So a good rule of thumb is to estimate your growth and buy drives big enough that you will start to outgrow them in 5+ years. Most drives running 24/7 start having a high failure rate after 5-years, you might be able to squeeze 6 or 7 years out of them if you’re lucky. There are a few cases where an L2ARC makes sense when you have very large working sets.įor SLOG and L2ARC see my comparison of SSDs. I generally don’t use an L2ARC (SSH read cache) and instead opt to add more memory. In my home, I use 100GB DC S3700s and they do just fine. From a ZIL perspective, there’s not a reason to get a large drive–but keep in mind, you get better performance with larger drives. These run on the expensive side, so for a home setup, I typically try to find them used on eBay. These are rated to have their data overwritten many times and will not lose data on power loss.
#BEST NAS HARD DRIVE 2011 SERIES#
I have done quite a bit of testing and like the Intel DC SSD series drives and also HGST’s S840Z. The ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) should be on an SSD with a battery-backed capacitor that can flush out the cache in case of a power failure. You always want CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording). Be careful about any drive that says it’s for archiving purposes.
#BEST NAS HARD DRIVE 2011 DRIVERS#
If you don’t get one of the drives above, some larger hard drives are using SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) which should not be used with ZFS if you care about performance until drivers are developed. And of course for a small server you can grab the a 4 or 5 bay TrueNAS Mini. The prices on a TrueNAS are very reasonable compared to other storage systems and is barely more than a DIY setup. I’m cheap and tend to go with a DIY approach most of the time, but when I’m recommending ZFS systems in environments where availability is important I like the TrueNAS servers from iX Systems which can of course come with drives in configurations that have been well tested. Or buy a TrueNAS Storage Server from iXsystems If you don’t need more capacity or IOPS keep it simple. It’s far simpler to get a 4-bay chassis with 16TB drives, giving you 64TB RAW. Gone are the days when you need a 24-bay server for large amounts of storage.Higher RPMs and larger disks are typically going to have faster seek times.What you want to avoid is a drive that fails a year or two in and have the hassle of dealing with a warranty claim. You’re going to be able to return those rather quickly. If you read reviews about failures, I discount negative reviews with DOAs or drives that fail within the first few days.WD Ultrastar (up to 14TB) Datacenter class hard drives designed for heavy workloads (this line was going to replace WD Golds, but then WD changed their mind and now has two slightly different enterprise product lines). But to avoid confusion, I am telling people to stay away from the WD Red unless the seller specifically says it’s a CMR drive. WD Reds 8TB and above are still CMR (as far as I know) so should be okay if you’re careful. When you buy a WD RED there is a bit of confusion on whether you’re getting a CMR or SMR drive while stores work through inventory. This is bad for RAID (imagine trying to rebuild a 14TB SMR drive!) and especially bad for copy-on-write filesystems like ZFS. SMR essentially means the tracks are packed so tightly that data writes require a erase/rewrite cycle of data stored nearby which significantly slows down writes. Doing this on a drive designed for a NAS is awful, an unsuspecting customer could easily lose data due to the long rebuilds. The reason is Western Digital silently switched some WD Reds to SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). I no longer recommend the non-pro WD REDs. They bought out one of the most respected drive companies, HGST. Some of the most popular NAS class drives on the market today are made by Western Digital. Removed recommendation for WD Red since they are moving to SMR technology which will result in terrible performance on ZFS and RAID. Updated Ap– Removed WL and HGST drives, added Seagate, updated all product lines. Updated J– Updated prices, added larger drives, removed drives no longer being sold. Updated: J– Updated prices, and added WL drives Updated: J– Added quieter HGST, and updated prices. I prefer SATA but SAS drives would be better in some designs (especially when using expanders).įor a ZF home or small business TrueNAS, FreeNAS, or Proxmox storage server, I think these are the best options, and I’ve also included some enterprise-class drives. I prefer NAS or Enterprise-class drives since they are designed to run 24/7 and also are better at tolerating vibration from other drives in close proximity. What drives should I buy for my ZFS server?Īnswer: Here’s what I recommend, considering a balance of cost per TB, performance, and reliability.