new drives to feed the Drobo

Thorin · February 01, 2016, 12:50:23 PM

My Drobo FS is getting full; remember when I bought it after having a power supply that was killing WD Black drives?

I originally had two WD Black 1TB drives in it, then another, then a couple more, so now I'm at 5x1TB filling all five bays. I've already switched from dual disk redundancy to single, to get more space at the cost of higher chance of data loss when drives die. I have about 14% space left, which is still 500GB, but I do know from a bunch of reading that once Drobos get under 15% space remaining they start to slow down a little as the proprietary OS tries to balance things out.

The Drobo is emailing me three or four times a week stating that it can't protect against hard drive failures, then a few minutes later that it's finished rebuilding the file data and can now protect again. My guess is that one of the oldest drives (around six years old) is starting to have bad sectors. I'm kinda worried with the single disk redundancy, it'd suck to have two drives go bad at the same time.

So with the space dwindling and at least one disk starting to have some kind of minor problems, I've been looking at new drives. I was also looking at a new Drobo 5N, because the FS is so slow, but I don't really have money to spend on any of this. I do know that I'm sticking with WD Blacks, the only time I had trouble with them was when a bad PSU was frying the drive controller boards, and even then I managed to (very slowly) recover all data.

I've been watching prices, and humming and hahhing between the different sizes. Here's what I've been seeing:
3TB is about $240 ($80/TB)
4TB is about $305 ($76.25/TB)
5TB is about $350 ($70/TB)
6TB is about $420 ($70/TB)
The WD Black 5TB and 6TB have the new 128MB cache, the 3TB and 4TB have the older 64MB cache; some of the reviews show the larger cache makes the drives a little faster.

And then today, I found WD Black 5TB on sale on NewEgg.ca for $265 ($53/TB)! I bought three, final price after shipping and tax is $844.69. I can put all three in the Drobo and turn dual disk redundancy back on and still have 75% more storage than before.

I went through these stages of space:
2x1TB single disk redundant = 0.91TB usable
3x1TB dual disk redundant = 0.91TB usable
5x1TB dual disk redundant = 2.72TB usable
5x1TB single disk redundant = 3.63TB usable
3x5TB+2x1TB dual disk redundant = 6.35TB usable

Not as exciting as Lazy's new PC, but I was excited to find those drives for so cheap... MemEx didn't even have them in stock.

Melbosa · February 01, 2016, 01:09:52 PM

Nice

Mr. Analog · February 01, 2016, 02:25:19 PM

Is this it?
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236971

Cause I need a new array (I'm well out of space)

Thorin · February 01, 2016, 02:34:02 PM

Quote from: Mr. Analog on February 01, 2016, 02:25:19 PM
Is this it?
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236971

Cause I need a new array (I'm well out of space)

Yup, that's the one. $270 for one drive, $265 per drive if you buy two to four, $260 per drive if you buy five or more.

I was thinking of getting Memory Express to price-beat, but they don't even have these drives in stock so they probably wouldn't.

Tom · February 01, 2016, 03:40:20 PM

God damn it stop making me spend money you guys.

The max seems to be 5.

wanted 6 for 4+2 raid6. *sigh*. Nas would be getting a big upgrade then. lol. 3+2 is good enough for now

still more space than I have now with 7x2TB (6+1).

Oh god, my NAS array is degraded and ZFS didn't let me know. WTF. Guess with the new drives I WILL NOT be using zfs. ffffuuuu. (I was already planning that, the cpu use is INSANE) I heard a drive or two clicking like i heard before when seagates were going. But the drive that was kicked out is a WD Red... I hope its just a lose cable. Or if drives keep dying, even good WDs, it might mean the controller or PSU is defunct. feh.

Thorin · February 01, 2016, 04:10:49 PM

Yeah, but if you buy five drives at that NewEgg price, you've effectively saved 650 dollars! $1,300 instead of $1,950...

And I've read quite a few places that the NAS-optimized WD Reds actually die quite often in the first six to eight weeks. The newer NAS-optimized WD Red Pros, on the other hand, appear to be as reliable as the WD Blacks (and are the same price and right around the same speeds in various benchmark tests). Hopefully it's just a loose cable and not a PSU frying your drives...

Tom · February 01, 2016, 04:16:49 PM

Quote from: Thorin on February 01, 2016, 04:10:49 PM
Yeah, but if you buy five drives at that NewEgg price, you've effectively saved 650 dollars! $1,300 instead of $1,950...

And I've read quite a few places that the NAS-optimized WD Reds actually die quite often in the first six to eight weeks. The newer NAS-optimized WD Red Pros, on the other hand, appear to be as reliable as the WD Blacks (and are the same price and right around the same speeds in various benchmark tests). Hopefully it's just a loose cable and not a PSU frying your drives...

Hm, I did do some pretty heavy stress-tests on the drives when I got them. I'm pretty anal about that these days. I'll test drives for DAYS or a WEEK+ depending on how long the tests take.

Yeah, I sure hope they aren't actually failing or being blown up. The WD seems to be failing and sound the exact same as the Seagates were. Which, honestly seems weird to me. They aren't like a regular click of death, but like the arm is doing weird @%&#. and its very occasional.

But hey, new Blacks, and I can move the 2TB drives into either a new array for VMs and such, or use it to extend my current backup array (it's actually now smaller (4x3TB+2 raid6) than the new array will be. We'll see what I do.

