Hard Drive Shopping

[Teckno 187]

Im looking for drives for two boxes:

1. A nice Core 2 setup to replace my old AthlonXP box as my main system. Its mainly used for games and video encoding/DVD authoring. A single fast drive (but not stupidly expensive) I think would fit the bill. I'm thinking something like this Western Digital would fit the bill?

2. My old AthlonXp box is going to be my new file/web server. I'm looking to get over a terabyte across a couple drives so I can set them to raid 5, not for speed but to protect against drive failures. I know its not the best but a 50% price increase for the extra drive sounds better then a 100% increase just for backup.

I'm a bit stumped on what to get for this, speed is not much of an issue, price and reliability is however very important. I have a 500gb IDE drive (that's in my current server) I could use and just get two more of those, but I'd hate to sink money in a somewhat dying interface.

It looks like a couple terabyte drives (one internal, one external backup) might be a good option too, but I like the idea of having over a terabyte since you never get the full 1000gb anyway.

btw, the future file server uses an Abit NF7-S Motherboard with 2 SATA ports (onboard raid controller) so suggestions on a good 4 port pci raid card (if raid is deemed a good idea) would be welcome

 

[996GT2]

WD6400AAKS would be very good for the former. Very fast read/write speeds (sometimes even faster than the Raptor 150)...and also very good value for money.

For the latter...I would suggest getting 2 WD6400AAKS drives in RAID 1 instead of RAID 5, since you need 3 drives for RAID 5 and the rebuild time is insane (in RAID 1 if one drive fails you just use the mirrored data on the other).

If you really want 1 TB or more of storage, then I would just get 3 WD6400AAKS drives and not bother with 500GB drives. The reason is that the new WD6400AAKS has an insanely high platter density of 320GB/platter (only 2 platters) so it's got better read/write performance than other drives with 3 or even 4 platters.

The price difference between a 500GB drive and a WD6400AAKS is only about $20, and I say that's worth it for getting 1.28GB of storage in RAID 5 (vs 1 TB) and better performance overall.

 

[supremelaw]

> suggestions on a good 4 port pci raid card (if raid is deemed a good idea) would be welcome

Take a look at the Promise TX4310:

The "Media Patrol" functions in the software are
alone worth the price of this PCI RAID card, imho:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16816102080


It's generally not a good idea to plow more than $150 into a PCI RAID card,
because the extra expense would be better spent on a low-end PCI-Express
motherboard w/ integrated video and low-end Celeron,
which can handle file serving just fine (i.e. mostly I/O anyway).

For example, I was briefly on an Internet Forum where users were pushing
PCI RAID cards costing more than $400. QED.

Caveat: some older motherboards support prior versions of the PCI standard;
for this reason, a Promise TX4310 may not work in one of those older PCI slots.



Sincerely yours,
/s/ Paul Andrew Mitchell, Inventor and
Webmaster, Supreme Law Library

All Rights Reserved without Prejudice

 

[Teckno 187]

WD6400AAKS all round it looks like. thanks

however, I was thinking more around $50-$60 for the raid card, what makes these "Media Patrol" functions so special?
keep in mind my current server is and old Dell GX100 Celeron using an uber cheap IDE raid card (although its currently just using a single drive). I find I runs just fine for me, I just need more space and didn't want to spend any more money on IDE drives.

 

[Teckno 187]

any reason not to go with this Rosewill RC-209

Its only 1.5Gb/s (not sata II) but I don't think ill get 3Gb/s anyway due to the pci bus.

Sata II drives are backward compatible right?

 

[QuixoticOne]

I'll second the Rosewill RC-209, I've got 5 x 300GB drives in a RAID-5 using this card (and one of the motherboard ports). It works, it's cheap. Actually look at all neweggs rosewill raid category cards, there are several models between $20 and $99.

Also RAID-5 is NOT a backup option. If you accidentally clicked on "delete" at the top of your filesystem it'd HAPPILY delete everything on the RAID-5, and there's no redundancy / backup that will help in such cases.

Also if you got a virus / malware that went out and started a "format" on the RAID drive letter -- again -- you'll be wishing you had a REAL (offline) backup.

