Disk Price Performance Spreadsheet

[farmerpling2]

I created a spread sheet that lists many of the commonly used disk drives for NAS & desktops and thought I would share it with you.

It's goal is to provide information about performance, cost per TB, cost for electricity, cost per TB er year, etc. It tries to normalize the data for comparison purpose, $/TB/YEAR. If you see blanks in some of the data, that means I did not find it yet or the spec sheets did not provide it. Columns are not well documented as of yet, nor the formulas to compute cells.

Example: Power usage for 1 year was calculated at $0.12 KWH. I used 20% active and 80% idle, based upon someones home usage. Enterprise/commercial should be more 50%-90% depending on your activity. Just change the cells you need and the display should change accordingly.

It is NOT a finished product - more of a draft. I will work on it on and off and share it with you. It needs more documentation which I will work on so bear with me.

It is an excel spreadsheet, using Excel 2013. OpenOffice should be able to access it on Linux.
You will need to rename it from .txt to .xlsx. I could not upload it without changing file type.
I did a virus scan using Windows Defender immediately before I uploaded it.

Prices came mainly from US's NEWEGG.COM. Not that they always have best prices, just made it easier to look for.

I have also attached a screen shot of the spreadsheet. It is the second .jpg file.

UPDATED FILE: 07/31/2017

 

[Arwen]

I knew the Seagate 8TB Archive SMR drive was cheaper per Terabyte than some others, but
I did not realize how cheap. Makes me wish Seagate would make a 10TB, (or larger), model.

 

[farmerpling2]

I knew the Seagate 8TB Archive SMR drive was cheaper per Terabyte than some others, but I did not realize how cheap. Makes me wish Seagate would make a 10TB, (or larger), model.

I was also surprised. I will probably look at them more in depth i the future, because the old axiom goes without saying - "You get what you pay for."

If I were to use them I would put them on a VM on a separate machine as a backup method. You could power them down when not in use.

Price per TB was surprisingly cheap. Has anyone used them and have any feedback?

 

[Dice]

Some good ideas in this spreadsheet.

 

[farmerpling2]

I tried to normalize the warranties 3 year, 5 year, etc., to all five year in column M/N. I used the 10%/year for drives that had less than 5 year warranty to make them comparable. So a 3 ( (5-3) * 10%) year drive would get a 20% price increase to bring in into the general range of the 5 year warranty drive. This allows you to roughly compare drives on a equal footing. Not perfect by a long shot but better than nothing.

The energy usage needs to have more data added to it. Not all manufactures provide all the information for energy usage.

If anyone has any information that would correct my data or fill in the blanks - please share! ;)

 

[Arwen]

I was also surprised. I will probably look at them more in depth i the future, because the old axiom goes without saying - "You get what you pay for."

If I were to use them I would put them on a VM on a separate machine as a backup method. You could power them down when not in use.

Price per TB was surprisingly cheap. Has anyone used them and have any feedback?

Yes, I own a Seagate 8TB Archive SMR drive. And yes, I use it for off-line backups. It works perfectly
fine for my intended use. It's not a speed demon, but since my backups are scripted, I simply perform
the preliminary setup work, start the backup and ignore it til it's done.

Here is a link to the resource I wrote in how I use it:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/how-to-backup-to-local-disks.26/

Since the SMR methodology is new, I wanted my backups to use ZFS. Even in a single disk pool. Better
chance of detecting firmware faults, like mis-placed writes or reads. So my backup script runs a scrub
before every backup, and won't perform the backup if there is a single error detected. (I ALWAYS check
backup completion logs before I consider the backup complete.)

 

[Nomad]

Seagate 8TB Archive vs WD Red 8TB; Wouldn't the slower helium filled drives give better longevity, less power, vibration, heat? AFAIK they are about the same price.

 

[farmerpling2]

Seagate 8TB Archive vs WD Red 8TB; Wouldn't the slower helium filled drives give better longevity, less power, vibration, heat? AFAIK they are about the same price.

Both are low RPM/power. I would not get excited about that - unless specs show big differences.

Seagate was $27.50/TB and Seagate (Ironwolf == Red) $35.00/TB

Ebay has them a tad bit cheaper.

For backups, The run time will be quite low - IMHO, probably make little difference. I would script up the backup to the backup server via WOL and drive(s) on backup server, push the data over then put backup system back to sleep.

Low power and can use an older machine because of runtime being so low. As long as old machine can handle it, great way to use low power.