Thorin · February 01, 2016, 05:12:11 PM

From what I've read, WD Blacks have some kind of arm stabilizer that guarantees the head never touches the platter. Can't remember what they call it. WD Reds don't have this, but in a couple of places I red that the WD Red Pros do have that stabilizer. Although people could also be confusing it with the spindle shaft stabilizer...

I dunno, I've had Barracudas that failed on me with the click of death, it sucked losing data and then also not getting a new drive for free from warranty. I've had Blacks fail on me but managed to get all data of with ddrescue, and then got free replacement drives. I'm sticking with Blacks because of this. Guess I just don't like the rest of the rainbow.

Tom · February 01, 2016, 06:48:31 PM

Heh, I liked the reds because they are cheaper, mostly because they are mostly Blue's hw wise but with firmware more like the Blacks. Which means you can actually use them in raid with fewer problems than regular consumer drives. There a read-timeout feature that some drives (like all baracudas) have disabled, so the drive will attempt to restore data from a sector indefinitely. So instead of retuning a failure in a reasonable time frame, and letting the Raid subsystem rebuild the data and mark that drive for a re-write (which often tends to get a drive to reallocate a sector or otherwise unstick a sector), it just drops the drive instead.

But hey, this was an excellent deal

and i hopefully wont have to deal with this BS very much.

Thorin · February 04, 2016, 11:39:33 PM

I ordered the drives on Monday, they arrived today (so much for 7 to 12 business days, eh? came in 3!).

Fast forward to the evening, I figure the drives have warmed up enough from the frigid cold. Pop an old 1TB out of the Drobo, put a new 5TB in. The light goes red. Doesn't blink, just stays red. So I'm patient, I wait about a minute. Nothing, light stays red. Drobo Dashboard shows it recognizes the 5TB drive, but available space dropped from 0.5TB to 42MB. "Oh no!", I think, "It's hooped and I didn't back anything up first!" In a panic, I pop out the 5TB and put the 1TB back in. After a minute, all the lights start blinking green/yellow. This means that the Drobo is doing a "data protection", which basically means re-balancing all the files so that there's two copies of every file (file-chunk, really).

Did some googling, turns out it's normal for the red light to stay on for up to 15 minutes when a new drive is inserted. I should have just left it be. Now I have to wait for the data protection to finish. How long? Well, from what I've read it takes about 12 hours per TB and I have 3 TB, so about 36 hours. So I'll probably get to swap the drive back out on Sunday.

le sigh

Lazybones · February 04, 2016, 11:58:01 PM

Quote from: Thorin on February 04, 2016, 11:39:33 PM
I ordered the drives on Monday, they arrived today (so much for 7 to 12 business days, eh? came in 3!).

Fast forward to the evening, I figure the drives have warmed up enough from the frigid cold. Pop an old 1TB out of the Drobo, put a new 5TB in. The light goes red. Doesn't blink, just stays red. So I'm patient, I wait about a minute. Nothing, light stays red. Drobo Dashboard shows it recognizes the 5TB drive, but available space dropped from 0.5TB to 42MB. "Oh no!", I think, "It's hooped and I didn't back anything up first!" In a panic, I pop out the 5TB and put the 1TB back in. After a minute, all the lights start blinking green/yellow. This means that the Drobo is doing a "data protection", which basically means re-balancing all the files so that there's two copies of every file (file-chunk, really).

Did some googling, turns out it's normal for the red light to stay on for up to 15 minutes when a new drive is inserted. I should have just left it be. Now I have to wait for the data protection to finish. How long? Well, from what I've read it takes about 12 hours per TB and I have 3 TB, so about 36 hours. So I'll probably get to swap the drive back out on Sunday.

le sigh

RTFM gets you every time.

Tom · February 05, 2016, 08:20:15 AM

Awesome, mine are on truck for today too

Wasn't entirely expecting them to get in today.

Thorin · February 05, 2016, 02:07:48 PM

Alright, data protection finished a couple of hours ago!

My son has a friend over, they're just settling down to play Minecraft on our computers. The friend says, "Why is it blinking red here?"

Son of a gun, it was definitely not blinking red an hour ago! I think I know which drive is going bad, then.

Tom · February 05, 2016, 04:05:55 PM

Quote from: Thorin on February 05, 2016, 02:07:48 PM
Alright, data protection finished a couple of hours ago!

My son has a friend over, they're just settling down to play Minecraft on our computers. The friend says, "Why is it blinking red here?"

Son of a gun, it was definitely not blinking red an hour ago! I think I know which drive is going bad, then.

Ouch.

I got my new drives toady

I'm still planning on how I'll set things up. I now have enough storage to setup a dedicated VM storage array that can be shared between both hosts using ISCSI or ATA Over Ethernet. Or heck, DRBD. That'll allow some nice stuff, like super simple migration, as both hosts have "direct" access to the storage and find it at the same place, so all it has to do is sync the ram.

Tom · February 06, 2016, 08:46:32 PM

I've got the new drives in my NAS now. Unceremoniously yanked the old 2TB drives as I have a full daily backup on another box. Running a full "badblocks" scan on them now in parallel. I imagine it'll take a few days to finish. after that i may do some harsh random/read/write tests on smaller portions of the drives. Putting some heavy load on them initially may weed out any SIDS.

Also running badblocks on the two WD Reds that were in the NAS as it seems one of them was dropped from the array (which is strange...)