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8tb easystores on sale for $130: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-8tb-external-usb-3-0-hard-drive-black/5792401.p?skuId=5792401
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Mar 21, 2019 07:06
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D. Ebdrup posted:I suspect the core of it to be controller issues caused by the OEMs asking the ODMs to build down to a price rather than conforming to spec, because I have one USB3 to PATA/SATA adapter which works with S.M.A.R.T consistently across all OS' I've tried it on; it uses a NEC chip (before RENESAS took over their production line). D'oh, as I read your post I was going to ask you which adapter you found - until I got to the end.  Oh well. I ordered a StarTech dock adapter thing, I'll let you know how it works. astral posted:8tb easystores on sale for $130: D'oh! I also came here to post this! Anyways, these typically have white-label Reds; I'll let you know which one I get. This is a decent price for 8 TB, ~$17-18/TB with tax. There are comparable Seagate Expansion drives (e.g. on eBay) for around the same price (I got a couple last year for ~$126.) Seagate uses SMR for what seems like all of their high-capacity drives nowadays, but the 6 TB one I'm using (ST6000DM003) has been perfect as a media drive for Plex; fast and quiet, SMR or not. I actually have the Seagate backed up to a 6 TB WD Elements, which has a Blue drive inside; I'm not sure if it makes sense to have the SMR Seagate as the backup or the main drive, but for my purpose I don't think it's going to make a difference, because the media drive is very light-duty and the backup drive is nearly nonexistent-duty (i.e. connect it about once a week to transfer a few tens of GB.) Also, the 10 TB Easystore has frequently been ~$160 at BB (usually bundled with a bonus 32 GB USB flash drive) and with tax it's comparable at ~$17/TB. It was I think $140-150 at B&H once a couple weeks ago but that was a freak sale that sold out quickly.
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Mar 21, 2019 09:22
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astral posted:8tb easystores on sale for $130: Thanks bought 5. Got 5 year old 3tb reds I'm gonna start replacing.
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Mar 21, 2019 23:57
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Jeez and gently caress! Is he gone now? Can the thread not get shat up by insular, myopic, and rather circular thinking now? Sweet! 
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Mar 22, 2019 01:08
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Tapedump posted:Jeez and gently caress! Is he gone now? Can the thread not get shat up by insular, myopic, and rather circular thinking now? gently caress are you talking about
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Mar 22, 2019 03:13
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astral posted:8tb easystores on sale for $130: I saw Best Buy was having a sale this morning and checked my local store. I ordered them for pickup this weekend and I can finally get my server some much needed additional space, ordered 2, but may go ahead and pick up 2 more when I get there, if they have anymore. Right now my unraid is: 1x4tb - parity 3x4tb - data Total - 12 TB. 2 - 8TB will make it: 1x8tb - parity 1x8tb - storage 4x4tb - storage Total - 24TB This should give me some breathing room for a while. If I get 2 more 8 TB I may set it up as follows: 2x8tb - Double parity 2x8tb - storage 4x4tb - storage This will give me 32 TB of storage with extra parity, it will also max out the physical drives my server will hold. So the next steps woul be upgrading 4tb drives to 8tb+ drives.
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Mar 22, 2019 14:34
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nerox posted:4tb drives to 8tb+ drives. No wrong answers there. I'd let budget dictate actions. I mean that it say I literally let budget dictate my actions last time.
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Mar 22, 2019 14:57
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I was starting this in the Plex thread, but this seems the better place. My current home server is a Linux machine with SSD for os, and 2 2tb drives (WD red drives) for storage, each it's own partition. I was looking to add in Nashville, etc, but lately I am thinking about just grabbing 2 more 6TB WD red drives, and just adding them into the 2u case. I'll set each one up as it's own logical partition, transfer the contents of the 2tb drives over, then add them to one or both partitions. I am ignoring raid because I just don't need high availability, hot swap, redundant drives, etc .. I need storage. If a drive goes down, I'll identify it and just redownload all the data.. couple days of work. Nothing is mission critical there. The os is on a separate drive for this reason. So, is this overly dumb for reasons, or what does the expense of raid or an extra drive get me over this? The case in question is a 2u rack mount case that will fit 4 drives just fine, but top out. Future expansion would be a concern, but I also don't store everything on Earth on it, I do cull content occasionally Someone Vette my decision?
