What Disks to Buy? NL-SAS Worth it?

[Ellusionist]

Hey Everybody,

So I'm working on first build and I'm in the final stages. Been doing a lot of reading on NL-SAS and brands of hd's, but it seems that HGST is coming out on top for reliability? Western Digital owns Hitachi (HGST) but I'm kind of torn now that I know that, hopefully they have not changed processes. There was a report that came out related to the drive reliability, https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/ that also made me question going with Seagate and WD.

MTBF on the HGST are higher then all at 2,000,000 versus 1,200,000.

Primary use of the system will be:

Backups
Photo Storage
Media Storage
VmWare Datastores

I'm running HBA's between ESX and storage and HBA internally. Also, network is going to be 10 GB.

So my question would you go with WD SE/RE, HGST (7K4000), or Seagate (ES) and would you bother with NL-SAS when hooking up to a backplane on a supermicro chassis?

Thanks!

 

[Ellusionist]

Any Thoughts or Opinions?

 

[jamiejunk]

I'm old school. So I'm a seagate fan from back in the day when they were the only ones that made 10k scsi drives. When i did hardware repair in the late 90s I'd see dead quantum, IBM, and WD seemed to be the worst.

I have a bunch of storage arrays.
Here is a list of jbods running the Seagate 7200rpm SAS drives and the purchase date I pulled from a spreadsheet. I think some of them were called barracudas, newer ones are called constellations I think

14 - 2010
14 - 2010
14 - 2014
32 - Not sure of the purchase date.

It's pretty rare that I have to replace a drive. These are doing backups, group files, home directories, ip camera video archives.

People seem to like WD nowadays. But i've had good luck with the SAS Seagates.

Also have about 48 of the 300 gig 15K sas drives from them. Those are NFS shared to vmware.

 

[diehard]

To answer your question about bothering with NL-SAS drives.. Yes, two times now i have had SATA drives detach during a scrub.