Best hard disks for Microserver
Discussion
Murph7355 said:
I've been using Western Digital Reds for the last few years.
Prior to that I had Seagate Barracudas, but they started to fail too much. The WD's had a good reputation for longevity and are proving OK thus far.
Same here, I have few Qnap NAS boxes at work and they all came with 3TB Barracudas, bought within 20 months from each other so I can't blame a faulty batch. I had at least one failing each month until I replaced all with WD Reds, absolutely no issues with over 30 drives. Highly recommended. Prior to that I had Seagate Barracudas, but they started to fail too much. The WD's had a good reputation for longevity and are proving OK thus far.
The WD Reds have a few extra features over WD Greens; TLER support, useful in RAID Arrays, a listed MTBF of 1,000,000 hours, plus a 3 year warranty. They also have a longer head parking delay and 3D Active Balance (vibration damping.)
However we have Greens in our NAS boxes with no issues (Yet.) We also have a Seagate Barracuda 500GB running in a Dell Precision workstation since 2010. It has no SMART errors or other problems, so it's become a curiosity, like those light old bulbs that never burn out.
The question of RAID 1 over no RAID is harder to answer, RAID 1 doubles your storage cost, (halves the total capacity) but most NAS boxes will re-sync a RAID 1 pair if a single drive is replaced.
So, Reds is good, SSD's tend not to show much improvement, as the transfer speeds from many NAS boxes are fairly low, even over wired Gigabit Ethernet (10 MB/sec on some of them.)
If it's a critical NAS, then adding an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) feed is a cheap way to keep it happy.
However we have Greens in our NAS boxes with no issues (Yet.) We also have a Seagate Barracuda 500GB running in a Dell Precision workstation since 2010. It has no SMART errors or other problems, so it's become a curiosity, like those light old bulbs that never burn out.
The question of RAID 1 over no RAID is harder to answer, RAID 1 doubles your storage cost, (halves the total capacity) but most NAS boxes will re-sync a RAID 1 pair if a single drive is replaced.
So, Reds is good, SSD's tend not to show much improvement, as the transfer speeds from many NAS boxes are fairly low, even over wired Gigabit Ethernet (10 MB/sec on some of them.)
If it's a critical NAS, then adding an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) feed is a cheap way to keep it happy.
Edited by Slushbox on Monday 12th June 07:03
mikef said:
Yes, designed for always-on operation
I run two NAS's with Reds, and can recommend them for noise, heat and reliability. I'd think twice about disk size though, 4x1TB disks in RAID-10 is less than 2 GB usable space
A good reason not to use RAID 10. Life was much simpler when it only went up to 5 I run two NAS's with Reds, and can recommend them for noise, heat and reliability. I'd think twice about disk size though, 4x1TB disks in RAID-10 is less than 2 GB usable space
In all seriousness, with a 3+ disk array I still see little to no reason to use anything other than RAID 5 (and do myself). RAID 1 has merits occasionally. But 5 gives a good balance of performance, reliability and capacity IMO.
Disks don't fail anywhere near as often as they used to, and there are plenty of warning signs that a decent array will report back on. I just make sure I replace any disk that starts throwing warnings immediately (and quite possibly have some reasonably serviceable disks sat in a draw waiting to be destroyed as a result
).This does raise one more challenge though - you store a lot of data on a NAS and need to think about what you will do if the unit itself (rather than the disks) fails and how you will back it up (RAID is NOT a replacement for a good backup/recovery solution).
Once you start admitting you need RAID, you need to get a second unit of equivalent size and back the whole array up to it IMO. Preferably in a different location and preferably with "fire breaks" applied to try to prevent issues with malware etc. (Call it manual RAID 10
).HantsRat said:
Is it worth getting SSD's?
...
Not in my opinion. I'm not convinced they're great for the hammer a NAS can give to disks. Sounds counter intuitive with SSDs having no moving parts etc...but NAS units can/do run warm very easily and this is not the friend of SSDs. They also didn't used to have great longevity with either excessive read or write cycles (can't recall which. Think it was read). I'll admit that my recent experience of SSDs is relatively limited though....
They're also expensive byte for byte.
HantsRat said:
I'm pretty sure the HP Microserver doesn't support RAID 5.
It probably only supports mirroring or striping, most basic systems do.For RAID 5 and beyond, you'd need a proper third party RAID controller.
Also - if you plan to use it with Linux, the built i RAID likely won't work either, as it's usually 'host raid' which means the O/S and driver does all the work.
Linux will simply see it as JBOD.
If you want proper RAID, just buy an HP P410 RAID controller off Ebay.
You can pick them up for around £25 - you just need one with a low profile bracket IIRC.
Also - IIRC - the microserver back plane sata connectors will plug straight into the P410.
The P410 also has good O/S support, including VMWare ESXi.
You can pick them up for around £25 - you just need one with a low profile bracket IIRC.
Also - IIRC - the microserver back plane sata connectors will plug straight into the P410.
The P410 also has good O/S support, including VMWare ESXi.
Not sure which OS you're looking at but I currently use Rockstsor on an HP Microserver (N40L) with WD Red but as Raid 1.
Rockstor uses a BTRFS file system which, from what i understand, has series issues of potential data loss with RAID 5/6 at the moment (there is meant to be an upcoming fix in Kernel 4.12). You are supposed to be able to convert to a different RAID type on BTRFS though. Which is my plan if the fix actually happens.
Rockstor uses a BTRFS file system which, from what i understand, has series issues of potential data loss with RAID 5/6 at the moment (there is meant to be an upcoming fix in Kernel 4.12). You are supposed to be able to convert to a different RAID type on BTRFS though. Which is my plan if the fix actually happens.
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