Best HDD for production

brittadams · 2016-10-27T14:22:28.000Z

I try not to be negative on here but if you do not think RAID is required, maybe you should hire a professional. With that being said and the limited information, I would recommend RAID 10 due to speed and reliability is what you would want but you might not have that ability with a 2U server. RAID 1 will add some redundancy but no speed, RAID 6 or 5 can add some read speed but will cause writes to be slower.

kptim · 2016-10-27T14:23:29.000Z

How many drives will the server hold? This is where you should start, fill all the drive slots. This will also determine what RAID you can use, and of course the RAID controller. Once you have a drive count and controller specs then take your desired storage size needs and decide what size the individual disks have to be.
Once you have done this then we can talk drives. I recommend WD Red Pro drives, they spin faster than the regular Reds and have a 5 year warranty instead of 3.

justinaggus6047 · 2016-10-27T14:32:23.000Z

If you don’t want raid then I’m assuming 100% uptime isn’t a huge concern?
A 4tb 850 Evo is about $2000 and would be as fast as possible at that price.
And a single consumer SSD would probably be just as reliable as single enterprise HDD, but definitely keep a good backup.
If that is too expensive, then Can you do any manual tiering?

Like have a small SSD where people keep their active files, and keep everything else on the HDD?

Repairatrooper · 2016-10-27T14:46:31.000Z

As stated by other users, with information provided we are playing birthday party Pinata not providing solutions. You need to follow some solid planning steps, layout in detail what you need to do and how much money you have to make that happen. Based on information you have provided it sounds like the organizational approach to IT in the past equates a server to a hopped up workstation. That approach will never provide the type of performance and reliability it sounds like you need.

egpetey · 2016-10-27T14:50:42.000Z

I have 45 users serviced by 8 7.2k NL-SAS drives in RAID 10… My only regret is not filling all 12 of the drive bays because more spindles = more speed.

janrubbrecht · 2016-10-27T15:29:08.000Z

Sorry to say, but this is another fine example of asking a bad question. You’re asking us to tell you what to buy, but you’re not telling us what your budget is, what the purpose is of your purchase, how people will be using it and to make matters worse, some people ask you questions to get a better understanding and you don’t even give them an answer.

Please have a look at these links below if you want to have a good answer to your question:

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This information doesn’t only apply to this post but to any future query you may have.

jamesholden8454 · 2016-10-27T15:38:56.000Z

Azim5837:

My server is connected via 1 Gbps speed and all users are connected to other switch .But both switches are connected through 2 Gbps LAG.

So to describe more, we use to receive files which are from 30 Mb - 600 MB in size and sometime 1 Gb. All users are working on a shared folder directly on network. So they are opening files from the network shares and saving in the same location. When they say it is hanging then I see the task manager and found hard drive utilization is 100% ( 100% highest active time in task manager) and network utilization is around 40-60 % only. So as per my understanding there could be a problem with hard drive writing speed because if they are saving the files that means they are writing the files.

kindly help me to create a good setup environment for them to not face such issues in future. I appreciate all of your replies:-)

Please find the attached the hdd utilization.

It’s hard to make a hard recommendation here, but based on what you’ve described, and what is generally considered best practice, I would recommend you consider a minimum of a 4 drive RAID10, and considering the fact that you are saturating a single drive, I’d tend to lean toward a 6 drive array, and I’ll explain why.

First, while some drives are faster than others, the difference between them isn’t double, triple, quadruple, etc. which is what you need here, and an SSD is the only drive option where you’ll get that kind of a performance boost, and as you said, a 4TB SSD probably isn’t in the budget. Even if it was, I couldn’t recommend a single drive setup for this because a single failure takes down your entire system.

Second, we know we can’t get 2x or 3x the speed by upgrading a single drive, but we can get it by combining multiples in a RAID. Considering you probably have a LOT of writes, the only logical RAID levels are 0 and 10. Since 0 will lose everything if a drive fails, we should rule that out too. That leaves us with RAID 10. On an array with 4 drives and a good controller, you should see read speeds approaching 4 times that of a single drive, write speeds approaching double that of a single drive, and capacity double that of a single drive. On an array with 6 drives, you’d see near 6x read speed, near 3x write speed, and 3x storage of the single drive, and both options will survive a drive failure without downtime. I’d also recommend sticking with SAS drives both for performance and reliability.

Bottom line is if you need significantly faster drive performance (and I believe you are correct about that) you will either need to consider an SSD or a RAID. Even if you go with SSD’s, I still recommend RAID on any server to reduce the possibility of downtime.

