Hard drive recommendations for Thunderbay Raid

[Mecio]

Hey,

I just got a Thunderbay 4 Raid Edition and wondering if anyone has some recommendations for which hard drives to use. Does it need to be "Nas" drives as they will be in Raid 5?

Im thinking 4tb drives and a good compromise between cost and performance.

Thanks!

 

[satinsilverem2]

If you are looking for energy efficiency with decent speeds then the WD Red drives are great. If you want all out speed with great reliability the HGST 4TB drives are awesome. I would stay away from WD Green drives if at all possible.

 

[AidenShaw]

Hey,

I just got a Thunderbay 4 Raid Edition and wondering if anyone has some recommendations for which hard drives to use. Does it need to be "Nas" drives as they will be in Raid 5?

Im thinking 4tb drives and a good compromise between cost and performance.

Thanks!

The Thunderbay is not a RAID system, so get quality drives - but don't worry about getting RAID drives.

I run a number of external enclosures with the Seagate 4TB SSHD drives (http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-hybrid/desktop-solid-state-hybrid-drive/) and have had no failures (about 20 drives in use).

They have a 64MiB DRAM write-back cache (so writes are super fast), and an 8 GiB SSD that is a read cache for frequently read data.

On special at Newegg for $150 each (http://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9b-22-178-379)

 

[AidenShaw]

They have a 64MiB DRAM write-back cache (so writes are super fast)...

ps: Of course you realize that sustained writes will be dog-slow with software RAID-5, right?

 

[toptoptopper]

I've just ordered my Thunderbay 4 to complement my (yet to arrive) 5k iMac and I'm trying to figure out which drives to order. Currently I'm thinking:

3 x 3tb WD Reds, in RAID 5 (this will be for day to day stuff - mainly RAW files which Lightroom will reference with the library being on my internal SSD)
1 x 750gb WD Red as a bootable CCC clone of my internal iMac 500gb SSD (to clone daily or weekly)

In addition I'll have USB3 external drive which will time machine the whole lot regularly.

What do you guys think of this config? It would be cheaper to put a different model of 750gb HD in for the purpose of cloning (perhaps a WD green), but I feel all the drives should probably be Reds so they're consistent in terms of noise/vibration etc.

The other thing I'm toying with is slinging 4 x 2tb WD Reds in, all as RAID 5, and having an additional external to serve as the clone. This will be speedier, but it means yet another box under my desk!

Any thoughts/recommendations welcome!

Thanks in advance!

 

[andy89]

I suggest avoiding WD Reds (or Blacks, Blues, Greens) in RAID. They try way too hard to read bad blocks before finally giving up, long enough to make some RAID implementations timeout and mark the entire drive bad.

 

[zesta]

I suggest avoiding WD Reds (or Blacks, Blues, Greens) in RAID. They try way too hard to read bad blocks before finally giving up, long enough to make some RAID implementations timeout and mark the entire drive bad.

The Red drives are specifically designed for RAID. Black/Blue/Green definitely not. Reds are basically 5400 RPM versions of the RE drives, as they have TLER

As was said before, though, The thunder bay really isn't a RAID system, so it shouldn't really matter.

For my Areca ARC-8050T2, I use the WD Red drives to great success.

 

[deconstruct60]

ps: Of course you realize that sustained writes will be dog-slow with software RAID-5, right?

It will consume CPU and RAM resources... not necessarily "dog slow" if have a modern Intel CPU in your Mac and a reasonable amount of system RAM cache (with reasonably smart prefetch heuristics )
[NOTE: the following numbers are on a MBP , not a Mac Pro. ]
http://macperformanceguide.com/SoftwareRAID-performance-RAID5.html

If your current Mac is close to fully loaded down with workload then Softraid 5 isn't going to help. If have typical amounts of headroom on CPU utilization then it shouldn't be a major problem on leading edge Mac Pro class hardware.

 

[AidenShaw]

It will consume CPU and RAM resources... not necessarily "dog slow" if have a modern Intel CPU in your Mac and a reasonable amount of system RAM cache (with reasonably smart prefetch heuristics )
[NOTE: the following numbers are on a MBP , not a Mac Pro. ]
http://macperformanceguide.com/SoftwareRAID-performance-RAID5.html

If your current Mac is close to fully loaded down with workload then Softraid 5 isn't going to help. If have typical amounts of headroom on CPU utilization then it shouldn't be a major problem on leading edge Mac Pro class hardware.

The "dog" factor comes from the issue that a single write to a four disk RAID-5 can require three reads and two writes.

I wasn't considering the CPU/RAM load.