WD Red 3TB - the best for quiet, fast, dependable media storage?

Head parking involves taking the head from over the platter into an area not over the platter. Hence "parking" as you're taking it off from over the "tracks". WD Red's have less agressive head parking compared to greens, have an extra year warranty and configurable TLER (i think?) for RAID, as well as 24/7 power on hours i think. Head parking will result in extra latency, you are correct.

Any modern hdd will be able to play back 10gb ripped movies (1080p?) (assuming your 10gb movie files aren't 10 second 4K RAW video files =P). I assume windows (you are using windows? you haven't specified any hardware/software?) does metadata indexing so lists of 1000+ files will be fine if you enable indexing.

Keep in mind that there will be an order of magnitude of difference in latency between the SSD and HDD, it may be annoying waiting for your drive to spin up, so editing your power settings so they don't spin down may be helpful. This won't be an issue if you're accessing the drives constantly of course.

Okay, thanks =)

Concern One:
Size - according to pcpartspicker.com with WD RED drives, the 3tb is the best value 5400 rpm drive so good choice already, my experience is more with storage servers which can be tucked away. Most motherboards can do RAID 5 which is fine, (using on board things)

With $300 right now to spend on 6TB of storage, and with the drives going for ~$143 each, it looks like your choices are a RAID0 or JBOD with two drives. I would strongly suggest going for RAID6 however (RAID 6 is double parity, so n-2) as the chance of data loss after losing one drive is less, you both remove the likelyhood of a URE during the rebuild (1 in 10^4 read bits per drive for consumer, which is one in 11.6TB, spread over 6TB's is a high risk for single parity.)

I point you in the direction of servethehome.com, albeit their simple model is going to be flawed they're the best i've found recently.

http://www.servethehome.com/raid-calculator/raid-reliability-calculator-simple-mttdl-model/

Backup - I want to repeat this, RAID is not backup. It doesn't replace backup, it means you don't have to spend time recovering your data as it's still there after a drive failure. RAID means you have redundancy in case of failure, a backup is more offline and you can bring it out to recover your RAID in case you lose the array. Using some calcs, it'd require 240 single layer blu rays, and cost ~$350 to buy 6TB of offline storage, but that'd be an example of a backup if your array failed. Alternatively you could already have the movies on blu-ray and just have to re-rip them, or if they're from itunes/amazon you could re-download them and recover that way? It's all about time/money spent recovering versus time spent making a backup or redundant system so you don't have to do much to recover.

Media storage performance - the waits you speak of would probably involve spinning the drives up. A 10gb 2 hour movie approximately has a bit rate of 1.4 MB/s so i assume reading it won't be too difficult.

Noise - my best preference to keeping noise down is putting it in the appliance cupboard, networking can do the rest. If you have a spare PC this may be a good idea? it simplifies HDD selection based on price per gigabyte. The WD red is a good choice and is good $/gb so no qualms from this side.

RAID5 helps as you still have access to the data when a drive fails, although the likelyhood that you'll survive a rebuild could be quite low, it enables you to pull actual important data off the array. RAID6 with an array this large means that you're more likely to actually survive a rebuild, however it adds an extra drive compared to RAID 5. RAID 6 has its own special requirements such as increased computational complexity and most motherboard chipsets don't do it. You can use your OS to do it, although if your OS drive goes, so too does your array.

Another thing about RAID is that once you pick a level you're stuck with it (unless there's a fancy migration tool, which if your computer crashes in the middle the data is toast), you can't easily add storage without adding a whole other array or killing your array you have now (there's migration tools still but yeah....). With ZFS you add arrays to a pool, so if you bought 4 3tb drives for 6tb RAID6, to get to 12TB you'd have to buy another 4 drives. Then you have 8 drives and 12tb of storage space, whilst with 8 drives and double parity you'd have 18 TB, or with triple parity and 8 drives you'd have 15TB.

So it's hard to expand with RAID. With your $300 now you could buy 2 3TB drives, and later down the track spend $300-400 on drives which are hopefully cheaper so you can do a RAID6, migrate the data, and save for two more drives so that you can get RAID with the original 3tb drives you bought to get to 12TB.

Currently the cheapest way to get RAID6 & 6TB & red drives, would be to buy 5 2TB drives (that's a lot of spindles though), which totals to 6TB exactly, assuming you had hardware/software to do RAID6. With red drives that comes to $525, versus $572 for 4 3Tb drives. However, if one were to get Seagate Barracuda drives, they're $115 each atm for 3TB, that comes to $460 for 6TB RAID 6, one could buy a 2nd hand PC for the $100 saved compared to WD RED's and put a computer away somewhere & network it.

Cheers,
BBCXC

Okay, sounds like a nice solution. Manually duplicating the data is similar to doing a RAID1 (mirroring), one could do a small RAID1 partition and keep your documents folder on that or something.

What i mean about moving things away is due to how things are quieter farther away. I encourage doing networked attached storage and putting it far away. This means you have less vibrations on your desk and less noise. WiFi is more than fast enough for streaming movies if you don't have a wired network.

