RAID6: Samsung or WD?

Which 1TB laptop (2.5", 9.5mm) drive to use for 8x RAID6 volume?


  • Total voters
    2
  • Poll closed .
What!! if you bought a years supply of hard drives to sell on and you sold out in 2 weeks you'd be dancing in the street. Demand = supply is great demand greater than supply is still great and both are better than supply greater than demand.

No. If you bought a year's worth of harddrives and sold them in two weeks, then you sold them for far too little money. You always want demand to slightly exceed supply where feasible; you do not want demand to crush supply or vice-versa. If demand is too high, this is when you crank up the dollar figure.

You and I, as consumers, want them to just sell it cheaply and quickly. But as a business owner (especially one that is publicly traded) you have an obligation to maximize value. To use your example: if you bought 365 drives and sold them all in two weeks (26 drives per day) for $5 profit each, sure, you could undercut your competition immediately. But then you'll be out of stock.

Instead, you could also sell the same 365 drives for $50 in profit. Are people still going to buy your drives, when your competition has nothing else to offer as well? Sure, but not in great volumes. So rather than selling them in two weeks, perhaps instead you sell them in three months. Or maybe you get greedy and sell them for $100 each, but it takes nine months to sell them all.

Let's compute the three differences:
365 drives at $5 profit each, sold out in two weeks: $912.50 per week in profit.
365 drives at $50 profit each, sold out in three months (91 days): $1403.84 per week in profit.
365 drives at $100 profit each, sold out in nine months (274 days) at $932.48 per week in profit.

Selling them all at $5 profit is the bottom end of the curve -- sure, you can sell 'em all and then celebrate, but you have zero income after two weeks. Selling them all for $100 profit is the top end of the curve -- yeah, you make a but-ton of money when a sucker buys one, but you really don't end up making more than at $5 because sales are so ungodly slow.

There will be a sweet spot, somewhere in the middle, where a specific price point drives sufficient sales and margin to maximize business value. In that imaginary middle number I created where each drive generates $50 in profit, your business only sold four drives per day instead of 26 drives per day, and yet made almost 50% more profit per week. And you'll have cash flow for three months instead of two week. Why blow your wad all at once? This is basic economics, you can probably take a class at your local JuCo for ~$125 for the three credit hours.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
eh, I've started a music file server, in some shoddy place where I do some sysadmin and beer drinking tasks. I added a quantum 6GB drive to the safest but still accessible computer, pried from an useless imac (with useless firmware).

I had to google it for the jumper settings (seriously, not printing it on the drive is a crime), I found advice that said, quantum was bought by maxtor, see maxtor support. no maxtor on the horizon.. but maxtor was bought by seagate, and I could found a nice support page for my quantum drive on seagate's site, with the diagrams for the dreadful jumper settings.

btw 6GB was good enough to add some survival music, and getting it started, I'm doing some thing where the folder is mounted through sshfs, client computers are debian or ubuntu, server (which is a desktop actually) is debian. have some work to automate the mounting (set up ssh keys, set up a tool). then I will add some other crappy drives, a low end SATA controller and join them with UnionFS ; there will be a real HDD for backup off-site.
(yes, we have good upload bandwith, good nuclear electricity and the place is run with computer junk..)
 
Placed the order for WD drives last night on Amazon; they should be here Monday thanks to Prime :D I posted this same question + poll on TechPowerUp forums and most folks went for the WD's.

Not sure how long it takes to initialize eight consumer-grade 1TB spindles for RAID6, but it will probably take a while ;) I should start getting performance data by Tuesday and be able to make some judgement on likely reliability by Wednesday. I'll hammer it with about 2TB of writes across multiple streams and see if I can get it to barf a drive.

Thanks to all who participated in the convo.
 
It's MS Server 2008 R2, so GPT disk using an EFI partition running NT file system.

