jtown

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  1. Don't worry. I don't pay attention to "friends don't let friends buy <brand>" stuff. If I did, I wouldn't be able to buy any hard drive brand, motherboard brand, CPU brand, memory brand, video card brand, car brand, beer brand, etc. I have an ASRock X79 Extreme11 in one of my computers. That thing's a beast!
  2. Right now, I'm just doing NAS but part of my upgrade will include adding a Plex docker and a couple low-demand VMs. That's part of phasing out other old equipment. I'm looking at the ASRock Z270 Taichi with an i5-7600T. That should give me more power than I need at a low TDP with the option of going way up on power if I decide to do more VM stuff...or steal it for a new gaming rig.
  3. It's time to swap out my old hardware that's way past my 5 year rule. I'd like to build around an 1151 motherboard with an i3-7100T or i5-7600T but I can't find a suitable motherboard with more than 10 SATA ports. I'd like to have 12 ports without adding another controller since the new case will have 12 drive bays. I can live with adding a controller to get the last 2 ports but I'd rather have them all on the motherboard if possible.
  4. A little late to the party but I'll still give my $0.03 worth. 5 years is my rule of thumb, tho I've stretched that a bit on my array. My two oldest drives are 6 years old. They're getting yanked this month as I condense down to a smaller number of higher capacity drives. Unless you've got a hot-swap setup with tested spares sitting on the shelf, I think it's better to get ahead of the failures and schedule your upgrades rather than react to them. True story: I recycled some of my old 2tb drives in a security camera NVR. Within 4 months, one of those drives was throwing errors. When I'm done condensing, I'll put my old 4tb drives in there. They have fewer years on the clock.
  5. I started with 2tb drives because that was the biggest available at the time. I only got six 4tb drives in the array before skipping to 8tb at around $300. 6tb drives were never a good price point. Newegg regularly puts the Seagate 8tb Expansion drives on sale for $150. Twice in August that I noticed. I've got 2 on my desk going thru pre-shelling diagnostics right now. I have ST8000AS0002, ST8000DM004, and WD80EZZX drives in my array. Whichever's cheapest when I'm looking to buy. None have given me any trouble. Even used a shingled drive for parity until I got one of the WD drives. I don't know that I'd go with the IronWolf, tho. That's $100+ more than shelling an external. Of the [literally] hundreds of hard drives that have passed thru my homes over the years, two (2) have failed in the warranty period. Yeah, yeah, anecdotal evidence and whatnot. But, with a savings of $100+ per drive, you'll quickly come out ahead even if one of the shelled drives dies in under 3 years. Just run diagnostics before you shell the drive to make sure it's not DOA. Three $150 externals = $450. Three IronWolf drives = $780. For the price of those IronWolf drives, you can purchase 2 more externals and shell them and still have change left over. 10tb drives are right out, tho. More than double the price for a 25% gain in storage.
  6. I don't think being convicted of murdering customers would get someone suspended from Amazon's marketplace. Fortunately, Amazon's always made things right when I've been burned by a marketplace vendor. On the other hand, Newegg's got 8tb Seagate "Expansion" externals for $180 with free shipping thru 9/30 with promo code so you can get a trusted-brand drive from a trusted-name vendor. According to customer reports, they contain ST8000AS0002 drives. I've run those both as parity and data with no issues.
  7. 8gb? When I have 8gb of free space, I consider myself to be out of free space. But you don't have to buy both at once. Replace the parity drive then add the old parity drive as a new data drive. Unless you're out of ports. Then replace the smallest data drive with the old parity drive. Unless all the drives are then same size. Then you need two new drives.
  8. At least Amazon will make things right. I bought an open box 8tb Seagate external from a third party seller fulfilled by Amazon. (If it passed diagnostics, I was going to void the warranty anyway so save a few ($50) bucks.) Turns out someone had shelled it and put in a 320 gig drive then returned it. Amazon shipped a new replacement drive immediately at the same price as the open box and gave me a prepaid shipping label to return the bad drive and refunded my original purchase amount as soon as the tracking info updated to "received by shipping company". I was very skeptical when they went to the "swap meet" format but they've really nailed the customer service on the marketplace transactions. While there is higher risk of annoyance, I'm comfortable that my money isn't at risk, just 10-15 minutes of time and a little packing tape.
  9. Run Seagate's diagnostics. The results of a 3rd party stress test mean nothing to them. They're not going to replace it unless it fails the official Seagate diagnostics. If it passes, you're stuck. If it fails, RMA it. It'd be silly not to replace a failing drive that's under warranty.
  10. The "graceful" multi-drive failure is what attracted me to unRAID. Unlike a striped array, if a few sectors go bad across a few drives, the whole thing doesn't crash and burn. The good drives can still be read individually and maybe you can limp along the bad drives enough to get most of your data off. It's not like you're cruising along with 80tb of data one second and 0tb the next.
  11. Well, with drive sizes in this size range, a rebuild is going to take a long time no matter what. Even the He8 8tb drives that cost a pot of leprechaun gold took over 19 hours to rebuild a mirror. Next time I can get a deal, I'll grab another Seagate SMR 8tb drive and install it as a data drive. That'll show whether an unRAID rebuild has the same performance hit as a RAID1 rebuild in a Synology box. But I kinda hope someone tries it before me. I've got 8tb free right now so it'll be a while before I need the space.
  12. Very interesting. I've just skimmed it but it shows significant write penalties once that persistent cache is full. Looks like they have a typo regarding the cache, calling it 20 MB instead of 20 GB. The presentation/paper I linked to earlier says the 8 TB drive has a 25 GB cache. Since they're both guessing the cache size based on observation, 5 gigs seems like a reasonable margin of error.
  13. I got faster preclear times on a SATA port. About 76 hours per cycle. (I lysdexic'd that as 67 on my earlier post.) If you're going to shell the drives, may as well do it that way. Tho I ran Seagate's full diagnostic before taking it out of the case and voiding my warranty. That was about a half day process. So figure 10 days or so for a pre-shelling diagnostic via USB3 then three preclears on SATA.
  14. Doesn't seem crazy at all. Seagate's been doing "SSHD" hybrids for years, tho their solid state side is only 8 gigs. And they switched from SLC to MLC on the last generation. But they've definitely got the ability to make it happen.