The one thing i'm really aiming for is convincing you to have a backup solution. You're correct in that any single point of failure (CPU etc) could kill a RAID array. With a hardware RAID solution, your RAID controller could go, with a software-motherboard system the mobo could die, with the OS raid your OS could corrupt.

One could go for cloud storage as a backup solution (google drive has 15 gb free) or if you don't trust others with your data, an offsite USB drive would be another option. In terms of budget, i'm of the opinion "you only lose data once" and then you invest in a good backup solution. For example if it takes 25 hours to re-do a paper (or in the case of RAID5 vs RAID6, recovering your data from your backup when an array fails, which could take hours in itself), that's at $12 an hour (idk what you value your time at or what you get paid per hour?), if you spent less than $300 implementing a proper backup solution (or going for an extra drive for RAID6) and that's money or time saved!

The problem with RAID5 isn't that you can sustain one drive failure, you can. It's just rebuilding the array is the problem. With a 6TB array of two drives, you're highly likely to run into an unreadable sector (URE), as well as being unable to sustain an extra drive failure due to drive age, manufacturing defects in a certain batch, or even pulling the wrong drive! You're at the most risk of drive failure when your data doesn't have any redundancy and is under the most stress. My point is that if you lose the array your data is gone. With a RAID5 you'd probably have enough time before something else goes wrong (if it does) to pull your papers off.

RAID usually doesn't allow you to expand the array due to the way parity works. You'd effectively be rebuilding the array, re-reading the data, splitting the data + parity 4 ways instead of three and writing again. That's if your raid solution even allow migration like that.

Personally if you see yourself as spending $700 in the next year, i'd say wait, ~$700 gets you five WD red 3tb's (if they haven't gone down in price) for RAID6 and 9TB's of usable space. Alternatively one could buy five 3tb seagates & a computer for a server (there's a dc7700 desktop (four hdd slots) on ebay, then one could buy a 5.25" to 3.5" adaptor(that could have come with your case) & a dual sata controller - total $100-105). Alternatively instead of using a computer and FreeNAS or the like, one could buy a 5 bay NAS or something, but it costs more money ~$300-350 for a LaCie 5Big Network V2 (it does RAID6).

In terms of spinning down it appears that WD Red's don't spin down as aggressively, so they appear to be perfect due to their low volume (23 Db from the specs i think?).

For your budget of absolutely no more than $300 now, i'd do a RAID1 partition for important data, RAID0 for movies and everything else just because more speed (you could do JBOD or have seperate partitions if you only fancy losing half your movies) and either spend the remaining $15 on more google drive storage, or a 32gb flash drive (or a portable HDD?) (if you like offsite encrypted backup if you don't trust google or other providers with your data). As always waiting will get you a better deal, but if you could wait you wouldn't be asking now =P.

Lose the array means you lose the data. The array of drives no longer holds the information, logical hard drive goes kaput. Due to the way the data is spread, an error when you no longer have a redundant drive (like a URE or another hard drive failure) it can't recover. In the case of an URE you could only lose a portion of your data that was associated with that sector.

You're correct with your conclusion that "i can't ofter recover fro a hard drive failure due to the URE"

What i'm saying is that with RAID5 you can sustain a hard drive failure and still have access to your data, but after replacing the drive, when the controller is restoring redundancy to the array there's a high chance of an URE not to mention simultaneous drive failure due to the extra stress on old drives or failures due to manufacturing defects etc. The high chance of a URE has made RAID5 basically useless for drives over 1TB. I point you to these two articles:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/805

Hi There,

Was searching on the net for some hard drive advice (been burnt before with a HD failure) and came across this post.

Just wanted to say thank you for all this great info - really great reading for anyone with loads of data and looking to reduce downtime when a drive fails with these back up solutions.

Thanks Again
Dan

Two or three points: RAID6 is dual parity, so you will loose 2 drive's worth of space and you have to have two extra write operations for every write operation (two extra stripes) the only thing you get in practical terms form RAID 6 is teh ability to withstand two drives failing concurrently the price is real estate and speed, second, I'm confident a DC7700 can't see drives bigger than 2TB, so you'll need a RAID card, also, although it has 4, potentially 5 bays, it only has a 240W or thereabouts power supply.

I don't think RAID has a place in home theater, but that's my 20 years of experience talking. Sinple is best the files will be big and hardly accessed, so the disks won't be drilled.

Please let me know if I'm wrng on any of those points, I'm here looking for the same answer and I have a DC7700 as my 'server'.

Good luck however you go forward.

Good luck however you go forward.

He may well have gone there in four months but your comments add to the debate for others to read later

I run 2 x 2TB reds and 1 x 1.5TB Green. Went to red after my first green died.

As for noise I cannot comment, I run folding@home and my GPU fan dilutes all other sound, but I do not think there would be a noticable difference between the red and green. They both take time to spin up. Roughly 3 secs, it is something I can wait for as my comp runs 24/7 and I use the drives for a fraction of the time.

WD Black runs 24/7 (complementary to my SSD for system drives).

If you are going to have the drives spinning 24/7, I would go the red over the green as they are marketed as 'Home NAS' drives. As for launching massive movies, I cannot say I notice but I can test this if you really want me to.