Turns out that Amazon Prime decided that Saturday was the 2nd day (it is, technically, but I didn't assume they would ship for Saturday delivery), so all the disks arrived yesterday. Put it all together and got it wired, but didn't kick off the RAID6 initialization until this morning. Looks like it's going to take a while ;)
 
So the array finished initializing, and I filled the whole damned thing to the brim (all 6TB) without dropping a single drive. I have an ATTO benchmark that came out pretty freakin' awesome (60MB/sec read/writes with 4K transfers, 600+Mb/sec reads and writes at peak) along with power consumption numbers in the basement (35W draw at the wall with the entire rig at idle, ~40W with the rig running the ATTO series) but need to go get screencaps and pictures of the case internals and the Kill-A-Watt E3 device.

I shall post them later tonight :)
 
awesome :)
I'd be wary of losing performance with virtualisation, with the home server VM. but who knows maybe the computer is so fast it will work well enough (and for storing video, music, performance doesn't matter)

I saw a french thread on the hitachi 5K4000 : a 4TB beast!
thinking of adding that one to my server, at an undefined date. no RAID but it would be a huge backup drive.

no kill-a-watt handy here but I suppose my lousy server (VIA C7 1.8GHz, inefficient but low power) would be in the same ballpark as yours, if stuffed with two 3.5" drives.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The 3.5" drives may soak up more power than you realize. Those 2.5" 1TB laptop drives use up about 2/3rd of a watt each at idle, all eight drives will use about twice the power of a single 3.5" 1TB drive when idle, but only marginally more power during full load (while being able to deliver quite a bit more performance in the latter category.)

Performance inside of the WHSv2 guest is pretty good, but not consistent enough to do full-on benchmarks with. Example: running ATTO with 2GB test file sizes will deliver mostly consistent results, but with weird spikes and troughs here and there. In some cases the VM tested faster than the physical host (approaching 1GB/sec which isn't physically possible even with perfectly linear scaling), in other cases it came in WAY under. I think a lot of it is timing related (absolute time synchronization has always been a problem under VMs). If you run ATTO with the default 256MB file test size, it gives completely wacky results at both ends of the spectrum which I attribute to timing -- as the actual file transfer happens incredibly fast.)

I'm pretty convinced that the raw, low-level performance is so ridiculously overkill that I shouldn't have any problems with it in real-life usage. I'm using the virtual pass-through method under Hyper-V, where I "offline" the storage volume within the host, and then mount it within the VM directly rather than doing an abstracted VHD (or similar).

Another 3 hours at work before I can submit pictures :D
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The E3 meter showing 35W at idle:
Kill-A-Watte3.jpg


The innards:
InnardsAgain.jpg


ATTO run from inside the WHS virtual machine (so the array volume is "passed through" Hyper-V, which gives interesting and slightly odd results)
WHSDiskArray-ATTOVirtual.PNG


ATTO run from the host operating system, so it produces a far more reliable / stable result
WHSDiskArray-ATTOHost.PNG


And snapshots of the configuration pages of the Highpoint 2720SGL array controller
WHSDiskArray-Config1.PNG

WHSDiskArray-Config2.PNG


Stats on the rig:
  • MSI Z77-GD45 board
  • i5-3570k processor (default settings)
  • Silverstone PS07B case
  • PC Power and Cooling 500W 80+ Bronze MKIII modular power supply
  • LG 12x BDRW/DVDRW
  • 2 x 8GB Mushkin value ram DDR3-1333 (undervolted to 1.35v)
  • 2 x WD Scorpio Black 7200RPM 320GB drives on the ICH10-R RAID1 for OS+Apps
  • 1 x OCZ Agility 3 240GB SSD for acceleration of the OS+Apps volume and scratch space
  • 8 x WD Scorpio Blue 5400RPM 1TB drives on the Highpoint 2720SGL RAID6 for data
  • 1 x WD Scorpio Black 7200RPM 750GB drive on the ICH10-R for VHD storage (second drive hasn't arrived yet to build the RAID1 array)

I think that about covers it.
 
Thought I'd post an update to this thread.

The box has been running for over ten months without issue. I upped the ram to 32GB; and now have a total of twelve VM's running in the host. I've also re-carved the disks a bit... Several of my server VM's now have a dedicated page file VMDK that is actually housed on the 160GB that's left of my SSD after the Intel SRT caching reservation. The pair of 750GB drives in RAID1 that are cached by Intel SRT are now solely dedicated to housing the OS boot VMDK volumes for my virtual guests; the 6TB RAID6 array is now holding all the data volumes (it was previously solely dedicated to the WHS2011 VM as a passthru SCSI device). The WHS2011 guest now has two VMDK data volumes; one for computer backups, one for everything else. I've worked into a folder mount system so it's easily extensible later...