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Mar 22, 2019 23:37
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Roundboy posted:If a drive goes down, I'll identify it and just redownload all the data.. couple days of work. Nothing is mission critical there. As long as you're OK with this it's 100% valid. RAID would get you convenience and potentially a speed bump, but it's unlikely you're hitting any performance limitations there.
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Mar 22, 2019 23:55
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Roundboy posted:Someone Vette my decision? It has my approval. Sounds a perfectly reasonable approach. Don't spend more than what you need now, unless you know for a fact tomorrow's needs.
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Mar 23, 2019 03:37
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Ok, if anyone was interested, the 8 TB Easystore I just received is an -EMAZ; the one I got last time was an -EFAX.
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Mar 23, 2019 08:17
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Atomizer posted:Ok, if anyone was interested, the 8 TB Easystore I just received is an -EMAZ; the one I got last time was an -EFAX. The two I got are both emaz as well. I am not sure what all that means, but both were made in thailand, had a white label, and has 256 megs of cache.
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Mar 23, 2019 20:58
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Yeah all 5 I got are emaz.
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Mar 24, 2019 00:06
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They're both 256 MB cache drives, so they're the "best" of the possible options, but the EFAX is a retail Red, and the EMAZ is more or less a white-label Red (although not necessarily guaranteed to be so.) Most notably, though, the EMAZ has the more current power interface (SATA v3.3) that can be problematic with generally older PSUs/backplanes (specifically the 3.3 V pin was reassigned to a reset function, so if a power supply sends a current along the formerly-3.3 V pin - which 3.5" HDDs don't use anyway - then the drive won't stay running and you have to use one of the methods to open that connection.)
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Mar 24, 2019 08:11
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I bought a couple of ultrastars for the office server. They are 7200 rpm 256 MB cache. If you are shucking 256 MB drives you are lucky.
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Mar 25, 2019 01:20
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Devian666 posted:I bought a couple of ultrastars for the office server. They are 7200 rpm 256 MB cache. If you are shucking 256 MB drives you are lucky. I'm 8/8 for the 8TB 256MB Cache WD drives out of the externals, an assortment of the EFAX and EMAZ and a lot of other people in here have similar results. All bought in retail best buy stores though, not sure about the online ordered ones. Maybe after a certain point in time, perhaps once they started going on sale every other month and selling like hotcakes, they switched them all primarily to the WD Reds/WD White labels with the 256MB Cache or something? I didn't get in on any of the early waves, so I never did see any of the "lesser" drives, fortunately.
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Mar 25, 2019 01:46
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I suspect it's the binning process for their high end drives. The ones that don't meet the high end specification go to the easystores. Can't complain as it's a win win situation. Also all the new reds at 6+ TB have 256 MB of cache.
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Mar 25, 2019 01:54
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For folks talking about the cache size - isn't the first thing any raid array does is to disable that? Or is it just for attempting to map the disks through to the "real" model name/guts?
