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Activity Forums Storage & Archiving Hitachi Ultrastar model HUS or HUA?

  • Hitachi Ultrastar model HUS or HUA?

    Posted by Jack Johnson on May 1, 2012 at 7:07 pm

    I’ve recently discovered there are two ultrastar models, the HUA (sata) or HUS (sas). I’ll be using an Atto R680 to control the mini sas tower.

    – Does it matter which ultrastar model I use?
    – And can I mix HUA and HUS within the same RAID?

    Steve Modica replied 14 years ago 5 Members · 10 Replies
  • 10 Replies
  • Jon Schilling

    May 1, 2012 at 7:40 pm

    Jack,

    The SAS drives are going to give you the better performance. With that concept in mind, you wouldn’t want to mix the 2 kinds of drives in an array.

    Jonathan Schilling
    Vertical Sales Manager
    Proavio
    12221 Florence Ave.
    Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670
    Dir: 562-777-3498
    Main: 562-777-3488 X106
    Fax: 562-777-3499
    Email: jon@proavio.com

    See our forum: https://forums.creativecow.net/proavio

  • Jack Johnson

    May 2, 2012 at 2:23 am

    Is performance the only difference? And how big a difference are we talking, specifically when working with multiple layers of 2k video?

  • Jon Schilling

    May 2, 2012 at 3:12 am

    Jack,

    From what I understand, SAS hard drive are nearly 3X as fast as SATA drives.

    Jonathan Schilling
    Vertical Sales Manager
    Proavio
    12221 Florence Ave.
    Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670
    Dir: 562-777-3498
    Main: 562-777-3488 X106
    Fax: 562-777-3499
    Email: jon@proavio.com

    See our forum: https://forums.creativecow.net/proavio

  • Rainer Wirth

    May 2, 2012 at 10:23 am

    I’ve come to the same question. The HUS drives are cheaper, the HUA drives are better.

    I use the same sas raid system (sonnet R800) and the same software (atto) to control it. The HUA drives work perfect for two years now. Don’t mix the drives! If you look at the sonnet site for specs, you can only use the HUA ones, the HUS are not listed.

    I hope this helps

    Rainer

  • Jack Johnson

    May 2, 2012 at 4:07 pm

    The only differences I’m seeing are block sizes and energy consumption:

    https://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/enterprise/ultrastar/ultrastar-7k3000

  • Bob Zelin

    May 3, 2012 at 12:44 am

    Ranier has just given you great advice –

    buy a Sonnet product – like this –
    https://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusiondx800raid.html

    it will give you everything you are looking for – a great ATTO RAID card, a great chassis, with a SAS expander in it that you can daisy chain on more SAS/SATA arrays. And a company with great support.

    Exactly what are you trying to achieve here? There are great products advertised here on creative cow – there are great products from so many companies here – from Enhance Technology (ProAvio), Sonnet, JMR, Cal Digit, Maxx, Small Tree, etc, etc. – why oh why are you trying to do this yourself, when you can just go out and buy a great product that already exists ?

    Bob Zelin

  • Jack Johnson

    May 3, 2012 at 1:18 am

    Bob, I’m very aware of the pre-made products available through and endorsed not only by this site, but specifically by you. Your responses are quite often the broken record of replies. Right now, those aren’t the solutions that best suit my particular situation. Which is why I presented the question. And please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t what these types of sites are for? A pool of gleanable knowledge that help people find solutions and answers for their particular situations.

    The next time I’m looking for a product solution, I’ll just type your name in and read from the valuable pool of endorsements. In the mean time, perhaps a deep breath and a walk might be good solution for you.

    -cheers

  • Steve Modica

    May 3, 2012 at 11:24 am

    [Jon Schilling] “The SAS drives are going to give you the better performance.”

    This isn’t really true. The underlying spindle isn’t any faster and the vendor themselves will tell you the SAS front in (dual ported) is really for redundancy.

    That being said, I think there might be a slight increase in performance if you had a dual ported SAS backplane and two channels driving it. Theoretically, you could see some better pipelining.

    (We’ve tested this BTW. The drives perform the same in a non-dual ported environment. There is no latency improvement)

    Steve Modica
    CTO, Small Tree Communications

  • Rainer Wirth

    May 4, 2012 at 9:10 pm

    That is interesting. I’ve got a question to Steve. As you work for small tree, one of the best raid storage producers, you say, that it doesn’t matter wether to use a HUA or HUS drive in a let’s say 16 bay SAS or FC Raid. Which drives do you use in the small tree products. Do you list the HUS drives within your small tree specs?

    Rainer

  • Steve Modica

    May 4, 2012 at 11:16 pm

    [Rainer Wirth] “That is interesting. I’ve got a question to Steve. As you work for small tree, one of the best raid storage producers, you say, that it doesn’t matter wether to use a HUA or HUS drive in a let’s say 16 bay SAS or FC Raid. Which drives do you use in the small tree products. Do you list the HUS drives within your small tree specs?”

    Hi Rainer

    We use SATA drives. When you’re doing video editing, it’s not about the bandwidth benchmarks. It’s about how many simultaneous streams you can sustain before the spindles can’t keep up with the framerate. I’d love to have a SAS product that could handle more streams that I could sell for 4X the price. We’ve tried buying much faster raids to test against but they can’t beat our stream counts.

    Steve

    Steve Modica
    CTO, Small Tree Communications

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