# Recommended HDD for ZFS homeserver



## tty23 (Aug 17, 2010)

Hi,

I am one of the WD EARS "victims" (see here to find out what I am talking about: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=15402) and thinking about buying new drives for my home server. 

A few recommendations for drives are given in the thread linked above. However I thought I create a new thread on this matter.

My homeserver holds my backups, and some media files. Performance is not the most important issue (as long as it is not as bad as with the WD EARS drives). More important is reliability, actually most important. 

My server runs 24x7 which is another reason the WD Green drives are not suitable. They have a power management feature (which you cannot switch off) that puts the drive to sleep every few seconds, just to get woken up by the ZFS. Hence my drive already have 16,000 start/stop cycles (I think they call it load cycles).

Now I am thinking about whether to buy "enterprise" drives with a long warranty and which are made for 24x7 usage. Does anyone have some numbers or experience with the difference between consumer drives and enterprise drives?

I am using a RaidZ1 with 4 1GB WD EARS ATM.

Here are the contestants, I am looking for 1GB drives
Hitachi UltraStar A7K2000
+ 5y warranty
- not cheap
? I found no reports on how these perform on the long run
Western Digital RE4 or RE3
+ 5y warranty
+ alleged good performance
- I do not want to give WDC even more money
- quite expensive
- read somewhere the WDC support is quite bad
Samsung SpinPoint F1 RAID
+ 7y warranty
- quite old
? really made for 24x7 operations?
? what is the difference between RAID and non RAID versions?

Maybe others are interested in this matter as well. Any thoughts?


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## phoenix (Aug 17, 2010)

tty23 said:
			
		

> My server runs 24x7 which is another reason the WD Green drives are not suitable. They have a power management feature (which you cannot switch off) that puts the drive to sleep every few seconds, just to get woken up by the ZFS. Hence my drive already have 16,000 start/stop cycles (I think they call it load cycles).



This can be disabled using the wdidle3 DOS utility from a DOS boot disk.   I've used it to "disable" the idle timeout on 8 1.5 TB WD Green drives.  It's not actually disabled, but the timeout it set to 15 minutes or something around there.  They've been working fine in one of our backup servers (not the fastest drives, but not completely horrible) for several months now.



> Now I am thinking about whether to buy "enterprise" drives with a long warranty and which are made for 24x7 usage. Does anyone have some numbers or experience with the difference between consumer drives and enterprise drives?



For a home server for backups, enterprise drives are overkill.  The only added bonus is the 5 year warranty (instead of the 3 year for most consumer drives).  All the rest of the features are geared toward using fancy, high-end, hardware RAID controllers, which you won't be using since you have ZFS.

Seagate 7200.11 or 7200.12 drives are nice (we use the 1.5 TB drives).  WD Caviar Blue and WD Caviar Black drives are nice (we use the 500 GB drives).  I've heard good things about Hitachy 1-2 TB drives.

Just avoid the Green-series of drives (regardless of manufacturer), the 4K-series of drives (regardless of manufacturer), and you'll be fine.


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## jem (Aug 17, 2010)

phoenix said:
			
		

> Just avoid ... the 4K-series of drives (regardless of manufacturer), and you'll be fine.



Unless he can find models that report the 4KB sector size to the OS...?


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## phoenix (Aug 17, 2010)

True.  But, for now, it's just easier to avoid the 4K drives.

Once DES' work to come up with a way to support 4K drives natively, regardless of the manufacturer, then this will be moot.


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## olav (Aug 17, 2010)

I have five Samsung Spinpoint 5400rpm 2TB in a raidz1 setup. They work great and are surprisingly fast.


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## aragon (Aug 17, 2010)

I'm curious about this too.  I'm really interested in building a home NAS that uses low power drives.  From the reviews I've read, between the "eco" drive offerings from WDC, Seagate, and Samsung, Seagate's Barracuda LP has performance as good or better than the rest and the lowest idle power consumption.  Of course these reviews didn't test anything like ZFS. 

Anyone know much about Barracuda LP drives?  Do they report 4k sector size correctly?


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## vermaden (Aug 18, 2010)

tty23 said:
			
		

> I am using a RaidZ1 with 4 1GB WD EARS ATM.


I am currently running a setup with 3 x Samsung F3 1TB drives (7200) and they work nice, are fast and not so hot/power hungry at the same time.


```
ada0 at ahcich0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
[U][B]ada0: <SAMSUNG HD103SJ 1AJ100E4> ATA/ATAPI-8 SATA 2.x device[/B][/U]
ada0: 300.000MB/s transfers
ada0: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada0: Native Command Queueing enabled
ada1 at ahcich1 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
[U][B]ada1: <SAMSUNG HD103SJ 1AJ100E4> ATA/ATAPI-8 SATA 2.x device[/B][/U]
ada1: 300.000MB/s transfers
ada1: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada1: Native Command Queueing enabled
ada2 at ahcich2 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
[U][B]ada2: <SAMSUNG HD103SJ 1AJ100E4> ATA/ATAPI-8 SATA 2.x device[/B][/U]
ada2: 300.000MB/s transfers
ada2: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada2: Native Command Queueing enabled
```






			
				aragon said:
			
		

> Anyone know much about Barracuda LP drives?  Do they report 4k sector size correctly?


