New FreeNAS Build

[LIGISTX]

I can't say I never had a drive fail in the warranty period but I just retired seven that had run without fail for 5 years and I have another 12 that are at the 2 year mark.
It is purely your option, naturally, and if you go with the Iron Wolf drives it does give you warranty coverage.
When I buy drives for work, I go with the Seagate Constellation drives and I have many of those that go the distance but even with them you have failures. Some of the drive shelves at work came in with WD Red drives, others came in with WD Red Pro drives and some even came in with HGST. I have seen all the brands and if you are really worried about failure, the HGST drives appear to be the least failure prone. Just in the past 30 days, I have replaced 3 of the Seagate Constellation 4TB drives 4 of the WD Red Pro 4TB drives and 2 of the WD Red 4TB drives. There isn't a drive out there that won't fail, which is one of the reasons we use disk arrays to begin with, to mitigate the risk associated with storing our data on spinning rust. Just keep in mind that no array is a substitute for a backup and eventually your drives will fail.

I agree with all points. Spinning rust is just prone to failure at some point.

I am just worried about not being able to RMA and then being stuck with a bunch of bad drives and having to big replacements.

I do know HGST has a great track record, big my data is not "highly critical" and will be backed up to cloud storage solutions as well. So it's not suuuuuper critical from a failure standpoint. Raid z2 should suffice for my needs, I am just unsure about the quality of drive I trust. I agree any drive can fail, but not being able to warranty is would be a bit annoying.

And what about the whole head parking issue? I know that is why people always say NAS drives are better for this application.


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[Stux]

You can burn them in in their case usually.

 

[LIGISTX]

You can burn them in in their case usually.

That's a good point. I guess almost all drives would die during their burn in. It's a good weed out.


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[Stux]

I've still had drives fail 3 weeks after their burn on :(

Nothing you can do. If possible try to non-destructively shuck ;)

 

[LIGISTX]

I've still had drives fail 3 weeks after their burn on :(

Nothing you can do. If possible try to non-destructively shuck ;)

So you think it's a good idea to shuck em vs buying NAS drives?

I know the biggest issue is typically head parking.... Obviously these will have this issue.


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[LIGISTX]

Also one more point, I know Corsair RM power supplies are not the highest of quality units (Corsair used to be pretty solid, some of their stuff still is, but still.....)

I may have the option to get an RMA PSU from a buddy for basically nothing. Its a RM550. Wattage is sufficient, modular which is nice, and I think it is "not bad". Anyone have any input. I do know a lot about PSU's and have done research in the past, but its been a while, and I am not sure what people's results have been from using them.... Could save me ~80 bucks though!

 

[Chris Moore]

I know the biggest issue is typically head parking.... Obviously these will have this issue.

The problem with "Green" drives is that they are constantly parking their heads and spinning down because their firmware is trying to save power. Then FreeNAS will want to read or write and they have to spin back up. It causes the Load Cycle Count to go up high and fast and can cause premature failure of the device.
I have not seen that with the Seagate Barracuda drives at all. I have not been using the shucked drives long enough to say, but they are marked as Seagate Desktop drives.
Keep in mind if you go with an OEM drive, often it doesn't come with the manufacturer warranty. If you are buying a drive for the warranty, be careful to buy a retail drive. I was very careful taking them out of the enclosures and kept the enclosures so I can try to send them in for warranty replacement if something does go wrong.

 

[LIGISTX]

Crazy question, which may be destroyed with much hate, but I have a very random and not very high quality rosewill SATA card. Now don't worry, I am not about to try and use that to expand my array, but could it be used for my boot drive? Or is that equally as bad an idea?

Original plan is to just go USB -> Sata and plug in an 850 evo through that, so its effectivly a maxed out USB flash drive..

 

[Ericloewe]

It depends and won't hurt much to try it out.

 

[LIGISTX]

It depends and won't hurt much to try it out.

As long as it won't hurt. I guess all that will happen is it will not recognize it and not boot? I don't want some weird error to happen that would corrupt my data. No idea how such a thing would happen tho.


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[Ericloewe]

It'd have to be a very competent and very evil SATA controller. Fortunately, it's certainly not competent.

 

[Chris Moore]

Crazy question, which may be destroyed with much hate, but I have a very random and not very high quality rosewill SATA card. Now don't worry, I am not about to try and use that to expand my array, but could it be used for my boot drive? Or is that equally as bad an idea?

Original plan is to just go USB -> Sata and plug in an 850 evo through that, so its effectivly a maxed out USB flash drive..

That would be a phenomenal waste of a SSD. The boot drive does not benefit from the speed or capacity of the SSD. If I recall correctly, the required size is only 8GB, maybe 16GB. You would be better off selling the SSD on eBay and use the profit to buy what you need.

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[Ericloewe]

There's no point in wasting time getting an inferior solution. SSDs are overkill, but USB flash drives are decidedly underkill.

 

[LIGISTX]

I mean I originally planned to do a USB stick in the internal USB port, but I have the SSD literally laying on my desk, it hasn't been plugged in to anything for over 8 months. Might as well use it..... Not worth much to sell, certainly not worth the hassle for the 30 bucks I would get for it.


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[LIGISTX]

Actually the controller was used in a previous openmediavault build for years without issue. Every now and then it wouldn't boot (it had the OS drive running off that as well actually) because it couldn't find the Harddrive. But once running, the server never hiccuped.


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[Chris Moore]

I mean I originally planned to do a USB stick in the internal USB port, but I have the SSD literally laying on my desk, it hasn't been plugged in to anything for over 8 months. Might as well use it..... Not worth much to sell, certainly not worth the hassle for the 30 bucks I would get for it.


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What capacity is it?

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[LIGISTX]

What capacity is it?

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120 or 128. Whatever 850 evo's are.

 

[Chris Moore]

120 or 128. Whatever 850 evo's are.

I was looking in NewEgg today and you can buy an 850 evo all the way up to 4TB.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147372
It is a kind of device, like saying Seagate Barracuda, it has nothing to do with size or even interface, as you can get them in SATA, M.2 and mSATA.
Many people have used these as boot drives in their FreeNAS, but all the rest of that capacity is wasted.

 

[LIGISTX]

I was looking in NewEgg today and you can buy an 850 evo all the way up to 4TB.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147372
It is a kind of device, like saying Seagate Barracuda, it has nothing to do with size or even interface, as you can get them in SATA, M.2 and mSATA.

Right, I just meant its whatever "~120" size drive the 850 is. Its either 120 or 128. Whichever size is their "small ~120 size".

 

[Chris Moore]

Hey, take a look at this deal: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-...re-8GB-RAM-3U-Server-/182713859035?rmvSB=true
This is local pickup in LA and it is a good deal. Just rip out the old system board and put your gear in.
If I had the cash, and they would ship it, I would get this myself. I would offer them $150 and see if they go for it.