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Thermopyle
Jul 1, 2003

...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell



Star War Sex Parrot posted:

I wish they'd post a follow-up to that study. It's five years old and based on drives that are even older. Drive manufacturers have done a lot to both the hardware and firmware of hard drives to extend their lifespan and I'm curious if there are tangible results.

I agree that I'd like to see a follow-up.

I'm not sure I'd agree that they've done a lot to extend drive's lifespans. Since the time of that study, didn't all the manufacturers drastically lower their warranty periods? Or am I dreaming?

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that drives have gotten worse, but it makes me wonder.

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003



Muldoon

Thermopyle posted:

Since the time of that study, didn't all the manufacturers drastically lower their warranty periods? Or am I dreaming?

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that drives have gotten worse, but it makes me wonder.
What engineering does has nothing to do with sales. That's completely independent of the changes that have been done to improve drive lifespan, but yes warranties have been lowered. It's tough to find any companies that didn't make dramatic changes to survive the recession.

See: video card, SSD, and various other computer component warranties as well.

Star War Sex Parrot fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Jan 20, 2012

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





I thought most non-shit video cards had lifetime warranties now?

I say non-shit because the shit ECS 8400GS I've had in my HTPC is now showing swollen caps, and inexplicably they have a three year warranty (which it's in) but only cover labor for two years of it (which it's not in). Just shipping the fucking thing off is 1/3 of the cost of a new 8400GS.

Also, I thought swollen caps were so a decade ago. My fileserver's motherboard (Foxconn 946) and that video card both have swollen caps all over the goddamn place, but amazingly neither has shown any errors (yet). Oh well, excuse to rebuild it as a VM within an ESXi box with VT-d

Thermopyle
Jul 1, 2003

...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell



Star War Sex Parrot posted:

What engineering does has nothing to do with sales. That's completely independent of the changes that have been done to improve drive lifespan, but yes warranties have been lowered. It's tough to find any companies that didn't make dramatic changes to survive the recession.

See: video card, SSD, and various other computer component warranties as well.

I think you're overstating the de-coupling of engineering and sales.

As I mentioned, it doesn't necessarily mean anything about the actual lifetime of drives. But consider this: If lifetime of drives was actually lower, what affect would you expect that to have on warranty length?

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003



Muldoon

Drives manufacturers are always going to seek to improve lifetime regardless of whatever their retail warranties are. The vast majority of their revenue comes from OEMs and enterprise contracts anyway, and they just look at big picture RMA percentages. They'll do everything that they can to keep their big contracts happy.

Thermopyle
Jul 1, 2003

...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell



Star War Sex Parrot posted:

Drives manufacturers are always going to seek to improve lifetime regardless of whatever their retail warranties are. The vast majority of their revenue comes from OEMs and enterprise contracts anyway, and they just look at big picture RMA percentages. They'll do everything that they can to keep their big contracts happy.

Right, but it's not like drives stayed exactly the same. Densities and tolerances increased greatly from the drives from the time of that study. Merely maintaining the status quo would have improved lifetime when looked at as lifetime vs device complexity.

This is kind of a silly argument since I have no idea what drive lifetimes have actually done. What I'm disagreeing with is your asserted (implied) level of confidence...

Whoforthenwhat
Sep 20, 2009


Looking for a third tier back up solution for my PC, especially after my 1TB Seagate shit itself killing the drive (fortunately I panic grabbed everything I could off the drive before it really died).

At the moment I have a 16GB Flash drive for important constant changing stuff, documents etc, a 320GB Raid 1 external setup for the rest.

I need a third mainly due to storage capacity being reached on both the Flash and External drive setup (music+pics etc = 500+GB). I can either swap out the 320's and put in two 1tb drives into the Raid or get a third to do Images/full backups of everything and update that once a week and keep away from the PC (so I can grab and run in a house fire or whatever).

Do I go with a bog standard External Drive like a WD my book or whatever/2.5" 1tb portable or something else?

sleepy gary
Jan 11, 2006



Whoforthenwhat posted:

Looking for a third tier back up solution for my PC, especially after my 1TB Seagate shit itself killing the drive (fortunately I panic grabbed everything I could off the drive before it really died).

At the moment I have a 16GB Flash drive for important constant changing stuff, documents etc, a 320GB Raid 1 external setup for the rest.