Barracuda LP DataSheet report that they have 512B sectors:
http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_barracuda_lp.pdf

... but it seems that the Barracuda LP drives have similar firmware issues to those of Seagate 7200.11 drives: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagate_Barracuda


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## Deleted member 2077 (Aug 18, 2010)

I've had good luck with Seagate drives.  Used them for years and have a bunch of their 2TB 5200RPM drives.

The WD were a pain in FreeBSD; I couldn't get them aligned.  They were 512K sectors, but were reporting 4096K.  Avoid them!


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## mix_room (Aug 18, 2010)

Perhaps this can be a temporary solution for your 4k-Drives
http://ivoras.sharanet.org/blog/tre...drive-or-other-4k-sector-drive-try-this..html


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## jalla (Aug 18, 2010)

For the last 3+ years I've been buying Samsung Spinpoint F1/F3 drives exclusively for home use. They have excellent performance, but for me the main thing is that they're dead silent.

Got my last Samsungs about a year ago and now have 10 of them (160G/400G/500G/1T) spread across three servers at home, all running 24/7. My experience is that they are reliable. Never had a problem with any of them.


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## Matty (Aug 18, 2010)

I have 4 Samsung F3 and no problems so far and they are really fast....


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## tty23 (Aug 18, 2010)

phoenix said:
			
		

> This can be disabled using the wdidle3 DOS utility from a DOS boot disk.   I've used it to "disable" the idle timeout on 8 1.5 TB WD Green drives.  It's not actually disabled, but the timeout it set to 15 minutes or something around there.  They've been working fine in one of our backup servers (not the fastest drives, but not completely horrible) for several months now.



Thanks for the hint. I am a bit scared, because on the wdidle3 homepage there is stated that 



> This firmware modifies the behavior of the drive to wait longer before positioning the heads in their park position and turning off unnecessary electronics. This utility is designed to upgrade the firmware of the following hard drives: WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0.
> 
> CAUTION: Do not attempt to run this software on any hard drives other than what is listed above. Please make sure that the computer system is not turned off during the firmware upgrade. Doing so may damage the hard drive beyond repair and your data may be lost.



here are the infos for my disks:

```
ada0: <WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 80.00A80> ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada0: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada0: Command Queueing enabled
ada0: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada1 at ahcich1 bus 0 scbus1 target 0 lun 0
ada1: <WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 80.00A80> ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada1: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada1: Command Queueing enabled
ada1: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada2 at ahcich2 bus 0 scbus2 target 0 lun 0
ada2: <WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 80.00A80> ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada2: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada2: Command Queueing enabled
ada2: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada3 at ahcich3 bus 0 scbus3 target 0 lun 0
ada3: <WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 80.00A80> ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada3: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada3: Command Queueing enabled
ada3: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
```

They are not in the list of supported drives...?


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## Terry_Kennedy (Aug 18, 2010)

tty23 said:
			
		

> Now I am thinking about whether to buy "enterprise" drives with a long warranty and which are made for 24x7 usage. Does anyone have some numbers or experience with the difference between consumer drives and enterprise drives?
> 
> ? I found no reports on how these perform on the long run
> Western Digital RE4 or RE3
> ...


I'm running 3 chassis w/ 16 2TB RE4's (WD2003FYYS) in each as my home fileservers. :e

They're attached to 3Ware 9650SE-16ML controllers. The 9650's are just used as a good way to attach lots of drives w/ multilane cables - they export 16 individual units to FreeBSD, where they're in a ZFS pool.

Performance is quite good - 500MB/sec for both reads and writes, averaged over a 24-hour period (I'm using some other tricks, like using a 256GB PCI Express SSD for ZFS acceleration).

So far I've had 2 drives fail my burn-in testing - increasing numbers of offline uncorrectable errors. That's better than my experience w/ Seagate drives, though. The first server has been stress testing for 3 months now, with the second one going for about a month and the third one just starting.

I'll be doing a full write-up on the design and construction of these servers in the next month or two, and it'll be published on some well-known sites (and also on my web site).


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## danbi (Aug 18, 2010)

I have also used Hitachi 2TB drives on an reasonably active small backup server


```
ada0 at ahcich0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0
ada0: <Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 JKAOA20N> ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada0: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada0: Command Queueing enabled
ada0: 1907729MB (3907029168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada1 at ahcich1 bus 0 scbus1 target 0 lun 0
ada1: <Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 JKAOA20N> ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada1: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada1: Command Queueing enabled
ada1: 1907729MB (3907029168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada2 at ahcich2 bus 0 scbus2 target 0 lun 0
ada2: <Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 JKAOA20N> ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada2: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada2: Command Queueing enabled
ada2: 1907729MB (3907029168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada3 at ahcich3 bus 0 scbus3 target 0 lun 0
ada3: <Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 JKAOA20N> ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada3: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada3: Command Queueing enabled
ada3: 1907729MB (3907029168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
```

The computer itself is not very fast, but these manage to get over 100MB/s read/write (in stripped mirror).

