Which 6 TB drive should I buy?


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Preclearing my first 6TB WD Red now.  I run either 3 or 5 passes depending on the drive.  This one will get five.  I run them as 1, 2 and 2 passes.  First pass was completed with no issues.

 

The first drive sent to me was bad.  It would stop the server from even booting.  This is its replacement.  One good thing about New Egg, if the part is bad and you are exchanging it, they will pay the return shipping.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have 11 WD 6TB Red drives, they're all good. 

 

Only complaint is with ReiserFS, theoretically it supports 16TB drives, I very much doubt it will support anything bigger than a 6TB drive.  I had to do some tweaking to get it to put the last few files on the WD 6TB Red's.  They are painfully slow on write as they finally get full (unRAID 5.0.5).

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I just bought two WD RED WD60EFRX 6TB.  Will add them to my unRAID that already has 15 drives (mix of 3TB and 1TB). 

 

One of the new WD60EFRX will be used as a parity drive since the parity drive has to be at least the same of the largest disk in the array.

 

Once i have it up and running, i'll give you feedback.

 

I bought two of them for $579 from newegg.com

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Only complaint is with ReiserFS, theoretically it supports 16TB drives, I very much doubt it will support anything bigger than a 6TB drive.  I had to do some tweaking to get it to put the last few files on the WD 6TB Red's.  They are painfully slow on write as they finally get full (unRAID 5.0.5).

 

 

What kind of tweaking?

 

 

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Reiser is very slow at writes to ANY size drive when it gets very nearly full ... doesn't matter if it's 1TB, 3TB, 6TB, or even 500GB.    I'm sure it will, in fact, support drives up to the designed limit of 16TB in the same way.

 

... it'll be a while before anyone can confirm that, of course, unless you're using RAID controllers to provide the "drives" to UnRAID  [i do know someone with an 8TB parity drive that's actually a pair of 4TB drives in a RAID-0; and a couple of 8TB "drives" that are also created in the same way.]  But I don't know anyone who's built anything larger than that.

 

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xfs seems better in that respect.

 

I migrated two of my 4TB ReiserFS drives to xfs as one was getting so slow to write to, it was essentially unusable. Even after deleting 500GB from that drive, it was still too slow to use.

 

Indeed, I have read a few articles saying this issue goes away with a change of file system.  They also say that the bigger the disk, the more of a problem it is with ReiserFS, my experience with 3TB, 4TB and 6TB disks tends to back that up too.

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The reiserFS near full delay problem has always been there.

I believe it's based on how directories are allocated and grow. New structures require data from near the middle of the drive as it walks through all the structures.

 

In my prior experience, I had timeouts writing to near full drives that were only 1TB.

I did the whole directory cache scanning beforehand as a test. i.e. a find down the tree.

That did not solve it.

 

What helped was creating the directory manually on the unRAID server beforehand.

Once a new directory was created the timeouts and population thereafter went smoother.

 

So although the data may not be fragmented, I believe the directories do get fragmented as they grow.

 

@Bruce if you could share the timeout tweak, it could help some people until reiserFS is no longer used.

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Foo that is almost the one i was looking at.  The one i saw was a enterprize drive and helium filled.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145950

 

but yours is much cheaper :)

 

It's not only cheaper, but it's faster !!  They're both 7200rpm drives, but the new H3IKNAS600012872SN drive has a higher areal density => indicating the drive uses fewer platters than the helium-filled drive (I suspect 6 platters vs. 7 for the helium unit)

 

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This seems to indicate that it's 5 platters(Same Areal density as the 7K6000 Enterprise drives) :

 

http://www.hgst.com/hard-drives/internal-drive-kits/nas-desktop-drive-kit

 

http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/0BF8B842F66D454288257C74007E842B/$file/DS_NAS_spec.pdf

 

 

Foo that is almost the one i was looking at.  The one i saw was a enterprize drive and helium filled.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145950

 

but yours is much cheaper :)

 

It's not only cheaper, but it's faster !!  They're both 7200rpm drives, but the new H3IKNAS600012872SN drive has a higher areal density => indicating the drive uses fewer platters than the helium-filled drive (I suspect 6 platters vs. 7 for the helium unit)

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This seems to indicate that it's 5 platters(Same Areal density as the 7K6000 Enterprise drives) :

 

http://www.hgst.com/hard-drives/internal-drive-kits/nas-desktop-drive-kit

 

http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/0BF8B842F66D454288257C74007E842B/$file/DS_NAS_spec.pdf

 

 

Foo that is almost the one i was looking at.  The one i saw was a enterprize drive and helium filled.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145950

 

but yours is much cheaper :)

 

It's not only cheaper, but it's faster !!  They're both 7200rpm drives, but the new H3IKNAS600012872SN drive has a higher areal density => indicating the drive uses fewer platters than the helium-filled drive (I suspect 6 platters vs. 7 for the helium unit)

 

It may very well be a 5-platter unit with the same 1.2TB/platter areal density as the WD Reds.  The indicated density (703GB/sqin) is consistent with that ... although the % increase from the 7 platter units isn't consistent with a 7-5 reduction in platters.  But that's likely just due to the physics of the platters, which doesn't allow quite that much compacting.

 

IF that's the case, then these drives should have some really outstanding sustained transfers speeds, since they would not only match the 1.2TB/platter density of the WD Reds, but also gain 33% due to the higher rotational speed.

 

 

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