I need a third mainly due to storage capacity being reached on both the Flash and External drive setup (music+pics etc = 500+GB). I can either swap out the 320's and put in two 1tb drives into the Raid or get a third to do Images/full backups of everything and update that once a week and keep away from the PC (so I can grab and run in a house fire or whatever).

Do I go with a bog standard External Drive like a WD my book or whatever/2.5" 1tb portable or something else?

Upgrade your RAID, look into Crashplan to manage the backups to your flash drive (and maybe get a larger flash drive if necessary -- 32gb are now in the $25-45 range). Crashplan software is free for that use. Finally, get offsite backups. What happens if your house burns down while you're not home? Or you get burglarized and they steal your primary data and the backups? (THIS HAPPENS ASK ME HOW I KNOW)

For offsite, I recommend Crashplan+. If you can, pay for multiple years up front to get a discount. They allow you to get a pro-rated refund at any time if you are unhappy or want to discontinue your service, so there is really no risk in doing that.

Also maybe check out the SpiderOak thread to get a free 6gb account for your most critical data.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

Newegg's shell-shocker deal for today is the N40L w/WHS 2011 for $250 shipped: http://www.newegg.com/special/shell...hellShocker-EB3

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]


IOwnCalculus posted:

I thought most non-shit video cards had lifetime warranties now?

No graphics card ever came with lifetime warranty and never going to happen - does not even make sense: slot standards keep changing so buying one card would suppose to hold you over forever or you suppose to receive an AGP card 10 years after they stopped manufacturing it?
Makes no sense whatsoever.

quote:

I say non-shit because the shit ECS 8400GS I've had in my HTPC is now showing swollen caps, and inexplicably they have a three year warranty (which it's in) but only cover labor for two years of it (which it's not in). Just shipping the fucking thing off is 1/3 of the cost of a new 8400GS.

Also, I thought swollen caps were so a decade ago. My fileserver's motherboard (Foxconn 946) and that video card both have swollen caps all over the goddamn place, but amazingly neither has shown any errors (yet). Oh well, excuse to rebuild it as a VM within an ESXi box with VT-d

You just named the two biggest and cheapest OEM/ODM manufacturer of the world.
Try buying at least mid-tier quality stuff to avoid getting products built from the shittiest, cheapest parts.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





szlevi posted:

No graphics card ever came with lifetime warranty and never going to happen - does not even make sense: slot standards keep changing so buying one card would suppose to hold you over forever or you suppose to receive an AGP card 10 years after they stopped manufacturing it?
Makes no sense whatsoever.

XFX has advertised "double lifetime" (i.e. original purchaser and the first person they resell it to) for years, provided that you register the warranty within 30 days of purchase or something like that. I may have overstated it on "most" but it's certainly a non-zero amount. A quick look on Newegg shows that EVGA and Zotac also advertise lifetime warranties on video cards.

szlevi posted:

You just named the two biggest and cheapest OEM/ODM manufacturer of the world.
Try buying at least mid-tier quality stuff to avoid getting products built from the shittiest, cheapest parts.

Thus my own admission of calling it "shit". Of course, I did have to re-cap two IBM eServer power supplies in the last year. So please, continue to express your absolute opinions on what is good and what is not and what warranties have ever existed.

IOwnCalculus fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Jan 22, 2012

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

szlevi posted:

No graphics card ever came with lifetime warranty and never going to happen - does not even make sense: slot standards keep changing so buying one card would suppose to hold you over forever or you suppose to receive an AGP card 10 years after they stopped manufacturing it?
Makes no sense whatsoever.
A variety of manufactures offer lifetime warranties. If you RMA a card that's been out of production that they don't have any in stock, they will give you an "equivalent" card that they do have, or offer some form of monetary compensation. Which means if you RMA a PCI card or something, they'd probably offer you like $20.

KennyG
Oct 22, 2002
Here to blow my own horn.

szlevi posted:

No graphics card ever came with lifetime warranty and never going to happen - does not even make sense: slot standards keep changing so buying one card would suppose to hold you over forever or you suppose to receive an AGP card 10 years after they stopped manufacturing it?
Makes no sense whatsoever.


Think about what you said. They have warranted a rapidly depreciating asset. Most of them also have a clause that limit it to a single replacement. It makes total sense, especially when you consider the problems that Nvidia had with their manufacturing process circa 2007 when they had millions of defective cards on the market and refused to change the model number of the cards made with the fixed process. So a card manufacturer promises a replacement card if the thing EVER fails.