Enterprise drives give you few more benefits beyond the extended warranty, which alone might justify the cost difference. More important for home server is power consumption and noise. Enterprise disks typically are noisier, because of the higher demands. Anyway, sometimes there are good deals on previous generation enterprise drives, available at the price level of consumer drives.


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## tingo (Aug 18, 2010)

jalla said:
			
		

> For the last 3+ years I've been buying Samsung Spinpoint F1/F3 drives exclusively for home use. They have excellent performance, but for me the main thing is that they're dead silent.
> 
> Got my last Samsungs about a year ago and now have 10 of them (160G/400G/500G/1T) spread across three servers at home, all running 24/7. My experience is that they are reliable. Never had a problem with any of them.



Yes, I also like the Samsung drives; they are silent and reliable.


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## aragon (Aug 19, 2010)

Thanks for the feedback everyone.  Based on opinions here and benchmarks I've read, samsung drives seem to be the only drives that hit a good combination of performance, low power, low acoustics, low price, and high reliability!  I've never owned one, but they're on my list now.


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## bsd10 (Aug 19, 2010)

Are the Samsung F3 EcoGreen HD203WI 2TB drives ok, or are there other F3 drives that are non-EcoGreen? The EcoGreens are the only ones I see for sale online.


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## loop (Aug 19, 2010)

bsd10 said:
			
		

> Are the Samsung F3 EcoGreen HD203WI 2TB drives ok, or are there other F3 drives that are non-EcoGreen? The EcoGreens are the only ones I see for sale online.



There's a review on Toms Hardware comparing the Seagate Constellation ES and teh F3 EcoGreen drives. From a price/performance point of view the F3EG drives are hard to beat it would seem.


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## vermaden (Aug 19, 2010)

bsd10 said:
			
		

> Are the Samsung F3 EcoGreen HD203WI 2TB drives ok, or are there other F3 drives that are non-EcoGreen? The EcoGreens are the only ones I see for sale online.



I have 'non-eco' SpinPoint F3 Samsung drives, they work at 7200 RPM but also consume small amount of power (comparing to other 3.5 drives), they are even better then EcoGreen F3 series (running at 5400 RPM) when it comes to _performance per watt_.


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## vermaden (Aug 23, 2010)

Another 4K drive seems to be Seagate's new Barracuda XT 3TB (7200RPM):
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3858/the-worlds-first-3tb-hdd-seagate-goflex-desk-3tb-review

... it uses 'internal' translation of logical 512K sectors 'available' for OS into 'internal' 4K sectors _'which ensures Windows XP compatibility'_ as the article states, time will tell how much that helps.


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## tty23 (Aug 24, 2010)

phoenix said:
			
		

> This can be disabled using the wdidle3 DOS utility from a DOS boot disk.



Thanks, that worked for me!


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## vermaden (Aug 27, 2010)

The *newegg.com* has currently very nice offer for *Hitachi* drive with *2TB* storage, spinning at 7200 RPM only for *$90* (*$89.99* to be precise):
http://newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145369

More information here:
http://fudzilla.com/home/news/latest/newegg-selling-hitachi-deskstar-2tb-7200rpm-drive-for-8999-shipped


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## aragon (Aug 27, 2010)

I noticed Samsung are releasing their new F4EG Eco drives next month:

http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_f4eg_ecogreen_announced


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## aragon (Aug 29, 2010)

Well, I see Newegg have it in stock!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245&Tpk=N82E16822152245

I also found a review of the 320 GB F4 drive:

http://www.testfreaks.com/blog/review/review-of-samsung-spinpoint-f4-320gb-hard-drive/


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## Longevity (Nov 12, 2010)

I have concerns about using all of these "non-enterprise" drives which stem from the lack of the TLER/ERC/CCTL "feature".  If a sector goes bad, the drive will not report it as bad but may take a minute or two trying to recover, destroying system performance in the process:



			
				Miles Nordin said:
			
		

> Any timeouts in ZFS are annoyingly based on the ``desktop''
> storage stack underneath it which is unaware of redundancy and of the
> possibility of reading data from elsewhere in a redundant stripe
> rather than waiting 7, 30, or 180 seconds for it. ZFS will bang away
> ...


I think the best solution is to find a way to tell FreeBSD/ZFS to timeout such long read operations, interpreting them as meaning "bad sector".  Does anyone know how to do this, perhaps a tunable parameter similar to kern.geom.mirror.timeout?

Please see my thread on StorageReview for more background information.


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