HDDs - Enterprise vs Consumer drives.

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An interesting thread here about the difference between enterprise vs consumer HDDs and a rather surprising conclusion.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/

But he also said:"It turns out that the consumer drive failure rate does go up after three years, but all three of the first three years are pretty good"

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Basically what I've been saying for ages. These so called NAS drives with inflated prices are a load of marketing twaddle (or at least not worth the premiums) and "consumer" drives work just as well.
 
The "NAS" drives such as WD Red are not marketed as enterprise drives though. That's not why they are "NAS" drives. "NAS" drives do not hang around waiting for error recovery to work like desktop drives do. When this happens, the drive will drop off the RAID. They're not marketed as enterprise drives... just compatible with RAID arrays. Using desktop drives with a RAID can cause issues. (ask me how I know).
 
no the Red drives arent technically enterprise but they are marketed to give that impression. funny though ive been using desktop drives in my RAID for years with no bother. throughput is always close enough to the theoretical max for my use.

what i think the article shows though is that hard drives, no matter what grade will fail. ive had a brand new replacement fibre channel (enterprise) drive fail within a week.
 
All this is irrelevant if you have back up anyway. If anyone thinks they can use enterprise drives as a way of avoiding back up is misguided. All drives will fail sooner or later, yes.

Software RAID will probably be OK with desktop drives, but anyone that uses a proper enterprise grade RAID card will be able t tell you all about desktop drives dropping off the RAID. They're just not designed for drives that wait around for error recovery.
 
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Pookeyhead said:
If anyone thinks they can use enterprise drives as a way of avoiding back up is misguided. All drives will fail sooner or later, yes.
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This. Plan for failure and it doesn't really matter what grade they are.
 
neil_g said:
although ive never used software raid on any of my drives :)
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I do... :D ZFS is the way forward.


I've also found a command called "rm" which tends to increase my available disk space whenever I use it....
 
having work as a storage technical Manager for 8 years working alongside the likes of seagate, WD, Fujitsu and Storage enclosure manufacturers such as netgear, Promise, Infortrend, Thecus, Quantum, Synology, QNAP etc, the honest truth is the biggest difference between enterprise class drives and desktop drives is essentially warranty!
desktop drives warrnanty was reduced to just 1 year by seagate while there enterprise class drives had a 5 year warranty. in terms of failure rate the percentage tends to be between 0.5 and 1.5% across all drives.
There are some minor differences between the two classes : firmware in relation to sector mapping. on desktop drives it will try to remap a bad sector several times over a long period to try and fix the problem. in an enterprise drive this is normally limited to a single attempt as enterprise are designed to be used in a RAID array and bad sectors can corrupt the RAID so if it fails to remap on one pass it will reject the drive from the RAID array as faulty.
on a physical aspect enterprise drives use slightly different more hardwearing materials for parts like the bearings and heads to reduce friction, heat and wear allowing them to be run continuously for longer.
in terms of performance there is very little difference when it comes to read /write speeds ( other than hybrid drives and 10k and 15k drives which run much faster )
 
neil_g said:
incidentally i wish 4TB drives would drop in cost now theyve been around for a while o_O
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The Seagate 4TB external drives go up and down like the proverbial - the lowest I've seen them at is £90 and the highest £130:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-STB...49642&sr=8-1&keywords=4tb+external+hard+drive

Or you could go for a WD Red 6TB for £214:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-STB...49642&sr=8-1&keywords=4tb+external+hard+drive

There are also rumours of an 8TB HDD soon and a 16TB enterprise SSD by Sandisk.

Also a new technology "resistive random access memory (RRAM)" promises terabytes of memory on a single chip:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/529386/super-dense-computer-memory/

If they ever bring that technology to market goodbye both HDDs and possibly SSDs!
 
theres already a 10TB hard drive out ( been out for around 3 years )
FUSION io PCI-E SSD.
10.2TB
read speed is 1300 mb/s ( regular hard drive around 150 mb/s )
write speed around 1200 Mb/s

mind you you'll need around £30,000 to buy it!!
 
honestly though with bigger hard drives there is a higher risk of failure ( due tot he nature of how data has to be compressed on a platter there is only a finite amount of space before you reach a critical point.
this then means data recovery becomes harder, failure rates increase and corruption levels also rise.

my largest drive is 2TB.. i wont go larger.. for the simple fact that if a drive fails its 1. alot of data to lose
2. the bigger the drive the more costly to recover the data ( data recovery companies charge per GB ).
3. and simply even in a raid array it takes alot longer if a drive fails to rebuild the raid with larger drives. which means longer downtime.
i prefer to have an 8 bay raid 6 setup which also allows 2 8 bay expansion boxes to be attached
with 2TB drives i then get 12TB per enclosure.
so a potential 36 TB ( i would have sperate raid on each enclosure rather than use raid expansion for one large array
 
dean messenger said:
theres already a 10TB hard drive out ( been out for around 3 years )
FUSION io PCI-E SSD.
10.2TB
read speed is 1300 mb/s ( regular hard drive around 150 mb/s )
write speed around 1200 Mb/s

mind you you'll need around £30,000 to buy it!!
Click to expand...

WOW! - Now that could really speed up my Intel Duo core machine! :D
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