[plug] musing on HDD types (William Kenworthy)

Sun Apr 25 15:21:34 AWST 2021

Thanks Ben and Paul - this backs up my readings/experience.

I will shortly need a new archive drive because I have lest than 80Gb
left on the 2Tb WD green I have been using for a  few years.  As
performance isn't an issue I will likely go with a Seagate Barracuda
this time (still debating shingled or not because this use is more cost
sensitive than performance on writing new data across a network - so low
priority, busy, but not excessively so when in use - I am happy to allow
time for the shingling resilvering to complete as long as it doesn't
impact time to actually backup the data too much.)

Moosefs is more difficult to quantify whats needed - currently:

8 hosts (8 HDD, 1x M2.SSD, 6x arm32, 1x arm64 and 1x intel - all odroid
using gentoo)

~21Tb space, 3/4 in use. I could delete some as there is duplicate data
stored so if I lose a drive I can reclaim space easily as well as
decrease the goal in some places.

As well, I am using storage classes.  High use data has mostly 1 chunk
on the intel/SSD for performance and others on HDD's.  I have sc's
ranging from 1 to 4 copies with 2, 3 and 4 in common use ... for example
things like VM's where there are hot spots with temp file creation I
have 2 copies (2SH) whereas backups and user data have 4 copies 4HHHH or
4SHHH depending on priority (eg, /home).  Currently I have one WD Green
drive I would already toss if in a commercial system, and two Seagate
NAS drives I am not totally happy with.

For these, definitely non-shingled (CMR) 7200rpm around 4TB seems ideal
- but is a NAS optimised drive useful or a waste for moosefs? -
vibration of nearby drives is the only thing I can think of.  Some are
bound together (5x odroid HC2) and some are in pairs in relatively heavy
PC case baymounts (removed/pinched - from my sons ongoing gaming PC
build :) placed on a desk.  I am staring to lean towards the WD blacks
for this, but the HGST lines WD are starting to integrate are
interesting though more expensive ...

I would love to have MFSpro but cant justify it as super uptime isn't
necessary, EC isn't really attractive at my scale and multiple masters
isn't essential as I have plenty of alternative systems I could bring in
quickly ... though I am watching lizardfs and just might jump to it to
get the multiple masters that is in the free tier.

BillK

On 25/4/21 1:19 pm, Benjamin wrote:
> +1 to all of it, cheers Paul.
>
> I think it's worth going for the cheapest externals you can get,
> shucking them, then using MooseFS since you're already planning to.
>
> I'd use copies=3 and if you're storing more than 50TB talk to me about
> mfspro.
>
> On Sun, 25 Apr 2021, 13:03 Paul Del, <p at delfante.it
> <mailto:p at delfante.it>> wrote:
>
>     Hello Bill
>
>     My 2 cents worth
>
>     I am sure you know the common things that can increase your hard
>     drives life and performance:
>     Temperature
>     Humidity
>     VIbration
>     Heavy Writes
>     Heaving Logging
>     Clean/Reliable power
>     Data throughput
>
>     The rust hard drives I have seen the most failures with are: (I
>     recommend avoiding)
>     WD Green
>     WD Blue
>     Hitachi Deskstar
>     (Not The server drives)
>
>     The rust hard drives I recommend the most are:
>     WD Black 7200rpm or better
>     Seagate 7200pm or better
>     (Not Red, Blue, Green, Purple)
>
>     If you are doing the moose distribute setup
>     You could always choose two different brands/types
>
>     if you want to know more specific things about which hard drive
>     failures. Check out this from backblaze, I am sure there's more
>     around. Which is one Benjamin sent around ages ago.
>     https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-for-2020/
>     <https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-for-2020/>
>     https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q2-2020/
>     <https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q2-2020/>
>
>     Thanks Paul
>
>
>     On Sat, 24 Apr 2021, 09:02 William Kenworthy, <billk at iinet.net.au
>     <mailto:billk at iinet.net.au>> wrote:
>
>     > Just musing on what changes I could make to streamline my systems:
>     >
>     > After a recent stray "r m  - r f " with a space in it I ended up
>     > removing both most of my active data files, VM's etc ... and the
>     online
>     > backups - ouch!
>     >
>     > I have restored from offline backups and have noticed a ~10years
>     old WD
>     > green drive showing a few early symptoms of failing (SMART).
>     >
>     > With the plethora of colours now available (!) now what drive is
>     best for
>     > a:
>     >
>     >     1. moosefs chunkserver (stores files for VM's, data
>     including the
>     > mail servers user files, home directories and of course the online
>     > borgbackup archives - the disks are basically hammered all the
>     time.)
>     >
>     >     2. offline backups (~2tb data using borgbackup to backup the
>     online
>     > borgbackup repo, used twice a week for a few minutes at a time.)
>     >
>     > My longest serving drives are WD greens 2Tb which until now have
>     just
>     > keep ticking along.  The failing drive is a WD Green - I have run
>     > badblocks on it overnight with no errors so far so it might have
>     > internally remapped the failed sectors ok - I am using xfs which
>     does
>     > not have badblock support.  Most drives spent previous years in
>     btrfs
>     > raid 10's or ceph so they have had a hard life!
>     >
>     > Newer WD Reds and a Red pro have failed over the years but I
>     still have
>     > two in the mix (6tb and 2tb)
>     >
>     > Some Seagate Ironwolfs that show some SMART errors Backblaze
>     correlate
>     > with drive failure and throw an occasional USB interface error but
>     > otherwise seem OK.
>     >
>     > There are shingled, non-shingled drives, surveillance, NAS
>     flavours etc.
>     > - but what have people had success with? - or should I just
>     choose my
>     > favourite colour and run with it?
>     >
>     > Thoughts?
>     >
>     > BillK
>     _______________________________________________
>     PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au <mailto:plug at plug.org.au>
>     http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
>     <http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug>
>     Committee e-mail: committee at plug.org.au <mailto:committee at plug.org.au>
>     PLUG Membership: http://www.plug.org.au/membership
>     <http://www.plug.org.au/membership>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
> http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.org.au
> PLUG Membership: http://www.plug.org.au/membership
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plug.org.au/pipermail/plug/attachments/20210425/fbf339ae/attachment.html>