Re: [gentoo-user] Seagate hard drives with dual actuators.

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 14, 2024 at 3:33 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I've had a Seagate, a Maxtor from way back and a Western Digital go bad.  This is one reason I don't knock any drive maker.  Any of them can produce a bad drive.
> ++
>
> All the consumer drive manufacturers are in a super-price-conscious
> market.  For the most part their drives work as advertised, and
> basically all of them have made a model with an abysmal failure rate
> at some point.  I think Backblaze still publishes their stats and I
> don't think any manufacturer stood out when it comes to these cheaper
> consumer drives.  The enterprise stuff probably is more reliable, but
> for HDD I don't think it is worth it - just use RAID.
>
> I've personally been trying to shift towards solid state.  Granted, it
> is about double the price of large 5400RPM drives, but the performance
> is incomparable.  I've also been moving more towards used enterprise
> drives with PLP/etc and where I can find the drive endurance info on
> the ebay listing.  You can typically pay about $50/TB for an
> enterprise SSD - either SATA or NVMe.  You'll pay a bit more if you
> want a high capacity drive (U.2 16+TB or whatever).  That's in part
> because I've been shifting to Ceph which is pretty IOPS-sensitive.
> However, it is nice that when I add/replace a drive the cluster
> rebuilds in an hour at most with kinda shocking network IO.
>
> I'll use cheap consumer SATA/M.2 SSDs for OS drives that are easily
> reimaged.  I'll use higher performance M.2 for gaming rigs (mostly
> read-oriented), and back it up.  Be aware that the consumer write
> benchmarks only work for short bursts and fall to a fraction of the
> advertisement for sustained writes - the enterprise write benchmarks
> reflect sustained writes and you can run at that speed until the drive
> dies.
>


The biggest downside to the large drives available now, even if SMART
tells you a drive is failing, you likely won't have time to copy the
data over to a new drive before it fails.  On a 18TB drive, using
pvmove, it can take a long time to move data.  I think the last time I
did it, it took like two days.  Usually SMART is more like a 24 hour
warning.  Of course with some failures, you get no warning at all. 
SMART can't detect all modes of failure. 

Wol has a good point too.  What they trying to do is compete with SSD if
they can.  SSD, NVME and such are pricey if you need to store bulk
amounts of data.  I don't even want to think what it would cost to put
all my 100TBs or so on SSD or NVME drives.  WOW!!! 

Dale

:-)  :-)