RAID6: Samsung or WD?

Discussion in 'PC Purchasing Help' started by Albuquerque, May 7, 2012.

?

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

Poll closed May 21, 2012.
  1. Samsung SpinPoint M8 1TB (HN-M101MBB)

    50.0%
  2. Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB (WD10JPVT)

    50.0%
  1. Albuquerque

    Albuquerque Red-headed step child
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    ??

    Having run this array for ten months on a 600VA UPS system, moving it ~3000 miles from CA to KY, and having it live through September thru now March in the power-blippy mess that is Louisville's power grid, I have only one response: this is NOT an issue.

    Should I spend $150 raid card that can do RAID6 on commodity Western Digital BLUE drives that feature the dreaded TLER capability which normally trashes RAID arrays they live in, or should I spend $600 on a fancy caching Adaptec card + another $100 for the BBU unit, only to then potentially encounter the RAID issues with TLER firmware in the drives?

    Since there's no hardware caching on this controller, and I spent the extra $90 on an uninterruptable power supply, howabout instead you stop assuming things that aren't true and instead simply ask if I had thought about it? I did think about it, and whatever problem you perceive there to be simply isn't.
     
  2. Blazkowicz

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    Poor's man thing would be a ZFS array, I believe (it has "write atomicity")

    It would be fun to do pretty much the same thing as this machine but with FreeBSD 9.1 as the file server, and Xen as the hypervisor if it plays nice. No Server Windows but some Debian and Ubuntu 12.04, maybe one Windows Pro VM if be it ; whatever OS for a "networking" VM (dhcp, etc.), from just debian to something like OpenBSD or even OpenWRT (a linux distro for flashed routers that can run on x86 too).

    itsmydamnation, do you have IOMMU support and is it of any use?
     
  3. Albuquerque

    Albuquerque Red-headed step child
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    I didn't know there was an OpenWRT for x86... Nice, I have something new to play with tonight :)

    Also keep in mind that the "head end" of that box is being used as an HTPC for my wife to visit varying streaming websites or to peruse the myriad movies, TV shows, home videos, family pictures and music files we've stuffed into the WHS2011 guest machine. It gets used from pretty much every angle!

    Also, the only Hyper-V usage of IOMMU (that I'm currently aware of) is the RemoteFX capabilities where it virtualizes your 3D video card. Unlike ESXi, Hyper-V allows you to have significantly more guests using the 3D resources. The downside is those resources are all artificially constrained to 256mb of VRAM each, so the remote VDI session is only of "limited" gaming use compared to what many of us would want.
     
  4. MfA

    MfA
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    Anecdotal evidence and long tailed risk don't really go together ... I've run a file server in a closet with the house boiler with next to no ventilation and blistering heat for years without issue and I just rely on good old luck to keep the data safe (samsung drives BTW).
    It's dreaded, but it's also overstated ... the drive will have to be replaced and the array rebuild regardless whether it starts showing read errors or times out, it just gives you more time. A second hand SAS RAID card with BBU hardly costs 600 bucks ... a UPS helps, but they rarely tell you what happens on a hard system crash.

    No need to get offended.
     
  5. Albuquerque

    Albuquerque Red-headed step child
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    I don't even understand why you're posting. You went from your boiler-room PC to why a UPS doesn't tell me why my system crashed.

    What?
     
  6. MfA

    MfA
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    I went from anecdote to anecdote to show how long tailed risk simply doesn't happen very often.
    Not tells, you ... just doesn't necessarily save you, any time a full stripe set doesn't get written there is a risk.
     
  7. Blazkowicz

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    You know, most people basically have nothing, no raid and no backup. I'm in that situation currently (though data is spread on three HDD) and HDD failure is the biggest danger or even the single one.
     
  8. Albuquerque

    Albuquerque Red-headed step child
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    Are you trying to insinuate that, at some indeterminate point in the future, I might experience a disk failure? Oh my, you don't say?!?

    </sarcasm>

    Again, I'm not sure why you're having this conversation. If I somehow hard-lock the box and it somehow misses writing a stripe of data to the array, my world isn't going to end. It's not worth the time, money or effort to go find a gently used RAID controller, buy a new BBU (because how am I to trust the life expectancy of a used battery?), perform a full backup of all my data on the current array, open the box and rewire that entire setup (did you see the pictures?) to swap RAID controllers, rebuild the array on the new controller, and then restore all my data onto the new volume...

    That's easily three days of work, all said and done.

    You say I should perform all of this to avoid some trivial, remote possibility that a single 64kb stripe of unwritten data sends my entire 6TB RAID6 volume to dev/null? Even if it does, I make backups of that volume once a week to a 4GB USB drive. There's nothing I will lose in one week's time that will outweighs the cost of three days of my life.

    I'll take my chances.
     
  9. Malo

    Malo Yak Mechanicum
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    huh? A UPS will initiate a soft shutdown on a server once it gets to a certain battery threshold, thereby insuring all data is written.
     
  10. Blazkowicz

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    Yes. But you need a second UPS if the first UPS fails.
    Be connected to two different electrical power providers, with separate power lines, and have at least three backup diesel generators (two for the redundancy, and one more in case one is in maintenance)
    Dig a bunker too, so it survives aerial bombing.
     
  11. entity279

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    Why dig your bunker, when you can buy it from _xxx_ at a discount by now?
     
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