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Mar 25, 2019 04:07
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As far as the amount of included cache is concerned, I've assumed that the reason we're seeing larger amounts is because that's what's available, i.e. the DRAM manufacturers stopped making lower capacities because it wasn't economical. If modern HDDs need, say, at least 64 MB then there'd be no point in making anything lower than that because there's no market, and if they're the same DDR3 modules that are used in SSDs then they might just make a minimum size of, say, 128 or 256 GB, because those are the capacities that are in-demand and thus they can fulfil both markets.H110Hawk posted:For folks talking about the cache size - isn't the first thing any raid array does is to disable that? Or is it just for attempting to map the disks through to the "real" model name/guts? Why would the cache get disabled in a RAID? Wouldn't you always want cache for any performance boost it provides? While we're on the subject, how exactly do you qualify the performance cache provides to HDDs? On old HDDs I still have lying around they had as little as 2 MB, or 8 MB on say an ~SE~ model, and that was seemingly a low amount of cache related to the drive's capacity and sustained transfer rates. Nowadays even 256 MB is like a 3 second buffer on sequential transfers at best, or <2 if you've got a high-end drive. As far as random access is concerned, the cache becomes "deeper" but the bottleneck is still the HDD itself. It's a bit different from the DRAM cache on an SSD, which [when present] importantly holds the FTL but also acts as a [small] write cache.
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Mar 25, 2019 07:51
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Atomizer posted:Why would the cache get disabled in a RAID? Wouldn't you always want cache for any performance boost it provides? The write cache is past where the raid software can make guarantees about the durability of your data. This is less dangerous with file based replication (it is just like using your regular os) than parity based striping. Read cache helps marginally but you likely get a much larger boost from your os read cache unless your os is truly starved for memory, and you are under heavy random io, and you are re-reading blocks regularly. Once you have a ups which can signal a clean shutdown you start getting into the ZFS-level arguments about data consistency. If you don't I suggest getting one or disabling the cache on your disk. Commercial raid cards (aka LSI aka Avago) do this by default if you setup a raid volume. I don't know what they do in jbod mode. H110Hawk fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Mar 25, 2019 |
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Mar 25, 2019 14:56
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Initiator RAID mode on LSI controllers disables the flash for on-disk for three reasons that I know of: 1) it's usually volatile, and disks don't necessarily have capasitor charge enough to guarentee that all the cache gets written to disk, 2) IR-mode HBAs typically have BBUs to keep their flash memory charged until the disks are accessible again, 3) IR-mode HBAs don't always know when the OS or an application signals that a write is syncronous. JBOD mode for HBAs in IR mode is most often implemented very lazily, ie. each disk becomes a RAID0 consisting of one disk with the IR HBA metadata which truncates the number of LBAs on the disk slightly and doesn't permit ATA and S.M.A.R.T comands to be passed through. ZFS, and other software RAID implementations, often get cache control on a very low level if the disks are exposed through initiator target mode or attached to the ICH/PCH via simple SATA/mini-SAS connectors, since IT mode allows ATA commands and S.M.A.R.T queries to pass directly to disk so that databases and other programs can signal FSYNC, OSYNC or whatever else they need for individual functions.
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Mar 25, 2019 17:49
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Hi, you all might remember me as the moron that wants to use RAID as a backup. The issue I had is that about half of my drives are external, meaning I was out of luck when it came to RAID. However, I did some reading up on Microsoft Storage Spaces and it seems like it will do what I want. According to the guide I am reading: quote:To create a Storage Space, you need at least two physical drives on your PC. These can be internal drives or external drives connected via USB. So, this sounds like exactly what I want. A way to "revive" a single dead drive if one dies by simply replacing the dead drive (I am fully aware that if two drives die at the same time I am screwed). If someone could be kind enough to help me out with this, I have a couple questions. Which method should I go with? Mirror space or Parity space? It makes it sound like with Mirror space I can choose whether I want to allow 1 or 10 drives (or however many) to be able to have die at one time. Why wouldn't I just use this mode, and select 1 drive, over Parity space mode? What is the difference? If I have to do Parity space mode, how much slower are we talking about with these drives? Everything is mostly uncompressed Blu-ray rips. Will they become slow enough that it will make Plex choke or something? Finally, the guide says that Windows spaces formats your hard drives and wipes your data. Can I add 1 drive at a time to storage spaces, or do I have to do it all at once? Basically I want to add my D: to storage spaces, which I can do because I dumped the contents of the D: to my Z:. Then I'll put the contents of my Z: back into Storage Spaces. However, if I want to now add my E: to storage spaces, is it going to want to wipe all the data in Storage Spaces again? Or will it only want to wipe the E:? Or will [url=https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Features]Stablebit Drivepool/url] do exactly what I want without all of this other BS? I don't mind paying for it. Thanks in advance from a literal idiot! frh fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Mar 27, 2019 |
