Rotational drive question

[mab1376]

I'm looking into a Synology DS412+ and I can't decide which drives to get.

Enterprise drives seem more appealing due to the higher MTBF, and performance.

But some performance drives offer SATA3, now the caveat is that almost all enterprise drives don't have SATA3, is it even necessary? Do the SATA2 controllers on rotational drives even get fully saturated?

Also I've decided to avoid "green" drives due to some potential issues with the enclosure and the power saving techniques of the "green" drives.

I'm only looking at 1TB drives due to cost and lower seek times, does anyone have any suggestions?

These are some of the drives I was looking into:
Western Digital RE4 WD1003FBYX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB C...
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 R...

 

[newtekie1]

Mechanical drives barely saturate SATA1, thaley rarely if ever touch the extra bandwidth that SATA2 offers. SATA3 for mechanical drives is entirely marketing.

 

[mab1376]

Mechanical drives barely saturate SATA1, thaley rarely if ever touch the extra bandwidth that SATA2 offers. SATA3 for mechanical drives is entirely marketing.

Do you think the extra features such as time-limited error recovery (TLER) warrant the enterprise drives?

Which would you get? all that important to me is data integrity. I have over 3TB of data i've accumulated over the past 15 years or so.

 

[repman244]

Mechanical drives barely saturate SATA1, thaley rarely if ever touch the extra bandwidth that SATA2 offers. SATA3 for mechanical drives is entirely marketing.

Actually mechanical drives do saturate SATA1, which is ~150MB/s theoretically but there is always an overhead for drive communication...

Do you think the extra features such as time-limited error recovery (TLER) warrant the enterprise drives?

Which would you get? all that important to me is data integrity. I have over 3TB of data i've accumulated over the past 15 years or so.

Personally I would go for the enterprise one.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

Do you think the extra features such as time-limited error recovery (TLER) warrant the enterprise drives?

Which would you get? all that important to me is data integrity. I have over 3TB of data i've accumulated over the past 15 years or so.

An enterprise level piece of hardware is meant for longer life, and greater durability above all other considerations. I would say to go with the enterprise solution if you can't stand to lose the data, and do more than one backup.

As 3 TB drives come at a premium (especially enterprise), why not use 4 2TB (or 1TB) drives in RAID 5 (non-enterprise)? A single drive can suffer from catastrophic failure, without taking out the whole system. If you were to have the RAID 6 array as the primary, and a backup to that on a single 3 TB (again, non-enterprise), you shouldn't have any worries about losing data without an absolutely insane bill.



As far as SATA II versus SATA III, it isn't realistically a problem with mechanical drives. An SSD can saturate SATA II and SATA III, but mechanical drives rest comfortably in the SATA II limitations.

 

[newtekie1]

Do you think the extra features such as time-limited error recovery (TLER) warrant the enterprise drives?

Which would you get? all that important to me is data integrity. I have over 3TB of data i've accumulated over the past 15 years or so.

What form of RAID will you be using with these drives? If you are using RAID1 or RAID5 I wouldn't bother with Enterprise drives. In my experience they don't really last any longer than their standard desktop counterparts(I've actually seen them fail in just a few months). However, if you don't go with the enterprise drives you might run into issues with the RAID controller dropping drives due to the desktop drives lacking TLER, but those issues are very rare.

For what you are looking at paying I'd get some Seagate LP 1.5TB drives for $99. They don't have the issues with RAID controllers like the WD green drives, because they don't park the heads nearly as much. And they will run cooler compared to the RE4 or WD Black drive you were looking at, which will increase their longevity when in an enclosure where drives tend to run hotter.

Actually mechanical drives do saturate SATA1, which is ~150MB/s theoretically but there is always an overhead for drive communication...

That is why I said "barely", as in they do but just barely. And most actually don't, it is only a few newer larger capacity drives, or the 10,000RPM drives that actually pass the 150MB/s barrier.

 

[qubit]

As you really want data integrity (and I agree with you) then the best way to protect against failure is to have multiple copies on multiple drives. It can all get a bit expensive unfortunately and there's no one silver bullet solution for something like this.

What you could do for example, is in your main rig, run one OS disc and two data discs in RAID 1. Then, you have another HD in a NAS drive and then another, using as many as you want. You could also have another PC solely used as a file server with perhaps two or more drives holding copies of the data. You could have perhaps two NAS's and one file server PC with several drives in it. All of those drives are separate copies of the primary RAID 1 array, with some of them holding an intentionally "out of date" backup, say from a week ago allowing you to retrieve that critical tax returns file that got accidentally deleted, while the others are backed up to every night or perhaps even more often.

Also, consider cloud storage of really important stuff, to cover the offsite backup should the house burn down, floods, burglary etc.

As I said, there's no single one right answer, but the above scenario will keep your data very well protected against a multitude of ways of losing your data. It's also a bit expensive, but that can't be helped.

You then need software to keep this lot in sync, where you could use Karen's Replicator or the other one, Delta Copy I think, which I believe is better. Both are free, too.

Ultimately, this is waay better than getting one or two reliable drives and betting on those to keep your data safe.