Does anyone have moderate experience with 4TB hard drives? Any brand, any feedback. Preferably in RAID (RAID anything). I have been buying piles of 2TB raw drives by the case. They have been mediocre at best (but what do you expect from a $100 retail drive). Wondering if the 4TB drives are any better/worse. I can double my space/size however it also means doubling my rebuild times. Any feedback appreciated. These would be going into 16-drive RAID 6 arrays using LSI adapters.
Been using WD RED Nas 4gb for a few months, aside from a few DoAs, everything has been fine. Secret with back up is to make 2 not 1 and store them in different safe locations. For actually 24/7 drive usage I use Samsung SSDs not mechanical ones.
I have to price out a 200TB array for a client this week. This is 24/7/365 uptime, hot-spares, zero down time, etc. etc. 3TB platter size is junk so needs to be either 2TB or 4TB, just wondering about failure rates. I know there are a few guys who lurk around but don't post. If anyone wants to comment I'm welcome. I'm also trying to stick a 16-port Super Micro backplane into a Dell 3u box (common modification) and wondering if anyone has had issues with heat causing drive failures due to the increased density??? Thanks
I have been using one Hitachi HGST Touro 4TB external drive for a couple of years now. Worked okay so far, with no problem. I know this may not be what you were looking for. They do have internal versions. This model: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145596
I guess there's 2 ways to look at it - (1) do you want to pay $$$ up-front for reliability and longevity you get with SAS drives, or (2) pay as you go, buying boatloads of cheap desktop SATA drives and swapping them out/rebuilding the array as they fail. My preference was/is always #1. I liked to sleep. And hated the tedium of emergency maintenance at 2:30 am. What's your time worth? How cheap are your clients?
The requirements we have are 128mb of cache and 7200rpm. Only four drives show up on newegg with those specs and they range from $329 to $389 (SAS drive being most expensive). It really does not matter at that level, they are all enterprise. I assume our pricepoint would be lower - around $200/drive since we would be buying roughly 100 drives. The most we could shove into a 4U chassis is 48 drives. If we used 3 drives as hot spares (one per 16-port backplane) then we'd be looking at about 160TB of usable space - which isn't quite enough so we are looking to possibly build two 4U boxes 160TB each so there isn't a single point of failure... at that rate it's going to be a 120 drive purchase and a fun project. The backplanes are SATA only - I'm sure we may be able to get SAS or a SATA to SAS adapter but SATA is fine for these purposes.