Ok, let's take a look at the numbers. Many jurisdictions mandate a 2 year warranty on items like this, and most manufacturers offer a 3 year warranty. If you bought a TOP-o-the-LINE card 3 years ago when it was first released and it failed today, it's not going to cost them the same $650 to replace it that it cost you to purchase it. The best card on the market in January 2009 was the AMD/ATI HD4850 x2. To straight replace that today, at retail is $60. However, at this point they'd likely declare it was no longer available and replace it with a HD5xxx or even 6xxx (since the bitcoiners have killed the 5xxx stock) that will cost them less.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Amusingly, the Zotac card I found with a lifetime warranty was a near-bottom-of-the-barrel one at only $60, so arguably it would be a worse proposition (since equivalent cards won't cost them THAT much less to produce in the future) but even then it must still work out. </derail>

So, just flipped the switch on virtualizing my home fileserver. I set up a box with ESXi (Intel DQ67SWB3 motherboard, Core i5 2400, 16GB RAM), spun up a fresh Ubuntu Server 11.10 VM, installed mdadm, sshd, and samba, and then powered both it and my old fileserver off. Took the PCI SATA controller out of the old server, dropped it and a PCIe SATA controller (both cheap SiI cards) into the ESXi box, set them both to passthrough to the Ubuntu VM, and after a reboot to make that take effect, I was able to quickly add the array in the VM. No rebuild or anything.

So, I went from an E2140 with 2GB RAM to a VM with four cores on that i5 2400 and 12GB assigned to it (though I may just up it to 16GB for shits and grins). It also now sits on the same hardware as my m0n0wall box and a couple of test desktop OS VMs.

Thoroughly painless process. And whenever drive prices come back down from the stratosphere, I have a PCIe x16 slot open to drop a cheap LSI card into, and then I'll look at migrating to Solaris / ZFS.

Anyone need a Supermicro 5-in-3 SATA enclosure? With where I relocated my box to, I don't need it anymore and I'll be able to free it up soonish.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll

Nap Ghost

I'd think that VT-d would be helpful for a setup like that. Why not use the E3-1240? The ECC RAM cost bothering you? With enough data going through ZFS on enough RAM I'd want ECC. My current workstation will probably be repurposed as my VM and NAS server and I'd want to add another 2 UDIMMs then to make it 16GB. That's like $80 now, and while it's not as cheap as $25 like for standard RAM I can't imagine being anything less than paranoid about 12TB of data getting scrubbed through all that RAM so often. A hundred bucks is easily worth some peace of mind. Not to mention that server grade motherboards just make me feel a bit more comfy than the average Foxconn board for consumers.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





The i5-2400 and the DQ67 actualy supports VT-d, that's how I'm passing the two SiI controllers straight to the VM. However, I'm now having a lot of trouble with the two-port PCIe controller wanting to drop off, as well as ESXi losing the onboard NIC on every other reboot (which is admittedly only supported currently via a community-generated driver). Bizarre.

I may reconfigure things a bit and see if I can install ESXi itself to a USB drive, and add a driver to it to use the SiI 3132 + 160GB SATA drive as a datastore, and then pass through just the onboard controller and the four-port SiI 3114 PCI card.

Big reason is that the Xeon adds to absolutely everything in cost. I paid $225 to another goon for this CPU/Mobo, and $80-$15 rebate for the RAM at Fry's. Going Xeon would double+ the cost of the CPU and motherboard to do even an E3-1230 and a X9SCL.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll

Nap Ghost

My E3-1230 + Intel C202 board was maybe $380 new and 8GB of ECC RAM was $90 back in late July. I spent maybe $120 more than the folks building gaming rigs with 2600k CPUs (roughly equivalent to the E3-1230) in the system building thread including a GTX 560 and 128GB SSD. I figure I'll recoup costs from system longevity and also from the package conveniences of two onboard Intel NICs. Running ESX/ESXi on commodity hardware gives me some PTSD flashbacks to when I used to run ESX 3.5 at work on Adaptec RAID cards with hacked in drivers in the service console to make the datastore work.

I suspect you'll be needing different NICs though before controllers. It really helped the throughput on my network and even SMB connections are more stable than with the Realtek NIC that I had working on Solaris.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Well, to be fair the -K's don't support VT-d. I don't doubt the superiority of the Xeon hardware but I just can't justify the increased cost for it right now.

