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Hello,

Please suggest me a good hard drive for 50 people production team who will be working on images continuously.

I have 6 Core Xeon, 16 GB RAM , 2 U rack assembled server.

Please suggest. Thank you.

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How many drives can that machine support? 2.5 or 3.5"? What RAID card is in it? What’s your budget? There’s no sense in us suggesting 16 solid state drives if you only have the money for two hard drives.

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Any seagate SSD Enterprise Drive, as per your required capacity. BTW are you planning to have RAID ?

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Depends on the workload, with how dependent you are on fast read write speeds.

If you need a fast workload on a budget, then setting up a small NAS may be a good way to go, as you can add an SSD cache to allow users to access common files quickly, and then you are able to RAID a few HDD for redundancy. In which case a WD Red NAS drive would be the best choice imo, with any SSD as a cache.

As you already have a 2U rack, chances are you have a bunch of drives available for use, picking up a RAID card, and setting up a NAS VM may be the way to go.

If the budget is healthy, a bunch of nice high capacity SSDs in Raid 10 for super speed, and redundancy!

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WD Gold series, Enterprise Class with up to 10 TB capacity per drive

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Actually I do not need huge space and 4 TB will be enough for me.That is the reason I am not going with RAID.

I have Seagate 2 TB enterprise Hdd and I have installed in the server for the testing purpose however I see in the resources , it shows 100% highest active time and it hangs for the users.

Kindly suggest me accordingly because I am confused :frowning:

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If its being accessed that much, SSD storage will show a huge improvement over any HDD solution.

Otherwise, grabbing another identical disk would be good as you would be able to stripe the data with RAID to increase the read write speed.

Dont know how much you know about the different RAID setups, but they dont all give you additional space, some setups only give you the amount of storage as the smallest disk. (Example, if you have 2 4TB disks, you only get 4TB space, but much faster read/write, as half the data is on disk 1, and half on disk 2) Each setup has its pros and cons, as something to stripe the data doubles the chance of losing it, as if 1 drive fails, half of your data is gone, and may not be recoverable, whereas when you get to 4 disks, you can have two disks stiped, and two disks cloned, so that you have the speed, PLUS the backup.

Great vid by the legend over at LTT;

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So you have one single drive in a machine that is acting as a server for 50 people, correct?

What do you mean with “100% highest active time”? All the time or only sometimes?

It may “hang” due to the workload.

E.g.: WD Gold 4 TB (as you mentioned this cap) is able to write 200 Megabytes/sec. This bandwidth would be OK if incoming data is send to your machine via one Gigabit network interface (theoretical limit is 125 Megabyte/s). If you are using trunked NICs, let’s say 2 NICs, then your incoming bandwidth can reach somewhere 220 Megabyte/s - a bit more than one single drive can write. This creates a bottleneck until data is written onto the drive.

Please describe your machine in details, maybe we can identify your bottleneck and/or cause of the 100% load.

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Not needing much storage space is NOT a reason to go without RAID, especially in a production server.

You’d see a performance increase from running a RAID setup due to a larger cache and more disks.

You might also just be going past the limits of what Winchester drives can handle. If that’s the case, run a few SSDs in RAID 5. I recommend Intel’s data center drives.

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I don’t think that these are all read access. He described that they are working with images, therefore huger files I assume. Additional, I assume that he means writing data. So, an SSD could be the wrong approach as writing huge data will kill any SSD in a short period. SSDs are made for reading, not writing.

A combined SSD/HDD solution would be to use SSD as Tiering above the HDDs. But actually we are talking about one single drive, not even knowing what Operating System this machine is using.

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RAID is about protection from drive failure, not a size thing…You could use a RAID 1 which is just a mirror

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Since I am using Windows server 2008 R2 and it shows 100% highest active time in the task manager.

I am not using any teaming software and server is working on 1 gig port.

Intel Xeon E5405 dual processors

16 GB RAM

2 TB seagate enterprise HDD.

I am using above server for the production but it is under testing because I am still unable to identify the requirement of HDD.

Enterprise SSD’s will cost me very much, So any budget solution would be a help.

Thanks.

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Since you’re on a budget, giving us a rough $ amount would probably be helpful.

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I’d go for a SSD - use the PC card variety.

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I think its going to be alot of the same story. Multiple 4TB WD Red (or equivalent) in raid 5, or 10. with possibly a SSD cache drive if the budget can include it.

Most likley your best bet.

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If using Winchester drives, RAID 6 or 10, never 5.

If using SSDs, RAID 5 or 10. Generally 5.

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Ok, what about Seagate enterprise SAS drives ?

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What do you mean by

Working on images

Precisely.

How big are they , what software is using these images etc

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Thanks for more details

WSS 2008 R2 cannot handle SSDs in a way that would help here - the Windows Storage Space environment is available in WSS 2008.

You could use more than one disk,let’s say 2 x WD Red 4 TB and create a Mirror (RAID 1). This may help in Read performance but not in Write performance. WSS 2008 can run a software RAID from within the Disk Management Console where you can setup this Mirror. Writing data would be the performance of one drive (approx. 140 Megabyte/s with WD Red), Read performance would be combined performance of two drives (approx. 220 Megabyte/s).

SSD Tiering in WSS 2008 is not availabe, so you cannot add a SSD to speed up things.

But! You may think about splitting the drives! Put all WSS related stuff on a SSD and use the spinning drives in Mirroring for your data. So the operating system can make use of the fast SSD instead of treating the drives and the drives can take care about the rest of the data.

A good SSD would be SanDisk CloudSpeed Ultra Gen. II MLC (Business SSD) or SanDisk Extreme Pro (Consumer SSD but great value for money).

I think, your main problem is the overall design of your machine; looks like that everything is bound to one single drive - which seems to be short before to go berserk :wink: Review this drive / storage design and decouple the operating system from the storage part.

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Windows Server 2008 R2 cannot do RAID 6 or 10, only 5 or 1 :wink:

As he has a budget issue too, an additional Hardware RAID Controller card seems not to be an option.

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