Considering your utilization, you should also consider a 10 GB connection to your server and switches as that’s likely to be your next bottleneck.

jamesholden8454 · 2016-10-27T15:42:53.000Z

Harry Lui:

I would think the network speed would be the bottleneck way before the harddrive speed. Does the server have a 10Gb connection to the switch?

That depends highly on the type of load. With a lot of random reads and especially writes, a single drive can easily be saturated with a single 1Gb connection, but I agree that this would be the next bottleneck.

gregghill · 2016-10-27T15:50:14.000Z

DustinB3403:

Big Green Man:

DustinB3403:

Azim5837:

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

hahah what?

RAID protects in the event of a drive failure, you use it so increase reliability overall so you don’t lose all productivity / data on a single drive.

And then you have backups which keep your data in a safe location, so when things do go belly up you just restore.

I can’t tell by the way you wrote it, but I hope you’re not suggesting that RAID is a form of backup. Say it isn’t so!

Read it again, I clearly said, "and then you have backups which keep your data in a safe location " which means a separate and detatched medium to keep a copy of your production data.

Not to mean that RAID provides backups, which it obviously does not.

If you want to get picky, RAID is a backup in a sense. If there is a single disk installed and it fails, you’re done. Buy a new one, restore from backups. If there is a RAID 1, and one disk fails, the other disk is its backup. Pop in a new disk and proceed, no restore from backups needed. I had that exact scenario when I covered for a guy who had a client whose server went down. They had a three month old backup, no OS CDs, and a failed RAID card in an ANCIENT server. The RAID 1 had one bad disk, too. I was able to clone their one good disk to a new desktop-grade drive just to get them up and running. The guy came back from vacation and installed a new server.

It is NOT a backup in the sense that a file got deleted/encrypted/corrupted, so we have a backup. Nope, that just duplicates the deletion/encryption/corruption.

Gregg

dbeuerlein · 2016-10-27T15:53:25.000Z

greggmh123:

DustinB3403:

Big Green Man:

DustinB3403:

Azim5837:

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

hahah what?

RAID protects in the event of a drive failure, you use it so increase reliability overall so you don’t lose all productivity / data on a single drive.

And then you have backups which keep your data in a safe location, so when things do go belly up you just restore.

I can’t tell by the way you wrote it, but I hope you’re not suggesting that RAID is a form of backup. Say it isn’t so!

Read it again, I clearly said, "and then you have backups which keep your data in a safe location " which means a separate and detatched medium to keep a copy of your production data.

Not to mean that RAID provides backups, which it obviously does not.

If you want to get picky, RAID is a backup in a sense. If there is a single disk installed and it fails, you’re done. Buy a new one, restore from backups. If there is a RAID 1, and one disk fails, the other disk is its backup. Pop in a new disk and proceed, no restore from backups needed. I had that exact scenario when I covered for a guy who had a client whose server went down. They had a three month old backup, no OS CDs, and a failed RAID card in an ANCIENT server. The RAID 1 had one bad disk, too. I was able to clone their one good disk to a new desktop-grade drive just to get them up and running. The guy came back from vacation and installed a new server.

It is NOT a backup in the sense that a file got deleted/encrypted/corrupted, so we have a backup. Nope, that just duplicates the deletion/encryption/corruption.

Gregg

The hell, RAID is NOT A BACKUP!

RAID was designed to increase the storage capacity from what you could get with a single drive. It was never a “backup”, it was only ever misunderstood as a backup.

big-green-man · 2016-10-27T16:27:16.000Z

greggmh123:

DustinB3403:

Big Green Man:

DustinB3403:

Azim5837:

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

hahah what?

RAID protects in the event of a drive failure, you use it so increase reliability overall so you don’t lose all productivity / data on a single drive.

And then you have backups which keep your data in a safe location, so when things do go belly up you just restore.

I can’t tell by the way you wrote it, but I hope you’re not suggesting that RAID is a form of backup. Say it isn’t so!

Read it again, I clearly said, "and then you have backups which keep your data in a safe location " which means a separate and detatched medium to keep a copy of your production data.

Not to mean that RAID provides backups, which it obviously does not.

If you want to get picky, RAID is a backup in a sense. If there is a single disk installed and it fails, you’re done. Buy a new one, restore from backups. If there is a RAID 1, and one disk fails, the other disk is its backup. Pop in a new disk and proceed, no restore from backups needed. I had that exact scenario when I covered for a guy who had a client whose server went down. They had a three month old backup, no OS CDs, and a failed RAID card in an ANCIENT server. The RAID 1 had one bad disk, too. I was able to clone their one good disk to a new desktop-grade drive just to get them up and running. The guy came back from vacation and installed a new server.

It is NOT a backup in the sense that a file got deleted/encrypted/corrupted, so we have a backup. Nope, that just duplicates the deletion/encryption/corruption.