Edit: Going to pick up some eSATA-SATA cables so I can use all six ports of the onboard and just pass that through to the VM. I have a PCI SiI 3512 that ESXi 5 works with out of the box (I was using it in my proof-of-concept box). I may need to grab a USB stick to install ESXi itself to, though, since I don't know if this motherboard will actually boot off of the PCI card.

IOwnCalculus fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Jan 23, 2012

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]


DrDork posted:

A variety of manufactures offer lifetime warranties. If you RMA a card that's been out of production that they don't have any in stock, they will give you an "equivalent" card that they do have, or offer some form of monetary compensation. Which means if you RMA a PCI card or something, they'd probably offer you like $20.

Which means it's BS not real lifetime warranty, exactly. Congrat for getting my point though.

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]


IOwnCalculus posted:

XFX has advertised "double lifetime" (i.e. original purchaser and the first person they resell it to) for years, provided that you register the warranty within 30 days of purchase or something like that. I may have overstated it on "most" but it's certainly a non-zero amount. A quick look on Newegg shows that EVGA and Zotac also advertise lifetime warranties on video cards.

Do you even understand the point I'm making about this hilarious idea of "lifetime warranty" for a VGA?
I doubt it.

quote:

Thus my own admission of calling it "shit". Of course, I did have to re-cap two IBM eServer power supplies in the last year. So please, continue to express your absolute opinions on what is good and what is not and what warranties have ever existed.

OK, so you don't have clue, I see.

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]


KennyG posted:

Think about what you said. They have warranted a rapidly depreciating asset. Most of them also have a clause that limit it to a single replacement. It makes total sense, especially when you consider the problems that Nvidia had with their manufacturing process circa 2007 when they had millions of defective cards on the market and refused to change the model number of the cards made with the fixed process. So a card manufacturer promises a replacement card if the thing EVER fails.
That was my point: that "lifetime" warranty is not lifetime but limited warranty of probably one or two replacement cards.

quote:


Ok, let's take a look at the numbers. Many jurisdictions mandate a 2 year warranty on items like this, and most manufacturers offer a 3 year warranty. If you bought a TOP-o-the-LINE card 3 years ago when it was first released and it failed today, it's not going to cost them the same $650 to replace it that it cost you to purchase it. The best card on the market in January 2009 was the AMD/ATI HD4850 x2. To straight replace that today, at retail is $60. However, at this point they'd likely declare it was no longer available and replace it with a HD5xxx or even 6xxx (since the bitcoiners have killed the 5xxx stock) that will cost them less.

Right except if it happened to be an AGP card then someone is fucked... fitting examples are convenient, I know.

All I'm saying is that this "lifetime warranty" is just a dumb PR point to sell to people who eat this kind of dogfood.

DigitalMocking
Jun 8, 2010

Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.
Benjamin Franklin

szlevi posted:

That was my point: that "lifetime" warranty is not lifetime but limited warranty of probably one or two replacement cards.


Right except if it happened to be an AGP card then someone is fucked... fitting examples are convenient, I know.

All I'm saying is that this "lifetime warranty" is just a dumb PR point to sell to people who eat this kind of dogfood.

I've been an advocate of XFX for a long time now, I recently sent in a 4870 I got from them in 2008, they sent back a 6670, no questions asked. PR fluff or not, I got an 80 dollar video card for nothing.
</derail>

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





IOwnCalculus posted:

Edit: Going to pick up some eSATA-SATA cables so I can use all six ports of the onboard and just pass that through to the VM. I have a PCI SiI 3512 that ESXi 5 works with out of the box (I was using it in my proof-of-concept box). I may need to grab a USB stick to install ESXi itself to, though, since I don't know if this motherboard will actually boot off of the PCI card.

Quoting myself so that instead of sperging about whether or not a lifetime warranty is a lifetime warranty, we can get back to storage chat. This was the ticket; I'm using VT-d to pass the onboard controller straight through to the VM, while ESXi itself boots off of a $4 USB flashdrive. Four of my 1.5TB drives connect to the internal ports, while the other two connect using eSATA-SATA cables to the rear eSATA ports (which are still provided by the same controller). The datastore is a 160GB SATA drive hanging off of a SiI 3512 PCI card in the one PCI slot. No more issues with dmesg filling up with errors as the SiI 3132 PCIe card I was passing through started shitting data after about two minutes of actual use.