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Mar 27, 2019 18:09
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WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW posted:Which method should I go with? Mirror space or Parity space? It makes it sound like with Mirror space I can choose whether I want to allow 1 or 10 drives (or however many) to be able to have die at one time. Why wouldn't I just use this mode, and select 1 drive, over Parity space mode? What is the difference? With mirrored drives you get exactly that: a perfect copy reflection, at the expense of using an entire drive. So if you wanted two drives to be mirrored, you'd need two additional drives, so 4 total, but you'd only get the usable space of 2. These drives also do not care about whatever is going on with any other drive: if you have that above mentioned 2+2 setup, both the drives in one mirror could die (and take all the data that was in that mirrored set with them), while the other mirrored set would keep on trucking without issue. It lets you select how many you want to be able to die by opting to use that many mirrored copies. Eg, if you want 2 drives to be able to fail, you'd set up 3 drives in a mirror, and they'd all have the same data, so any 2 could fail without impacting the 3rd, at the cost of only being able to use 1 drive's worth of space instead of 3. Similarly, when you write to one pair, you're only writing to that pair, and don't touch the other set at all. This provides good reliability, but obviously eats up your space very quickly. Parity, on the other hand, distributes data over a set of drives, and you set how many "drives worth of redundancy" you want. So if you had the same 4 drives as before, and set it to 1-drive redundancy, you'd be writing data across all four drives simultaneously, and any 1 drive could die without impacting the data; you'd then replace that drive, let it rebuild, and off you go again. If you set it to 1 drive redundancy and 2 drives die, you lose the entire array. The upside is that you get to keep more of your usable space: a 1-drive redundancy on a 4 drive set lets you use the space of 3 of them, so it's less reliable, but has better space efficiency. WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW posted:If I have to do Parity space mode, how much slower are we talking about with these drives? Everything is mostly uncompressed Blu-ray rips. Will they become slow enough that it will make Plex choke or something?
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Mar 27, 2019 19:10
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Thank you! All of my externals are USB 3.0 and all of my USB ports are USB 3.0 so at least it won't be that slow. So just to keep things simple, if I have 10 hard drives, all 10TB each, and I only care about being able to recover 1 drive dying, how much of that 100TB is going to be used up to accomplish this?
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Mar 27, 2019 19:19
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Atomizer posted:As far as the amount of included cache is concerned, I've assumed that the reason we're seeing larger amounts is because that's what's available, i.e. the DRAM manufacturers stopped making lower capacities because it wasn't economical. This is probably most of it. DRAM on HDDs is mostly there for track buffering, not what people usually think of as caching. During writes, it helps performance a lot if the drive can buffer up an entire track before beginning to write it, since that guarantees it can write the whole track in one pass of the head rather than multiple. Same kind of principle applies to reads: if you’re priced into to reading just one sector of a track because the host asked for it, you might as well read a lot more from the same track and dump the extra data into a DRAM buffer. You had to spend time on that track, the data passed under the head, might as well read it into a buffer and hope it becomes useful in a future read request. DRAM on the host is far more effective at caching. The operating system has a much better idea about what to cache than the HDD possibly can, it gets to read and write that cache through an interface that’s at least an order of magnitude faster in throughput and latency than sending commands down to a SATA device and waiting for a response, and it often has several gigabytes of DRAM available to use as cache. All you really care about on the disk is that it should have enough DRAM to optimize out needless extra spins of the disk. There were times when enough DRAM to do that was quite expensive, but today the smallest single DRAM chip on a high volume (= cheap) DRAM node should qualify. You might be able to detect the difference between a 64 and 256MB cache version of the same basic HDD design in an artificial benchmark, but odds are good it’s unnoticeable IRL.