1Gb Ethernet would be fine unless you get into 10's TB of back.

 

[farmerpling2]

I updated the spreadsheet. Added some 2.5" drives, a 10K drive and a bunch of others. Added some more power info. I might remove non-NAS drives, but for now they give you an idea of "regular" drives vs. NAS drives.

 

[farmerpling2]

I have added more info to the sheet, startup peak power, top 20 best price per TB, along with some color. The new sheet makes it easier to compare for best value and power usage.

 

[Dice]

Where is the spreadsheet located? I cannot find a link.

 

[Arwen]

Where is the spreadsheet located? I cannot find a link.

It's the second attachment of the first post. You have to download and rename it, since this forum does not allow misc. file extension, (just .txt).

 

[farmerpling2]

I have updated the file in a couple ways.

• Maximum startup watts
• Bottom 20 drives - lowest price per TB
• Bottom 20 drives - lowest price per TB, normalized for 5 (you can change) years warranty to make it easier to compare 1, 2, 3, or 5 year warranty drives. Nor perfect but better than just guessing.
• The cost per drive per year for electricity has a shaded green to orange based upon cost to run drive for 1 year. There are some knobs to turn to make it match your locale such as cost per KW and duty cycle (active and idle).

A simple little thought... The cost for drive electricity only, for best case is $2.70, worst case is $9.05. If you have a 5 drive RAIDZ2, the worst-best difference in cost per year is ~$32. More than likely it will be closer to $12 - $15. Would you be willing to spend $15 more a year for electricity to have faster drives? This does not include the cost for A/C, better fans to cool drives, cost to cool controller for higher throughput, etc.

The point I am making is, the cost difference is not that much between 5400/5900 vs 7200 for electricity. You can find some good deals on 7200 RPM that can make it worth while if you are patient.

As I go along, I will add some more drives and possible more functionality.

If you get the urge, feel free to improve it, if it will help the community.

Enjoy!

 

[Nomad]

Both are low RPM/power. I would not get excited about that - unless specs show big differences.

Seagate was $27.50/TB and Seagate (Ironwolf == Red) $35.00/TB
.

I was talking about WD Red instead of Seafate Ironwolf just thought the He drives would be better.

 

[Nomad]

I knew the Seagate 8TB Archive SMR drive was cheaper per Terabyte than some others, but
I did not realize how cheap. Makes me wish Seagate would make a 10TB, (or larger), model.

Do you think these would make a good Plex Storage? That is all I really use my NAS for is massive amount of movies and tv shows.

 

[Evi Vanoost]

The "Archival" drives are intended for just that. They are horribly bad at read/write and changing a block of data requires an entire 'shingle' to be re-written (kind of like SSD MLC but with the hard drive access rates and latency). They are intended to be Write-Once-Never-Read. So if you keep streaming ZFS snapshots to it and never, ever delete them, they might be good for that purpose, long term archiving.

 

[Arwen]

I knew the Seagate 8TB Archive SMR drive was cheaper per Terabyte than some others, but
I did not realize how cheap. Makes me wish Seagate would make a 10TB, (or larger), model.

Do you think these would make a good Plex Storage? That is all I really use my NAS for is massive amount of movies and tv shows.

Yes and no.

If it's pure media storage, you can probably get multiple streams of 1080p, (even a 4K), out of a single drive. And if you have more than one drive, (striped, Mirrored or RAID-Zx), then you may be able to come close to saturating a 1Gbps link.

That said, you have to plan for disk failure. That's what Mirroring and RAID-Zx are intended to allow for, disk failures without data loss. Under some specific conditions you can plan on little or no redundancy. For example, if you have GOOD backups for your media, plus the original source DVDs and Blu-rays, you may stripe the media disks.

Another way to look at it, is use each disk as a single disk pool. So, when you have a disk failure, you only have to restore those media files. This avoids disk failure magnification in a striped pool, (where one disk failure takes out the entire pool).

In my case, my miniture media server has a 1TB mSATA SSD and a 2TB 2.5" HDD. The OS is Mirrored with ZFS, but the remaining space is striped, (no redundancy), for the media. Yet, I use my FreeNAS with 4 x 4TB in RAID-Z2 for backups, (including the media). And, I use my Seagate Archive SMR for backing up my FreeNAS. Thus, I have to loose 5 disks before I loose my media. (And I still have the DVDs & Blu-rays...)