Best spinning platter Hard Drives for cMP?

[AidenShaw]

Not hearing the annoying spinning & clicking sounds is the only justification one needs.

Really? I have lots of spinners for near-line stuff, and I simply don't notice any spinning and clicking sounds.

Are you using Western Digital spinners? (Mine are all Seagate.)

But, if you want to spend 5X the price for storage for a little bit of quiet - spend your money.

 

[gnasher729]

If you want to stick with an HDD my choice would be a Hybrid SSHD. This one:

https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/hdd/firecuda/

Lou

I like it on paper. I mean the 2TB with 8GB SSD is just a little bit more expensive than non-hybrid drives. Have you actually used it, and is it worth the money?

 

[AidenShaw]

I like it on paper. I mean the 2TB with 8GB SSD is just a little bit more expensive than non-hybrid drives. Have you actually used it, and is it worth the money?

I have a number of them, but I'm moving to drives in the 8 to 14 TB size range, and there are no SSHDs at those capacities.

On great thing about the Seagate SSHDs is that they allow safe writeback write caching.

For most drives, it is recommended that writes be synchronous (OS says "write", drive puts data on disk, drive tells OS "done").

With writeback caching -- this is OS says "write", drive puts data on disk DRAM cache, drive tells OS "done", drive eventually moves data from cache to the disk. Obviously better performance, since the OS isn't stalled waiting for the write.

The can be quite dangerous, however - because if there's a power failure between saying "done" and moving the data from cache to disk, data is lost or the file system is corrupted.

Seagate's SSHDs employ a brilliant trick to eliminate this risk. If power is suddenly lost, the drive turns the platter motor into a generator. It uses the momentum of the platters to power the electronics for long enough to copy the DRAM cache to the flash cache on the SSD - saving all of the dirty cache data. When the drive is powered back up, the dirty cache data is copied from the flash to the platters.

For many loads that include lots of metadata writes, this writeback caching can be quite a benefit.

For my servers at work, all of the RAID controllers have similar dirty cache safety mechanisms. The controller card has a flash the same size as the controller cache, and there's a battery backup to make sure that the cache is saved on a power hit.

[doublepost=1549934578][/doublepost]

Really? I have lots of spinners for near-line stuff, and I simply don't notice any spinning and clicking sounds.

Are you using Western Digital spinners? (Mine are all Seagate.)

But, if you want to spend 5X the price for storage for a little bit of quiet - spend your money.

Just did a quick check - I have at least 36 spinners in my home office. I never hear clicks. (All Seagate.)

 

[flowrider]

I like it on paper. I mean the 2TB with 8GB SSD is just a little bit more expensive than non-hybrid drives. Have you actually used it, and is it worth the money?

If you want a spinner, IMHO Yes! But, as I said in my post, My WD HDD is in the trash, my Seagate SSHD is in the closet. Both were replaced with SSDs. I have 7 SSDs mounted inside my cMP.

Lou

 

[AidenShaw]

If you want a spinner, IMHO Yes!

Both spinners and SSDs have their places.
Several of my servers have:

• 480GB SATA III SSD for system drive ($649)
• 8TB NVMe SSD for work/scratch/page (5*1.6TB in RAID-0) ($16249)
• 128TB spinners for big data (24*8TB in RAID-60) (~$34000)

I don't need NVMe for the system disk, and I can't justify/afford NVMe for the big data.

Be realistic, and don't buy SSDs for occasionally referenced data.

 

[flowrider]

^^^^That's NOT what gnasher was asking about. He was inquiring about the Seagate Hybrid SSHD, NOT an SSD.

Lou

 

[crjackson2134]

While I don’t have that much data, or the need for supermassive storage...

I like the idea of going all SSD internally for live work and frequently needed data. For large sleeping data, I have 32 TB of spinning rust in external storage (USB 3.0) which works out very well. I still have 2 spinners inside the cMP that I will eventually replace.

 

[flowrider]

^^^^same boat. I have already gone all SSD. 4 840 SSDs in heatsinks in my HD bays. 1 SM951 SSD in a PX1 and 2 970 Pros in a I/O Crest.

Lou

 

[AidenShaw]

^^^^That's NOT what gnasher was asking about. He was inquiring about the Seagate Hybrid SSHD, NOT an SSD.

Lou

I was replying to you, not the OP, and agreeing with your observation that both spinners and SSDs have their places.

...and an SSHD is a spinner, with better performance under a few workloads.

Sorry about any confusion.

 

[captainfamicom]

I'd recommend Toshiba and Western Digital performance, enterprise, or NAS drives. Stay away from Seagate however, I've had many new drives of theirs fail within two weeks (thank god for backups!)

 

[jscipione]

I also have a collection of 3.5" spinners for data and fast SSDs for boot but I think the best economical way is to get one PCIe SSD and one big spinning hard disk. Since you don't depend on the spinning rust hard disk speed you can buy a large capacity 5400rpm drive which while slower will be cheaper, last longer, and will work quieter. I have 5400rpm WD Red and 7200rpm HGST, the 7200rpm drive is audible while working yet the 5400rpm drive is not.

 

[flyingmanatee]

Both spinners and SSDs have their places.
Be realistic, and don't buy SSDs for occasionally referenced data.

For real, it's swarmy as hell, to recommend SSDs for large data storage. Besides, with the noise floor of a Mac Pro's fans and GPU, even on quiet GPUs means quiet models are mostly inaudible, especially idling. Cost already has been pointed out but let's not forget the cost per GB for an HDD often dips below $0.01 vs SSDs the best of SSDs at $0.05. In a perfect world, all of us could afford $1500 for 8 TB SSDs.

To parrot others with more anecdotal, I gave up on Seagate after a year and half period where 3 Seagate drives died with in 6 months of each other. Fortunately, being data paranoid I didn't lose anything. These days its my 5 year old 750 GB SSD as boot and a 5 TB WD Black + an internal Time Machine drive and external Time Machine drive as I've moved my pointless data to a media computer.

 

[tommy chen]

i want to change my 4 x 4TB HGST to 4 x 4TB samsung 860 pro SSD
but one of the 4TB SSD cost near 1000 bucks :- (

so to work to earn that as well +g*

 

[DPUser]

I like the Seagate 8TB Archive Drive; you can buy 'em without a case or, for less money (about $140), inside a USB3 enclosure. Great Time Machine drives. Not speedy, but SSDs are what one uses when quick access is needed.

Every time the subject of HDs comes up, there will be those who tells us they have had Seagate drive failures. And, yes, there was a time when Seagate has QC issues. That said, I don't think data supports a continuing issue with Seagate. Latest Backblaze report doesn't indicate high Seagate failure rates. And though my perspective is about as valuable as others who shared their own anecdotal evidence above, I've never had a Seagate drive fail, and have used quite a few over the years as a recording studio owner.

 

[barmann]

Definitely worth the extra cost IMO.

In most cases it isn't , the difference in price is just too great .
I think I have 4 SSDs in my cMP now, and one 3.5 spinner, but obviously everything external is HDDs only .

The 4 inside are only that many because only recently high capacity SSDs ( SATA models ) have become a sensible purchase , and I keep using the older, smaller capacity ones .

For many uses it's just silly to buy SSDs ; as for noise, a little research will lead you to quiet HDDs, more quiet than the fans on the GPUs most people use in their cMPs .