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Mar 27, 2019 19:21
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WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW posted:Thank you! All of my externals are USB 3.0 and all of my USB ports are USB 3.0 so at least it won't be that slow. One drive's worth, or 10TB. This is basically RAID5, and all the previously explained reasons why you ought not use RAID5 apply. In a storage space ten disks wide, you need at least 2 parity disks to have a strong sense of data security. Otherwise, honestly, you're more at risk with a parity space than you were with ten standalone drives. If storage spaces can do dual parity, then you'd be out two drives' worth, so your 10 x 10 array would be good for 80TB. Zorak of Michigan fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Mar 27, 2019 |
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Mar 27, 2019 19:59
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RAID1 is the only mode I'd use with USB attached drives, RAID5/6 using 10 USB drives sounds like a disaster waiting to happen
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Mar 27, 2019 20:06
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I'm basically stuck with software solutions since a lot of the drives are USB. I'm reading great things about DrivePool with SnapRAID. The thing I don't get is why DrivePool would be necessary if I don't care about all of the drives having different drive letters. I don't really find having 1 gargantuan D: to be all that important, but maybe I am missing something. And of course SnapRAID is some command line thing which means I am going to suck at using it. And then I'm reading that even after you set it up, it doesn't do anything automatically and I have to write scripts that happen daily? And that when that's happening I have to make sure SABnzbd isn't doing something at the same time?  There's literally a large vein externally pulsating above my right eye currently. Why is everything so goddamn convoluted? I'm happy to pay for software where I just say "OK, here's my 147 hard drives, just do that parity thing where I'm safe if one drive dies, thanks, bye". Instead I'm 15 pages deep in other forums about powershell scripts that need to be ran and editing snapraid.conf files for when a drive dies and I want to start huffing gasoline I found something called FlexRaid that's paid and actually has a GUI but of course the reviews for it suck so I'm back to huffing gasoline-soaked rags again
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Mar 27, 2019 20:22
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You have money for 10x10tb drives but can't buy a case?
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Mar 27, 2019 20:40
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Moey posted:You have money for 10x10tb drives but can't buy a case? Huh? My case has 13 hard drives in it. It was the biggest case I could find after hours of research.
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Mar 27, 2019 20:45
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WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW posted:There's literally a large vein externally pulsating above my right eye currently. Why is everything so goddamn convoluted? Are you familiar with Virtual Machines? If you are, please spin a few up with any arbitrary number of drives you like and try some of these solutions for yourself. It strikes me you really need to see this stuff in person to believe it, everyone is trying to convince you that the way isn't boobie trapped.
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Mar 27, 2019 20:45
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WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW posted:Huh? My case has 13 hard drives in it. It was the biggest case I could find after hours of research. Without going back through the clusterfuck, can you explain your use case, how much storage is currently utilised as well as how much you want/need? Also whatever existing hardware you already got.
