RAID6: Samsung or WD?

Your opinion counts

I'm building a new 2008 R2 server that will act as a VM host for a plethora of boxes, to include a WHS 2011 instance, another 2008R2 instance for hosting some online games (MineCraft, some old Telnet games), and some other nonsense. Because the box will be running 24/7 and will only occasionally get "busy", I'm going to spec it out with equipment with good idle power characteristics. And because it will be serving as the backup instance for all my other home Windows devices thanks to WHS, I need to make sure that data doesn't go off the deep end.

I'm going to stack it all up using laptop drives: a pair of WD Scorpio Black 320GB drives in RAID1 + Z77 caching SSD for the OS and apps volume, and then eight 1TB 9.5mm laptop drives all connected to a Highpoint 2720 SGL in RAID6 for the data volume.

The question is: which 1TB laptop drives to use? You decide

 

Well, they're still marketed as Sammy, so...

 

No worries, I wasn't mad at anyone I can't keep track of the innards of who-bought-who, so it doesn't surprise me that the Sammy drives are now Seagates. I have a small place in my heart for Seagate, as my very first x86 PC came with a 100Mb Seagate IDE (ata-33) drive that works to this day.

Realistically though, I don't have a preference for either. Most people have been leaning towards the WD's...

 

Laptop drives, not desktop, thus there is no "enterprise" version unless you go for something absurd like SAS (which I'm not doing...) The Highpoint RAID card can be flashed to have similar behavior to what Davros has quoted; many of the higher-end hardware RAID cards can also be configured similarly to ignore the data recovery cycles.

 

Power and size both, really.

From a power front, at idle, both of the drives I mentioned use between 1/4 and 1/6th of the combined power draw of the WD Green drives (depending on which Green drive you're looking at.) Under load, they use around ~1/2 of the power of the WD Green drives. And of course, the lower power results in less cooling necessity which also results in less noise. I can also can use a smaller power supply as the spin-up power requirement is quite smaller on the tiny drives as well.

From a size front, I can pack eleven laptop drives (8 x 1TB data, 2 x 320GB OS + Apps, and 1 x SSD for caching the OS volume) into a quite small Micro ATX case. Cost is almost flat between 1TB 2.5" drives and 1TB 3.5" drives currently, so that's really not much of an issue.

As for performance? The WD Scorpio Blue 1Tb drive stacks up incredibly well against the WD Green drives. Storage Review has some good numbers on both the WD Green 2TB as well as the WD Scorpio Blue 1TB. For the most part, the Green is slightly faster than the Scorpio, which is to be expected. Since I can cram twice as many spindles into the same space, I'll have lots of performance to "spread around" in that regard. Eight 2.5" spindles in RAID should have more than enough oomph to stream videos, music, backups, et al to multiple simultaneous points in the house.

 

Sounds like a FUD article to me. I don't like expensive hard drives just like everyone else, but when you are unable to manufacture anything, you're going to have low expenditures. And when you raise your prices on the existing inventory in order to regulate the outflow of your product (to ensure people who really need drives can still get them), it's just pure profit. I guess the alternative is to continue selling them as low as they always were, but have no ability to maintain product within that demand curve. So then you simply run out of product with no ability to replace it, and now what? That's a good way to go bankrupt.

So, lower expenditures for manufacturing (can't make as much stuff) combined with high prices for selling what little is there = fat profit. I don't think it had to be any sort of collusion or conspiracy, it's just economics.

 

Couldn't agree more. Every day you can now find a high-performing name brand SSD drive for under $1 per GB. I remember buying an OCZ Vertex 2 120Gb for under $300 and thinking it was a steal just two years ago...

 

You're talking about Seagate having annual increase of 2% in shipped units; you're also talking about Seagate who only minimally affected by the floods unlike WD.

http://www.isuppli.com/memory-and-s...e-in-hard-drive-market-in-fourth-quarter.aspx

The entire pricing structure of HDDs had to take a collective hit because of the floods, even though they were not all flooded. Seagate's manufacturing contracts and capabilities were not under water, but similarly they were not scaled to sustain all of WD's lost business along with Seagate's own 'normal' business simultaneously. Thus, the fact that WD took a massive supply hit simultaneously (and negatively) affected Seagates ability to deliver.

When your business experiences a massive unplanned spike in demand (this example: a very large competitor falters), you are forced to raise prices or else you'll be out of stock rapidly too. It's the same demand curve that we talked about before; having demand that far outstrips supply is NOT a good place to be.

Yes, prices were raised. It is to be expected, because supply was massively diminished. As supply returns, so will low prices.