Richard Elling wrote:
On Jul 4, 2011, at 6:42 AM, Lanky Doodle wrote:
Hiya,
I''ve been doing a lot of research surrounding this and ZFS, including some
posts on here, though I am still left scratching my head.
I am planning on using slow RPM drives for a home media server, and it's these
that seem to 'suffer' from a few problems;
Seagate Barracuda LP - Looks to be the only true 512b sector hard disk. Serious
firmware issues
Western Digital Cavier Green - 4K sectors = crap write performance
Hitachi 5K3000 - Variable sector sizing (according to tech. specs)
Samsung SpinPoint F4 - Just plain old problems with them
What is the best drive of the above 4, and are 4K drives really a no-no with
ZFS. Are there any alternatives in the same price bracket?
4K drives are fine, especially if the workload is read-mostly.
Depending on the OS, you can tell ZFS to ignore the incorrect physical sector
size reported by some drives. Today, this is easiest in FreeBSD, a little bit more
tricky in OpenIndiana (patches and source are available for a few different
implementations). Or you can just trick them out by starting the pool with a 4K
sector device that doesn't lie (eg, iscsi target).
Who would have thought choosing a hard disk could be so 'hard'!
I recommend enterprise-grade disks, none of which made your short list ;-(.
-- richard
I'm going through this at the moment. I've bought a pair of Seagate
Barracuda XT 2Tb disks (which are a bit more Enterprise than the list
above), just plugged them in, and so far they're OK. Not had them long
enough to report on longevity.
--
Andrew Gabriel
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