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Mar 27, 2019 20:50
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What kind of USB drives do you have? A lot of usb drives are often just regular HDDs crammed into an external enclosure, and with a bit of effort you can extract them and hook them up internally. Additionally, some of the cheaper (more common) USB enclosures don't pass through the SMART (drive health) data, so any software that could potentially alert you to a failing drive wouldn't be able to do so. With the amount of drives and data you're trying to secure, you're well into prosumer/business levels of data storage where you typically have a NAS/dedicated network device to manage and serve the data to your computer(s). There aren't a lot of novice/home oriented solutions for what you're trying to accomplish, and a lot of the homebrew stuff can be messed up easily if you don't know what you're doing. If the data on these drives is similar to the data you were trying to recover previously, where you were mostly just interested in having the file names (I assume to re-torrent?), you may want to just keep a list of the names and locations of the files/folders that you have on the drives and use some free cloud storage (OneDrive) to have it available. Then when (not if) the next drive fails you know what was on that drive. Actuarial Fables fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Mar 27, 2019 |
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Mar 27, 2019 20:59
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Moey posted:Without going back through the clusterfuck, can you explain your use case, how much storage is currently utilised as well as how much you want/need? Also whatever existing hardware you already got. OK for example I have all 8 seasons of That 70's Show ripped right from Blu-Rays and that show alone is half a terabyte. Now multiply that by a shitload of other TV shows and movies, and that makes up a vast majority of it. 8TB is $130 which is dirt cheap and means there's little reason for me to delete stuff. Rather then delete stuff I just buy a new hard drive any time I am running out of space. I will probably be good for a long time now, as I have a good 20 TB of space free right now. Everything is installed to a Windows 10 PC. A large % of my media was dumped by my cousin who lives in America. The rest are TV shows and movies that download automatically. I also play PC games on it with the NVidia Gamestream, since the PC is not in an ideal place and I'd rather game on a TV anyway. That's really it. My use case is I don't want to delete anything, ever (I seriously had one instance where a file from 14 years ago saved my rear end). I also hate streaming as movies and shows are constantly being held hostage by licensing agreements and stuff like that. That's really it. I would just like to be able to save 1 disk should it die using some sort of Windows software is all. Actuarial Fables posted:What kind of USB drives do you have? A lot of usb drives are often just regular HDDs crammed into an external enclosure, and with a bit of effort you can extract them and hook them up internally. Additionally, some of the cheaper (more common) USB enclosures don't pass through the SMART (drive health) data, so any software that could potentially alert you to a failing drive wouldn't be able to do so. They are all Western Digital USB drives. You are correct that they are just SATA drives inside. I've already shucked two of them, but I can't do that to the rest because there's no more physical room in my case. I am reading SnapRAID will do exactly what I want....I think. But it's a really confusing program (like everything on GitHub seems to be) so it's going to take me a long time to figure it out and set it up. I am unsure if I have to have all the drives pooled or if I can just leave them as JBOD. I can do the file name thing. I couldn't find software that would regularly write a document with a list of all files on all drives but I believe someone wrote a script in a Windows .bat file that can do it or something. frh fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Mar 27, 2019 |
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Mar 27, 2019 21:12
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WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW posted:I can do the file name thing. I couldn't find software that would regularly write a document with a list of all files on all drives but I believe someone wrote a script in a Windows .bat file that can do it or something. for %%i in (C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z) DO @if exist %%i: dir %%i:\ /a /s > c:\file-lists\%%i-%date:~6,4%-%date:~3,2%-%date:~0,2%-%time:~0,2%-%time:~3,2%-%time:~6,2%.txt
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Mar 27, 2019 21:36
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I need more storage for my Plex server and was thinking about getting a NAS box but do not know what is good out there and what is just. I don't want to spend a ton but I don't need to buy drives as I have a few 4tb drives already. I am hoping for something that can handle 4 or 5 drives probably. My "server" is an old desktop with an SSD for the c drive and already has a couple 4tb drives in the 2 available internal sata drive spots. I am not concerned with raid, I just want more raw space. If I lose something it is not a big deal as I can get it back if needed. So what is good out there right now?
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Mar 27, 2019 21:54
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WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW posted:OK for example I have all 8 seasons of That 70's Show ripped right from Blu-Rays and that show alone is half a terabyte. Now multiply that by a shitload of other TV shows and movies, and that makes up a vast majority of it. Stablebit DrivePool.
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Mar 27, 2019 22:29
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redeyes posted:Stablebit DrivePool. I looked into that but apparently you need one to one for hard drive data recovery with it. I'd have to buy a duplicate of every single hard drive I already have
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Mar 27, 2019 22:36
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Buy an unlimited drives unraid license, run all your server poo poo in unraid dockers. Do a pass through of your video card to a windows 10 VM for your game playing.
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Mar 27, 2019 22:41
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How many drives do you have again if all 13 internal bays are full but the majority are still external USBs? I think at this point a therapist is the cheapest option.
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Mar 27, 2019 22:49
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