Gregg

RAID is NOT a backup. RAID is redundancy (except RAID 0), speed increase, and storage expansion (except RAID 1). Please let me hit your file server with ransomware. Then restore it using RAID.

briandunn3 · 2016-10-27T16:30:00.000Z

You need to give a scope of work first. No one should be trying to get you to a conclusion with the amount of data you haven’t given us. Also it sounds like you have a very low end server, how many drive bays does it have? 2.5" or 3.5"? budget for project? What operating system are you using on said server? This and many more questions have been asked.

jamjamil · 2016-10-27T16:51:20.000Z

I think what people are tying to say is that your setup is flawed. You can get the fastest SSD on the planet but you are still going to have issues. The advice given on here already is good, make sure you follow it.

harry1028 · 2016-10-27T19:58:57.000Z

Azim5837:

My server is connected via 1 Gbps speed and all users are connected to other switch .But both switches are connected through 2 Gbps LAG.

So to describe more, we use to receive files which are from 30 Mb - 600 MB in size and sometime 1 Gb. All users are working on a shared folder directly on network. So they are opening files from the network shares and saving in the same location. When they say it is hanging then I see the task manager and found hard drive utilization is 100% ( 100% highest active time in task manager) and network utilization is around 40-60 % only. So as per my understanding there could be a problem with hard drive writing speed because if they are saving the files that means they are writing the files.

kindly help me to create a good setup environment for them to not face such issues in future. I appreciate all of your replies:-)

Please find the attached the hdd utilization.

How many drive space do you have? I’d use SSD, ether RAID 5 or 10.

williampotts · 2016-10-27T20:01:02.000Z

You can only do so much with out a proper budget. ArsTechnica did a nice review that might fix it for you, but it ain’t cheap:

Ars Technica – 18 Oct 16

Samsung 960 Pro review: The fastest consumer SSD you can buy

Samsung takes SSD performance to another level—but it may be too much for some.

Probably won’t work on your machine either.

bmercer · 2016-10-27T20:15:30.000Z

This is one of those cases where a RAID-5 array of cheap consumer drives would actually be an improvement.

Trying to imagine ANY scenario where 50 people are all editing images on a single hard drive and it does not end in a horrifying disaster…

Nope, I got nothin’.

adrian_ych · 2016-10-28T02:39:50.000Z

What do you mean by assembled server ?

A box that you pick parts and self-fix ? Then that may be the main failure point…so there may not be a “BEST” HDD…

For me, i would recommend RAID 6 using at least 6x 400GB Enterprise Grade SSDs (RAID 6 + 2 hot spares). You can then change the formulae of RAID 6 + 2 hot spares to suit your storage requirements that you can fit into your server. That means if you need 4TB, then you may want to use 10 HDD to get 3.6TB.

Then you may also need to consider the following factors

PSU : does your power unit have enough power for all the added hardware and HDD ?
RAID controller card : can your RAID card handle all the transfer speeds and that number of HDD ?
Does your mobo accept the RAID hardware
Does your server have HDD slots, rib cage or Hot pluggable slots ?
What is the downtime/response time you have if HDD fails
What is your budget ?

adrian_ych · 2016-10-28T02:56:45.000Z

Azim5837:

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

I do not mean to be rude or harsh if I sound like that but I do not know how to find the words…RAID is the basics if you want to work with servers and storage (SAN & NAS included).

The average of HDD is about 2yrs (SOHO grade) and 3-5yrs (Enterprise grade) but nobody anywhere can guarantee when the HDD may fail. RAID (except for RAID 0) gives you time to replace failed HDD when it does fail and not suffer 100% data loss.

If you are think of setting up the server as a file server or only as a file server for 50 users…did you consider the following :

Why not use a SOHO grade NAS like Synology 4bay or 8bay NAS ?
Are People saving files on the file server or working off the file server ?
Where are the potential bottlenecks ?
Are you going to backup the files on the file server ?

When you see the HDD on file server is busy, it does not always mean the HDD is slow…HDD, CPU and RAM is required to read, write and transfer files. The load can be partially distributed to the RAID controller and NIC cards. Local AV and anti-malware software can also cause the HDD to be busy in file servers.

netsvc · 2016-10-28T04:49:57.000Z

Network speed (LAN) must be in ratio with the number of users and amount of data to process. Given your hardware, I guess you should start with a 10gb network with “enterprise” HDDs (in RAID10 maybe).

michaelstudte · 2016-10-28T05:21:29.000Z

Joerg (WD):

Big Green Man:

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

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

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

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

Eeek, I’d never want to let Windows do the RAID anyway. Physical or embedded RAID controller or nothing!