Right now, the box is almost perfectly balanced for my usage patterns. The CPU idles at around 20% utilization with regular plateaus to ~65% depending on what's running. Total disk I/O is continuous but the queue length on any one RAID set is always quite short, the data volume gets most of the traffic of course. My RAM alloc is quite high but still has ~2.5GB room to spare. I use Hyper-V's dynamic allocation, so certain VM's (ultimate or server OSes) will grow and shrink their physical RAM allocation depending on what's going on.

Even with all this load, average power consumption of the box stays below 50W. It's a fantastic little home virtual server; I would totally do this again.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
What!!! why does a home computer need 12 vm's

Because the wife of the house doesn't want 12 disparate machines laying around instead? :D The host is Server 2008R2 Standard running the Hyper-V role along with the necessary features to enable desktop experience, aero, and to play back media. The "front end" of the box acts as an HTPC with a limited rights user account that automatically logs into a static desktop with shortcuts to stuff the wife likes to do on a regular basis (netflix, hulu, youtube, our varying media collections, pandora, etc)

It sits nearby our family room LCD wall-mounted TV on a 600VA UPS and is connected with a 1Gb link back to my "core" router. The guest operating systems are...
  • Windows Home Server 2011 Serves as the central file repository for the house; stores our personal pictures, home video, recorded TV and movies, music, provides the basic web portal for remote access. It also backs up every other physical machine in the house (two laptops, one Surface Pro, one gaming rig)
  • Server 2008R2 Domain controller, DHCP, DNS, RRAS services
  • Server 2008R2 Domain member server, IIS, TS RemoteApp services
  • Server 2008R2 Domain member server, SharePoint 2010 services
  • Server 2008 Domain member server, SCCM 4 services
  • Server 2008 Domain member server, SQL 2010 services
  • Server 2008 Domain member server, Exchange 2010 and OWA services
  • Server 2008 Microsoft Threat Management Gateway server
  • Ubuntu Server 12 LAMP box
  • Windows Vista Ultimate MineCraft / Bukkit hosting
  • Windows Vista Ultimate USENET, sabnzbd, couchpotato, sickbeard
  • Windows 7 Ultimate Not always on, varying numbers of test boxes
  • Windows 8 Ultimate Not always on, varying numbers of test boxes

Most of my job is Microsoft related, can you tell? :D
 
That just changes the question to "why would a house with 2 people in it need 12 pc's"
the wife like to use netflix, hulu, youtube doesnt cover it
 
That just changes the question to "why would a house with 2 people in it need 12 pc's"

That's like asking "Why would a PC ever need more than 640K" or "Why would a PC gamer need more than 30GB of disk space" or "Why do techies like gadgets".

I think he uses this as a personal hobby development system at home.
 
What!!! why does a home computer need 12 vm's

i run ESXi at home this is what I have.

hardware: 8350@4600 (undervolted :LOL:)
32 gb 1666
2X 128gb SSD for guest OS
about 10TB of usable spinny disk ( combination of RAID 10 and nothing)

1. 2k3 Domain controller
2. file server , server 2k3
3. IPTV server , windows 7
4. DLNA trancoding server, windows 7
5. Load balancer/SSL VPN , F5 BIG-IP
6. Team speak + other random crap, windows xp
7. network monitoring ( cacti logging etc) Ubuntu
8. legacy embroidery software win xp
9. lab stuff for study Ubuntu

once you've had hypervisor you never go back :LOL:

so not 12 but not far off.
 
My technical job duties revolve around solutions design and architecture for Microsoft shops. I don't get that busy for my personal needs, but it's good to have one of about everything to play with at home.
 
[*]8 x WD Scorpio Blue 5400RPM 1TB drives on the Highpoint 2720SGL RAID6 for data
It's only data, but still why not just get some second hand battery backed up controller which won't trash your entire array if there's a powerfailure at the wrong time?
 
Back
Top