The last thing I need to figure out is the 500GB SATA drive that I had connected to the fileserver - I don't have any open ports I can pass straight through to the VM, but it's about half full of data so I'd rather not wipe it. Everything on it is completely non-critical and already backed up to Crashplan so I may just wipe it, put a giant VMDK on it, attach the VMDK to the fileserver VM, and restore everything from Crashplan. Not sure.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003



IOwnCalculus posted:

a VM with four cores on that i5 2400 and 12GB assigned to it (though I may just up it to 16GB for shits and grins).
Don't do this. Too much memory doesn't matter if there's no contention but extra vCPUs will actually slow shit down unless they're needed.
Also 12GB is kinda fun, I serve 25TB with 4.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.


DigitalMocking posted:

I've been an advocate of XFX for a long time now, I recently sent in a 4870 I got from them in 2008, they sent back a 6670, no questions asked. PR fluff or not, I got an 80 dollar video card for nothing.
</derail>

Congrats, you let them give you a lower-performing card. That's exactly why I'm an anti-XFX advocate.

Wait, what thread is this?

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003



Star War Sex Parrot posted:

I wish they'd post a follow-up to that study. It's five years old and based on drives that are even older. Drive manufacturers have done a lot to both the hardware and firmware of hard drives to extend their lifespan and I'm curious if there are tangible results.
The backblaze guys had some data on HDD failure rates in their pod 2.0 article:

quote:

We monitor the temperature of every drive in our datacenter through the standard SMART interface, and we’ve observed in the past three years that: 1) hard drives in pods in the top of racks run three degrees warmer on average than pods in the lower shelves; 2) drives in the center of the pod run five degrees warmer than those on the perimeter; 3) pods do not need all six fans—the drives maintain the recommended operating temperature with as few as two fans; and 4) heat doesn’t correlate with drive failure (at least in the ranges seen in storage pods).
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/2...g-more-secrets/

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]


OK, so yesterday I fired up my brand-new ReadyNAS Pro 6, loaded two 2TB Hitachi 32MB 7200 drives and started copying stuff.

Issue#1:

First speed was around 85-90MB/s which is great considering mirror sync was running.

By today morning, mirror sync done around midnight, speed decreased to 40-50MB/s... WTF?

Now I plugged in a third matching drive (older firmware though) so it started restriping the whole mirror into RAID5 and write speed (reported by SuperCopier 2, see Issue#2 for reasons) is now down to 20s and 30s, thnat's just fuckin unacceptable.


Issue#2:
Around the evening I started receiving those awful 'source is no longer there' or 'can't find source' BS error messages in Windows, similarly to this issue: http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewt...p?f=111&t=29373

Again, mine is a ReadyNAS but issue is the same - is there any known workaround for this?
It happens randomly but it ALWAYS happens, in EVERY copy process and once it happened it always fail AT THE SAME ITEMS when I restart the copy process... it goes without saying that files/folders in question are working just fine in Windows and if I move them to somewhere else then copy works fine (only to fail somewhere else.)

I suspect it's another stupid Debian/fs/SAMBA bug that needs to be fixed in a new firmware (why anyone is choosing that PoS Debian for his distro is beyond me but that's a whole other topic.)

One workaround I found is by using SuperCopier 2 I do not get these messages.

szlevi fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Jan 25, 2012

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams


Last time I got hard drives, it looks like I got some Samsung EcoGreen drives, because they didn't do the crazy head parking that Western Digital green drives did. Now I'm thinking of buying some more drives. I'm assuming that Western Digital Green drives still head park, but what about Seagate or Hitachi? Right now their 2TB drives are 129 on NewEgg, and Samsung EcoGreen drives are $159. Is it worth it to spend the extra $30, or are Seagate or Hitachi fine?

These will be going into a Solaris machine with ZFS.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


FISHMANPET posted:

Last time I got hard drives, it looks like I got some Samsung EcoGreen drives, because they didn't do the crazy head parking that Western Digital green drives did. Now I'm thinking of buying some more drives. I'm assuming that Western Digital Green drives still head park, but what about Seagate or Hitachi? Right now their 2TB drives are 129 on NewEgg, and Samsung EcoGreen drives are $159. Is it worth it to spend the extra $30, or are Seagate or Hitachi fine?

These will be going into a Solaris machine with ZFS.

Running Hitachi 5K3000 2TB drives in my ZFS setup and they're pretty great.

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]


Hitachi is cool though runs hotter.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


szlevi posted:

Hitachi is cool though runs hotter.

