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Black Box
join:2002-12-21

Black Box

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Storage server: Red or black?

I'm building a storage server for home. It will also run a few low load virtual machines. Should I go with Reds, or pay the premium for Blacks?

Thanks.

exocet_cm
Writing
Premium Member
join:2003-03-23
Brooklyn, NY

exocet_cm

Premium Member

Assuming you're talking about Western Digital hard drives, I've been running 8x 1TB Western Digital Scorpio Blues in RAID6 without issue for months now (Proliant DL380 G5 P410). Proceed with caution.
For my desktops and at work, we use WD Blacks. Haven't used the Reds. I viraled off the Greens.

In a RAID setup, you must account for Error Recovery Control. WD calls it TLER "Time Limited Error Recovery". Consumer-based drives, WD Blacks, Greens, Blues, don't allow for TLER modification which has been hard-coded into the firmware of the drive. Although pre-2011'ish (I think) WD drives allowed for TLER modification using a WD command line tool. Nowadays, WD wants you to purchase the outrageously expensive RE-class drives. Most consumer drives allow for RAID 1, 0, and 1+0 without issue. RAID 5, 5+0, 6, and 6+0 usually will give you problems on non-enterprise class drives but YMMV.
JoelC707
Premium Member
join:2002-07-09
Lanett, AL

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I've been using various Seagate 7200.12's, WD blacks and greens and the occasional Hitachi drive in RAID for a while now. Mostly they've been in RAID 5 for general file server duties but I've also occasionally run VMs off them.

Currently I have the following setup:

Primary SAN volume for VMs: 6x 3TB WD Red in RAID 10
Backup SAN volume for DPM: 5x 1.5TB WD Green in RAID 5 (modified to not excessively park the heads)
Primary desktop volume: 4x 750GB WD Black 2.5" in RAID 10.

The SAN utilizes a Dell PERC H700 RAID card for both arrays, the desktop system uses the built-in Intel z77 RST controller.

All of them work great in their respective setups. The SAN volume would work fine if local storage but I'm using Hyper-V SMB 3.0 storage (could just as easily use iSCSI if desired) and it's basically being used as a glorified file server for Hyper-V hosts.

I've run a VM or two on my desktop but lack of extra RAM (I've only got 8GB) on my desktop hurts that ability more than any drive choice.

Here's a good writeup on the 1TB model of WD Reds: »koitsu.wordpress.com/201 ··· d10efrx/
asdfdfdfdfdf
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join:2012-05-09

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As performance isn't a key issue I would go with the reds and wouldn't pay a premium for the blacks.

aurgathor
join:2002-12-01
Lynnwood, WA

1 recommendation

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I have several Reds and several Blacks. For all practical purposes, the sustained DTRs are roughly the same (I think I have posted some HD Tune Pro graphs in the past) but the seek times of the Blacks are much better. This means that when reading large files (i.e. a movie server), the Reds should perform almost as well as the Blacks. But in a usage involving seeks (i.e. database) the Blacks should be vastly superior.
decx
Premium Member
join:2002-06-07
Vancouver, BC

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Also in a higher density storage server application where heat is an issue, Blacks put out more heat than the slower spinning Reds. In my experience Blacks are relatively hot running even compared to other 7200 rpm drives.
Uraki
Uraki
Premium Member
join:2003-06-22
Belle Plaine, KS

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If you buy reds, please use something like PartedMagic to run a Secure Erase on them.

Sure, it takes 2+ hours per drive...

I recently bought 5 2TB reds and two of them died during the initial stress of a Secure Erase.

One died 15 minutes into the process, the firmware on the drive went away and the drive could not be recognized on any machine after that.

The other one developed massive amounts of reallocated sectors but completed the erase.

That's 40% failure for 5 new drives out of the box.

At the time of purchase (newegg) other customers were complaining of dead/dying red WDC drives. They were well-packed when shipped to me.

Personally, I'd stress any drive I buy (esp. large capacity) before use.
JoelC707
Premium Member
join:2002-07-09
Lanett, AL

JoelC707

Premium Member

FWIW, my six drives passed koitsu See Profile's new drive prep: »Re: Repair or Replace Disk Warning on Brand New WD Caviar Black. just fine.

SimbaTLK1
Rawrrr
join:2001-09-07
Pittsburgh, PA

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said by Black Box:

I'm building a storage server for home. It will also run a few low load virtual machines. Should I go with Reds, or pay the premium for Blacks?

Thanks.

What will the specs of the storage server be?
- OS
- RAID Type (Software mdadm, zfs, hardware raid card)/RAID5/6/10
- How many drives/what size?
- What protocol(s) will the clients be using (especially for the VMs? (iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, FC??))

Black Box
join:2002-12-21

Black Box

Member

Thank you all, I ended up going with WD Black bought on the Black Friday. But anyway, for the benefit of people reading this later on let's continue the discussion.

It will be OpenIndiana, zfs, RAID-Z2 (software), 6 2TB drives, VMs on the same box only, CIFS for the lone Windows computer, sshfs for the Linux.