As for drives, any of the 7200.10 / 7200.11 seagate or relabeled maxtor discs are fine. Samsung spinpoint. WD6400. I'd look at the anandtech and fatwallet "hot deals" forums for about 2-3 weeks or whatever your time limit is and simply find the best ones of any of those models when they're on sale without a prohibitive rebate. Look for messages about prices and suppliers from the past 6 months to get an idea of sale frequency, suppliers, and estimated cost variations.

Reliability? I think any of those models of drives will probably be suitable, however the seagates have the best warranty -- 5 years in the case of most of their drives. This is far better than most of the others. I'd consider buying them for that reason especially in a RAID-5.
Your chances of any drive failing short of the warranty period are not insignificant, and without a backup / redundant RAID the warranty would be poor comfort against the data loss. Having a backup / redundant setup, though, get the drive that will have the reasonably lowest cost of ownership over a couple year period. After 3 years you'll probably be replacing them with 2TB drives or whatever anyway.

If you're considering an expensive RAID card for its reliability / data security features, consider looking at OpenSolaris or secondarily FreeBSD and the ZFS filesystem for your software controlled RAID-5 needs in conjunction with a cheap JBOD (non raid) mode capable controller like the RC-209 / some other rosewill units. ZFS actually benefits from working with JBOD individually PC software controlled drives, NOT hardware RAID controlled drives. ZFS doesn't require that you have NVRAM backed RAID cards for reliable storage, it loves cheap discs and cheap controllers.
Due to the checksumming in the ZFS it gives you far better data security than most RAID-5 systems even if expensive hardware RAID controllers are used in conjunction with filesystems like NTFS / EXT3 / whatever.

It is pretty trivial to share your ZFS RAIDZ over a SAMBA/CIFS windows compatible file share setup (and also NFS if desired), so it'll work with all your client PCs whether they're Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/.../zfs/docs/zfs_last.pdf

 

[Teckno 187]

Thanks for the reply, My current server is actually running Debian so it shouldn't be too big a switch to FreeBSD or maybe even OpenSolaris, I do really like the idea of ZFS, and RaidZ looks awesome.

I understand the need for backups and was planing in getting an external drive down the road.

Thanks for your suggestions on the anandtech/fatwallet forums thing, I didn't think of that, I got too remember there are other places then newegg

 

[QuixoticOne]

Speaking of hot deals --
$109 shipped from Dell for some of the nice Seagate 1TB units, no rebate.
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2218039&enterthread=y

I'd get three for a RAIDZ unless you wanted to get a fourth as an "in the closet spare" for the day when one of the three active units dies to prevent much down-time waiting for a substitute.

I haven't seen a better deal on the seagate 1TB units or any comparable ones, especially if these have a 5 year warranty (which I assume they do -- didn't look since I'm still working on the migrating to the use of older 4x500GB RAIDZ setup).

I'd suggest OpenSolaris as a better implementation of ZFS than FreeBSD currently has since FreeBSD's one is based off of an older fork of the code, and they're a bit slow to catch up to Sun's latest fixes. If you want LINUX you could run LINUX x64 and a VirtualBox VM of OpenSolaris under that and just "give" Solaris access to the "raw" drives for its use in RAIDZ, and have the LINUX host run its EXT3 boot/root from a distinct small cheap non-raid drive.

 

[Teckno 187]

Does RAIDZ still require an extra drive just for parity (ie would I need 3 drives just to get 2 tbs) like raid 5?

I admit thats a great deal, but 300 just on drives... I still need to buy a PSU to power the 9800GX2 I got for the new system.

maybe just 2 and save for a backup solution

 

[QuixoticOne]

Yes you need 3 or more ideally identically sized drives to make a RAIDZ.
(1) drive's capacity is dedicated to distributed parity type redundancy distributed over the whole group.
(N-1) of the drives' capacities is available for user storage, just like a RAID-5 in this respect.

You can run a ZFS mirror instead of a RAIDZ with two (or more) drives. In a two drive mirror the data is just sort of redundantly copied across both discs so you have better data protection in the case of disk failure because of the redundant copy. Read operations will be faster in a mirror since it can parallelize both drives.

Yes, $109 x 3 for three drives is a bit expensive, though not that much moreso than say $79x3 for 3x500GB or $89x3 for 3x640 or whatever.
3x300GB units could probably be had on sale sometimes for around 3x$35 but that gives you 600GB usable capacity, less than you desired.


