Running out of RAID server disk space, I chanced upon an eBay deal for
ten Seagate 1TB SAS 2.5" spinning hard disks for £80 all in.

Date of manufacture 2013.

Hmmm... They are likely gonna be shagged?

Running in a Dell R620, Plan B if that goes Pete Tong is a couple of
Samsung Evo 870 1TB SATA SSD consumer drives.

--
Adrian C

On 31/10/2021 12:23, Adrian Caspersz wrote:
> Running out of RAID server disk space, I chanced upon an eBay deal for
> ten Seagate 1TB SAS 2.5" spinning hard disks for £80 all in.
>
> Date of manufacture 2013.
>
> Hmmm... They are likely gonna be shagged?
>
> Running in a Dell R620, Plan B if that goes Pete Tong is a couple of
> Samsung Evo 870 1TB SATA SSD consumer drives.
>

All my server drives are WD Red specifically for NAS boxes. The oldest 3
are about 6 years now and no faults are showing....yet.

Adrian Caspersz <email@here.invalid> wrote:
> Running out of RAID server disk space, I chanced upon an eBay deal for
> ten Seagate 1TB SAS 2.5" spinning hard disks for £80 all in.
>
> Date of manufacture 2013.
>
> Hmmm... They are likely gonna be shagged?

If you're RAIDing them, surely that doesn't matter? You're protected
against N drives failing in your array, so just select N to be sufficiently
large enough. And maybe keep a good drive on standby/next day delivery to
cover the time when one does go down, when you're at heightened risk?
(ie if one fails you're now only protected from N-1 failures)

Although I'm not sure I'd go for it over a single 10TB drive. They're gonna
howl and take more power. Possibly slightly more resilient (with 1x 10TB if
that one drive goes down you lose everything, with RAID you need to lose N
drives before you lose but a higher probability of losing one drive if
they're shagged - do the maths). But there's a certain opportunity cost of
filling slots that you could fill with larger drives in future (assuming
you'd want to).

Theo

On 31/10/2021 21:01, Theo wrote:
> Adrian Caspersz <email@here.invalid> wrote:
>> Running out of RAID server disk space, I chanced upon an eBay deal for
>> ten Seagate 1TB SAS 2.5" spinning hard disks for £80 all in.
>>
>> Date of manufacture 2013.
>>
>> Hmmm... They are likely gonna be shagged?
>
> If you're RAIDing them, surely that doesn't matter? You're protected
> against N drives failing in your array, so just select N to be sufficiently
> large enough. And maybe keep a good drive on standby/next day delivery to
> cover the time when one does go down, when you're at heightened risk?
> (ie if one fails you're now only protected from N-1 failures)

True, it's how I use them. Like disposable Type 1 ferric oxide cassettes.

Was just a bit bowled over by how cheap they were this time, to solve a
VM space problem I'd been banging my head on the wall. However,
replacing all eight previous 146GB disks (born in 2008!) at the moment
looks to be a complete back-up/replace operation, and my past unlucky
experience is most drive failures show up just as I'm doing something
critical. So here goes testing first ...

> Although I'm not sure I'd go for it over a single 10TB drive. They're gonna
> howl and take more power.

These disks do howl along with the 14 server fans. It's really Halloween
365 24/7 in there, they ramp up and down in a ghostly wail which can be
heard at night... Fitting for the season :-)

Possibly slightly more resilient (with 1x 10TB if
> that one drive goes down you lose everything, with RAID you need to lose N
> drives before you lose but a higher probability of losing one drive if
> they're shagged - do the maths).

I'm fairly good on the backup strategy, so a single drive could work.
But the work to put it all back would be a pain, which is why I'm using
RAID. Also both mirroring and striping (Raid 10) works well IME for
hosting Linux VMs.

But there's a certain opportunity cost of
> filling slots that you could fill with larger drives in future (assuming
> you'd want to).

It's currently 8 disks installed, but I'm going to try reducing the pool
down to 4 drives. Looks like I can also hang an M.2 SATA SSD (or a
couple) on internal PCI express cards, and cable them to the R620's RAID
controller, but equally I can just bung in SATA SSDs in the drive slots.

I was looking at (consumer) Samsumg SSD EVO prices as a home lab bodge,
but the used HDD drives came in cheaper - and I don't think I'm too long
down the road to eventually scrapping all and buying something decent
(or investigating AWS)

I'm collecting too much metal that ought to be sold as scrap.

--
Adrian C

On Monday, November 1, 2021 at 4:41:42 AM UTC+8, RobH wrote:

> >
> All my server drives are WD Red specifically for NAS boxes. The oldest 3
> are about 6 years now and no faults are showing....yet.

I use WD Purple, which are mechanically the same as Red. The 10 TB is a sweet spot, almost as fast as "enterprise" drive, but cheaper. I churn over a lot a data, which isn't needed long term, so no RAID. No failures in 3 years.