Can you back that up? Or are you referring to the 7200 RPM variant?

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]


LmaoTheKid posted:

Can you back that up? Or are you referring to the 7200 RPM variant?

He's asking about EcoGreen vs Hitachi and the latter does not have any "green" version as far as I know.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams


szlevi posted:

He's asking about EcoGreen vs Hitachi and the latter does not have any "green" version as far as I know.

The Hitachi drive I'm looking at in particular has "CoolSpin" technology, but I can't figure out what that means. There's also a lot of reviews of early failure on that model, so maybe I'll just skip it and look at the Seagate Green drive. Does Seagate have any of the issues that WD drives do?

feld
Feb 11, 2008

Out of nowhere its.....

Feldman



FISHMANPET posted:

The Hitachi drive I'm looking at in particular has "CoolSpin" technology, but I can't figure out what that means. There's also a lot of reviews of early failure on that model, so maybe I'll just skip it and look at the Seagate Green drive. Does Seagate have any of the issues that WD drives do?

I've also been looking for a proper explanation of what "CoolSpin" really is.

BnT
Mar 10, 2006



Some Hitachi blog:

quote:

“Hitachi CoolSpin drives deliver a substantial power savings over their desktop-class counterparts, simplifying CE product design and paving the way for a new class of set-top boxes and DVRs that are smaller, quieter and more reliable for consumers,” said Larry Swezey, director, Consumer and Commercial HDD Marketing and Strategy, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

I think this is how a marketing guy says "green"? But yeah, basically a motor that uses less power.

I'm using seven of the 3TB Hitachi 5400s with good success. None were DOA, none have failed, and they're performing very well for me in ZFS RAIDZ2 on Solaris.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams


BnT posted:

Some Hitachi blog:


I think this is how a marketing guy says "green"? But yeah, basically a motor that uses less power.

I'm using seven of the 3TB Hitachi 5400s with good success. None were DOA, none have failed, and they're performing very well for me in ZFS RAIDZ2 on Solaris.

The 5400s may be fine, but its the 5300s that are having the problems it seems. I can't do 3TB drives right now because of my controller, and even if I could, the price makes them not worth it for me.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams


Fuck, today I learned the hard way that SFF-8087 to 4xSATA cables come in a forward and reverse variety.

So if you have 4 SATA ports on your motherboard/controller and your enclosure has a SAS port, you need a reverse cable (what I ordered). If you have a SAS port on your controller and 4 SATA ports on your enclosure/individual drives, you need a forward cable (what I should have ordered).

Oddhair
Mar 21, 2004



What would the symptoms be if you had the wrong cable? I have the forward kind of setup (and I just double checked and the cables I ordered are forward, but I've been having problems.) does the connection simply not recognize the drives?

BTW: http://www.monoprice.com/products/s...102&cp_id=10254

The .5M 30 gauge feels really flimsy in those SATA wires, I might try the 1M 28 gauge just for grins.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams


Oddhair posted:

What would the symptoms be if you had the wrong cable? I have the forward kind of setup (and I just double checked and the cables I ordered are forward, but I've been having problems.) does the connection simply not recognize the drives?

BTW: http://www.monoprice.com/products/s...102&cp_id=10254

The .5M 30 gauge feels really flimsy in those SATA wires, I might try the 1M 28 gauge just for grins.

Yeah, the controller just doesn't see the drives at all.

I ordered the .5M 30 gauge last night, we'll see how that goes.

Bonobos
Jan 26, 2004


Ok, I just picked up one of the HP Proliant Mini-servers. Have a bunch of drives I intend to use (a mix of 1 and 2tb disks of various speeds, from various manufacturers).

I would like to make this awesome little thing an awesome little server for various media, and do things like run regular backups of my other computers and maybe some torrent/usenet stuff. However, I am not sure how to approach it. Ideally, I'd like to run ESXi on it, then install something that can run ZFS.

First question - for the VM server, I don't know if I should roll with Solaris, FreedBSD, FreeNAS or Openindiana. I have used Windows and Mac PCs, but my linux experience has never been positive. Can anyone recommend a particular distro?

Second question - is ZFS raid doable for drives of various sizes, or am I just going to regret trying? I have some WD green drives that are of the consumer quality - I don't believe those support raid, so I assume I can't roll those.

I'll assume that I will need to upgrade the ram from 2gb to 8gb to see acceptable performance. Can anyone offer any suggestions?

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