Comment by speedgoose
Comment by speedgoose 3 days ago
I 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.
Comment by speedgoose 3 days ago
I 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.
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.
You can find cheap used enterprise SSDs on ebay. But the problem is that even the most power efficient enterprise SSD (SATA) idle at like 1w. And given the smaller capacities, you need many more to match a hard drive. In the end HDD might actually consume less power than an all flash array + controllers if you need a large capacity.
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%.
Curious, what's the use case for wanting your data backed-up without fail? Is it personal archives or otherwise (business) archive related?
Not to say you shouldn't backup your data, but personally I wouldn't be to affected if one of my personal drives errored out, especially if they contained unused personal files from 10+ years ago (legal/tax/financials are another matter).
Any data I created, paid to license, or put in significant work to gather has to be backed-up with 3-2-1 rule. Stuff I can download or otherwise obtain again is best effort but not mandatory backup.
Mainly I don't want to lose anything that took work to make or get. Personal photos, videos, source code, documents, and correspondence are the highest priority.
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 solutions that more easily allow you to move hard drives around without tying them to motherboard-slots or other such hardware issues.
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.
I haven't seen a machine shipped with firmware RAID in decades.
It's still enabled in the firmware of some vendors' laptops -- ones deep in Microsoft's pockets, like Dell, who personally I would not touch unless the kit were free, but gullible IT managers buy the things.
My personal suspicion is that it's an anti-Linux measure. It's hard to convert such a machine to AHCI mode without reformatting unless you have more clue than the sort of person who buys Dell kit.
In real life it's easy: set Windows to start in Safe Mode, reboot, go into the firmware, change RAID mode to AHCI, reboot, exit Safe Mode.
Result, Windows detects a new disk controller and boots normally, and now, all you need to do is disable Bitlocker and you can dual-boot happily.
However that's more depth of knowledge than I've met in a Windows techie in a decade, too.
Software or hardware, it's still the same basic concept.
Redundancy rather than individual reliability.
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.
Not really. I know that my sleep is worth more than the difference between HDD and SSD prices, and I know the difference between the failure rates and the headache caused by the RMA process, so I buy SSDs.
In essence, what we together are saying is that people with super-sensitive sleep that are also easily upset, and that don't have ultra-high salaries, cannot really afford 18 TB of data (even though they can afford an HDD), and that's true.
Well, again, well done on being able to afford it. I have 24TB array on cheap second hand drives from CEX for about £100 each, using DrivePool - and guess what, if one of them dies I'll just buy another £100 second hand drive. But also guess what - in the 6 years I had this setup, all of these are still in good condition. Paying for SSDs upfront would have been a gigantic financial mistake(imho).
Enterprise drives are way different than anything consumer based. I wouldn't trust a consumer drive used for 2 years, but a true enteprise drive has like millions of hours left of it's life.
Quote from Toshiba's paper on this. [1]
Hard disk drives for enterprise server and storage usage (Enterprise Performance and Enterprise Capacity Drives) have MTTF of up to 2 million hours, at 5 years warranty, 24/7 operation. Operational temperature range is limited, as the temperature in datacenters is carefully controlled. These drives are rated for a workload of 550TB/year, which translates into a continuous data transfer rate of 17.5 Mbyte/s[3]. In contrast, desktop HDDs are designed for lower workloads and are not rated or qualified for 24/7 continuous operation.
From Synology
With support for 550 TB/year workloads1 and rated for a 2.5 million hours mean time to failure (MTTF), HAS5300 SAS drives are built to deliver consistent and class-leading performance in the most intense environments. Persistent write cache technology further helps ensure data integrity for your mission-critical applications.
[1] https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/content/dam/toshiba-ss-v...
[2] https://www.synology.com/en-us/company/news/article/HAS5300/...
Take a look at backblaze data stats. Consumer drives are just as durable, if not more so than enterprise drives. The biggest thing you're getting with enterprise drives is a longer warranty.
If you're buying them from the second hand market, you don't likely get the warranty (and is likely why they're on the second hand market)
There isn’t a significant difference between “enterprise” and “consumer” in terms of fundamental characteristics. They have different firmware and warranties, usually disks are tested more methodically.
Max operating range is ~60C for spinning disks and ~70C for SSD. Optimal is <40-45C. The larger agents facilties afaik tend to run as hot as they can.
> drive has like millions of hours left of it's life.
It doesn't apply for the single drive, only for a large number of drives. E.g. if you have 100000 drives (2.4 million hours MTTF) in a server building with the required environmental conditions and maximum workload, be prepared to replace a drive once a day in average.
datablocks.dev has a page explaining what white label and recertified disks are [1]. Those are not disks used for years under heavy load.
1: https://datablocks.dev/blogs/news/white-label-vs-recertified...
Drive failure rate versus age is a U-shaped curve. I wouldn't distrust a used drive with healthy performance and SMART parameters.
And you should use some form of redundancy/backups anyway. It's also a good idea to not use all disks from the same batch to avoid correlated failures.
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 go. I could replace a failed drive from the array in the time takes to shut down, swap a cable to the spare drive, and boot up again.
SSDs also need to be examined for power loss protection. The results with consumer drives are mixed and it’s hard to find good info about how common drives behave. Getting enterprise grade drives with guaranteed PLP from large on-onboard capacitors is ideal, but those are expensive. Spinning hard drives have the benefit of using their rotational inertia to power the drive long enough to finish outstanding writes.