sampled drives. These can range from dents/dings in the casing or torn labels to firmware or reliability issues.
4. The company returns the entire lot to Seagate as defective. Seagate now doesn't want anything to do with these drives, so they relabel them as "OS" with no Seagate branding and sell them as-is at a discount to drive resellers.
5. The drive resellers may or may not do further testing on the drives (you can probably tell by how much of a warranty a given reseller offers) before selling them onto people wanting cheap storage.
Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
#99I admire the courage to store data on refurbished Seagate hard drives. I prefer SSD storage with some backups using cloud cold storage, because I’m not the one replacing the failing hard drives.
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 spec sheets and realizing that all but the best consumer drives have miserably low DWPD numbers I switched to enterprise (U.2 style) two years ago. I slam them with logs, metrics data, backups, frequent writes and data transfers, and have had 0 failures.
Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me it was important to have ECC RAM and laptops pretty much never have that. My personal recommendation is an old IBM/Lenovo workstation tower as the base. I bought one for $35 on eBay and added $40 of RAM (32GB). A $10 UPS from Goodwill with a $25 battery from Amazon, and whatever hard drives you want. I run Ubuntu and ZFS on it but next time would probably opt for FreeBSD for a nicer OS.
Why is it important for an NAS to have ECC RAM?
When Bitrot happens, ECC catches it, where non-ecc doesn't