[plug] musing on HDD types (William Kenworthy)

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Sun Apr 25 18:38:34 AWST 2021


My 2 cents (and apologies if this has been covered already):

I went the other route of building a NAS and having storage off the NAS 
instead of vSAN or Distributed File system approach. My 
experience/thoughts with consumer grade hardware on my NAS (using mdadm 
and ZFS):

 1. Run the same speed etc ideally in the same RAID group (not sure if
    mooseFS counters this with using RAM as cache?). I have been caught
    out with thinking I was getting 7.2K RPM drive just find the
    manufacture changed drive speeds between different sizes in the same
    series of drives (e.g. WD Red I think). Personally I dislike 5.9k
    RPM drives...unless they're in big Enterprise SAN/S3 solution.
 2. Uses different brands and *batch numbers - *last thing you want is
    have bad batch and they all start failing around the same time -
    e.g. buying 5 x WD blues from same store at the same time is bad
    idea (and yes its pain).
 3. 8 TB and above drives have long response latency (due to density)
    and thus be careful what configuration you use and make sure it can
    handle long build time
 4. I have had drives die from HGST, Seagate and WD over the
    years...HGST died the quickly and were pain to replace under
    warranty from memory.

-Shaun

On 25/04/2021 3:26 pm, Benjamin wrote:
> It's not worth getting anything other than cheapest non-SMR drives IMO 
> for nearly any use case... you can get performance by aggregating 
> enough drives anyways
>
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2021 at 3:25 PM Benjamin <zorlin at gmail.com 
> <mailto:zorlin at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     LizardFS is a bag of hurt with dead development. Proceed with
>     hella caution if you go that route. I hope it changes and becomes
>     worth pursuing though.
>
>     MFSpro is justifiable around 50TiB and up, until then it's not
>     really worth it.
>
>     On Sun, Apr 25, 2021 at 3:22 PM William Kenworthy
>     <billk at iinet.net.au <mailto:billk at iinet.net.au>> wrote:
>
>         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
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