New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
HDDs for a server
SydneyWafflez
Member
in Help
Hello,
I just bought a server that I want to use for multiple things, like a Ubuntu machine (for web hosting), and a Windows machine (for high intensity stuff I don't want to do on my desktop).
The server I bought has 4 drive slots, and I wanted to do a combo of 2 WD Black drives, and 2 WD Purple drives, but I was told having two drives of different types was a bad idea.
I wanted to ask if I should do either WD Black or WD Purple. I also wanted to see if the above config would also be fine. Or, if I am being stupid, please suggest a WD colour I should use.
Thanks!
Thanked by 1pan_ia0_net
Comments
mixing 7200rpm similar drives is fine and no issues. Mix 5400rpm or shingled with regular 7200rpm and you get in trouble. WD Purple is surveillance, so optimized for write. You will probably be fine, just make sure you got 7200rpm drives.
Also some WD models have been purposefully made to drop out of RAID, i cannot recall what firmware feature was missing but it causes constant out of sync. Next step up is physically same drive but firmware had that feature enabled. Forgot already as we don't touch any WD drives except discount enterprise even with 10 meter pole, just not worth the hassle and extra expense for no benefits. A bit like HP in that regard.
@PulsedMedia So don't use WD? If not them, who would you advise I use? I would like to buy new drives if possible
You can use WD no probs, we just don't bother because they charge 10-25% more and pulls shenanigans all the time.
Toshiba, Seagate costs less in our supply chain.
Depends what your doing. Certain file systems don't like mixing drives ie zfs but stuff like Unraid you can mix n match without issues. Depends what your doin
Drives are tricky, everyone seems to have a favourite manufacturer after a bad experience with one brand or another. For us we prefer WD/HGST as I've always found them to be most reliable.
Are you going to be running two RAID 1 arrays? SW RAID? If so then I can't see any reason why you cant run Blacks/Purples in the same machine, then just use them as you see fit. Obviously running a RAID 10 across all four drives wouldn't be sensible if the drives are different types.
@FractionFrank I was going to do unraid, then use them for VMs. More specifically two VMs (one being windows, the other being Ubuntu)
This is the key question. If you don't spread the same filesystem across multiple drive types it is fine. This is the same principle as having two SSD/NVMe for OS and two HDDs for data (which is what I do, in RAID1).
Wouldn't want to host anything too important on a single SATA drive though (whatever colour it is!) so make sure you take some backups!
@FractionFrank I was planning on doing backups to an external NAS (With SSD drives, so I am not to picky about those lol!), on top of the unraid I wanted to use.
Then it doesn't matter about the colour so much with unRAID. But if you're hosting OS's on VM's, unless you have TB's of data, use SSD's instead. The blacks wouldn't likely be the most cost effective and will use more power and you won't likely experience the Black premium performance on an unRAID box. The benefit would mostly be 5-year warranty. But I've also RMA'd black drives before, so I don't think they're hot shit (no pun intended, because they'd run hotter than a cheaper desktop drive).
When using hardware RAID controller cards, it's important to use drives with firmware intended for NAS/RAID use. You can ignore.
Yeah, I would stick the SSDs into your server and the SATA drives into your NAS for backups!
There is a valid reason for the features (that cause problems for RAID) though IIRC they have in the past not been overly open about which drives have those features.
Certainly the green line does, as one of the issues is a power-saving thing: very aggressive power-saving feature with a slow re-startup time.
The other issue is long retry cycles on read issues: the drive would probably drop out of RAID due to the read issue anyway, but the retry cycle can make things stall first. Same for write though at this point the drive should reallocate around the iffy sector.
If these two features exist together, you can't really tell which one has caused any given issue.
Also, shingled drives have very slow write performance in a number of circumstances, which can be an issue if your RAID controller/software is sensitive to slow operations. There was an issue a while ago when they used this feature in some drives traditionally used for RAID in NAS (where is often isn't suitable) without telling anyone.