The web site is confusing and it is easy to download the 2008.05 older release of OpenSolaris.
Rather than that, you probably want the latest build 95 (B95) of
SXCE/ON (Solaris Express Community Edition Open Nevada) which is built to a new build number and
ISO image every 2 weeks.
In 2008.11 sometime around B100 time they'll resynchronize OpenSolaris / SXCE / ON and then there will be a new OpenSolaris major release. Around that time they should be introducing ZFS-crypto support too.

http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/#use
SXCE/ON DVD (Single Image) [B95 currently, B96 coming in 2 weeks or so] http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/sol_ex_dvd_1/

OpenSolaris 2008.11 Development Builds

Development builds are being released on a bi-weekly basis for work towards the next release of OpenSolaris, 2008.11. These updates have undergone limited testing, and thus may contain instabilities, and thus not recommended for inexperienced users. It is possible to update to these from an existing 2008.05 install using the pkg image-update command - please refer to the announcement for details of how to update. Additionally, torrents and ISO images are also available for those wanting to install the latest development base rather than upgrade from an existing install.

Solaris Express Community Edition ? CD | DVD |
DVD (Single Image) [B95 currently, B96 coming in 2 weeks or so] http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/sol_ex_dvd_1/

Solaris Express Community Edition is Sun's binary release for OpenSolaris developers (code named "Nevada"). It is built from the latest OpenSolaris source and additional technology that has not been published in the OpenSolaris source base. This release is unsupported. Developers can build the OpenSolaris source by using this release as the base system. It is usually updated every other Friday and its release is announced on the OpenSolaris announce forum.

 

[Teckno 187]

well, checking the finances, I might just get one and an external enclosure and use that to offload the junk from my server and use as the future back up. (still over budget, not counting the psu :roll

btw, i have no problem running OpenSolaris as long as it can run Apache and torrentflux

 

[QuixoticOne]

PS just to be totally clear I shouldn't have said they have to be identically sized drives, it is just better / usual that they are selected to be so for a RAID/MIRROR. Otherwise you're not getting full use out of the capacity on the other drives portions that exceed the size of the smallest of the included drives.

But if you already had say a single 500GB drive bought 2x640GB units you could (I think) raidz them into a 3x500GB group with 2x500GB available for user data, BUT if you ever replaced the lone 500 with a new 640 the whole group could then expand to take advantage of the 3x640GB available space maintaining the RAIDZ.

Usually though when you build a RAIDZ or Mirror you don't really want to mess with it in terms of doing anything but replacing a failed disc. You can't just increase space by upgrading any *single* drive, or adding a *single* additional drive to the group. You'd have to replace them all with larger individual drives, or create a new (additional) mirror or raidz set and add that to the pool. Of course you could destroy your existing pool/filesystems and then build a new one with whatever devices and groups in mirrors or raidzs make sense for you at that time but you'd have had to put all your data off of the previous pool before adding / removing any discs.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Ok I hope you have good luck with whatever configuration you pursue. I know it can be a pain in the rear to play "tower of hanoi" moving data around, doing backups, replacing servers, etc.

If you do end up with a non-raid server, OS and ZFS still run pretty nicely with some benefits even with a lone non-raid non-mirrored setup. I'd certainly prefer that personally over EXT3 just from the perspective of data integrity due to the checksumming and snapshots and so on.

It'd be nice if they offered individual drives with some better level of redundancy such as having half of the platters act together like a single 'drive' and the other half of them act together as another single 'drive' so you could 'mirror' with one physical drive or RAIDZ with two physical drives or something. As of now it is pain to recover any data from a drive if any one of the numerous heads / platters crashes even if the rest of them are fine.

You're getting a PSU? I've seen some nice "hot deals" on those several times over the last few weeks (of reasonable quality units). I think there will be others.
I think there were some in the 500/650 range around $40 and others in the 650-750 range around $60 though the details of most of those escapes my recollection at the moment.

 

[QuixoticOne]

I'm pretty sure you could build Apache and torrentflux for Solaris in the fairly usual ./configure; make; make install type ways with few major problems. Or you could get Apache and maybe even torrentflux prebuilt packages from one of the sunfreeware type of sites.

Failing that I'm sure they'd run in a VirtualBox VM of LINUX running under Solaris.
Whatever works.