5 ms·

A disk failure is still a cost though in terms of restoring a backup, replacing the failed drive, waiting for an RMA/new drive to come, etc.. If the price delta

by c0m 6y ago

A disk failure is still a cost though in terms of restoring a backup, replacing the failed drive, waiting for an RMA/new drive to come, etc.. If the price delta isn't anything crazy I'd prefer to get something that I know is more reliable.

pwinnski 6y ago
Agreed. Within $10/20, of course I'll go for the better drive. When it's $50/60 or more, I get the Seagate and hope I'm lucky. Earlier this year I had a Seagate fail within months of purchase, putting my NAS into degraded performance mode. So I quickly ordered a replacement drive (a WD Red) and started the RMA process for the Seagate. At some point during this process I removed and reinserted the Seagate, and... its been fine since. So now I have a WD cold spare in my closet for whichever drive fails next.
- karamanolev 6y ago
  I have a few RAIDZ/RAIDZ2 arrays and I've been wondering ... are let's say 8TB from WD/Seagate all the same size making them interchangeable? What if you have an array with WD drives and the Seagate drives turn out to be a few hundred/thousand bytes smaller?
  - gen3 6y ago
    The useable vdev space depends on the smallest drive in the vdev. ie, let's say you have a mirror with 1x8tb and 1x7.9tb, the vdev will be 7.9tb large. In the case of it being just a few bytes smaller, I would assume you just loose a block.
    - rincebrain 6y ago
      Only if all the disks when the vdev were created were the 7.9tb drives. If you have a pool of 8tb drives and want to replace with a 7.9tb drive, you're out of luck.
  - mjevans 6y ago
    I've intentionally under-allocated with array space on my drives and use the rest mostly for swap (which I don't want on ZFS anyway, mdadm raid10 is fine) and backups of /boot; all of which I can sacrifice without worry to make the data fit inside of smaller drives.
    - zepearl 6y ago
      > I've intentionally under-allocated with array space on my drives Same here - created on each drive a partition slightly smaller than the HDD's capacity (using ZFS raidz1).

by c0m 6y ago

pwinnski 6y ago

Agreed. Within $10/20, of course I'll go for the better drive. When it's $50/60 or more, I get the Seagate and hope I'm lucky. Earlier this year I had a Seagate fail within months of purchase, putting my NAS into degraded performance mode. So I quickly ordered a replacement drive (a WD Red) and started the RMA process for the Seagate. At some point during this process I removed and reinserted the Seagate, and... its been fine since. So now I have a WD cold spare in my closet for whichever drive fails next.

karamanolev 6y ago
I have a few RAIDZ/RAIDZ2 arrays and I've been wondering ... are let's say 8TB from WD/Seagate all the same size making them interchangeable? What if you have an array with WD drives and the Seagate drives turn out to be a few hundred/thousand bytes smaller?
- gen3 6y ago
  The useable vdev space depends on the smallest drive in the vdev. ie, let's say you have a mirror with 1x8tb and 1x7.9tb, the vdev will be 7.9tb large. In the case of it being just a few bytes smaller, I would assume you just loose a block.
  - rincebrain 6y ago
    Only if all the disks when the vdev were created were the 7.9tb drives. If you have a pool of 8tb drives and want to replace with a 7.9tb drive, you're out of luck.
- mjevans 6y ago
  I've intentionally under-allocated with array space on my drives and use the rest mostly for swap (which I don't want on ZFS anyway, mdadm raid10 is fine) and backups of /boot; all of which I can sacrifice without worry to make the data fit inside of smaller drives.
  - zepearl 6y ago
    > I've intentionally under-allocated with array space on my drives Same here - created on each drive a partition slightly smaller than the HDD's capacity (using ZFS raidz1).