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Promise Pegasus drives
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Sorry Ron
I did not advocate using drives that are NOT recommended by controller vendors. Hitachi desktop drives were certified for 24/7 RAID use before WD bought them. Also Toshiba do all their own testing and they had desktop drives compatible with RAID (but maybe not now). Barracudas are on the approval list for Adaptec Series 5, 6 and 7.
A Barracuda here is $92 and a Constellation is $172. There’s a decision to be made here when both drives are tested and approved.
What’s likely to happen is Seagate will change their firmware to stop them being used. They wont tell Adaptec and then customers will get stuck with drives that wont work. Adaptec’s get-out-of-jail will be “we dont recommend the use of desktop drives”. This is what I mentioned happened to me with WD FAUX Blacks. However the same thing happened with WD RE drives. Difference was that WD had to fix their firmware which they had to do because they were an enterprise product (although I’m not sure they fixed them completely as they still had to be jumpered as SATA150 to work on Series 5 controllers – SATA300).So I’m just pointing out that THEY have approved the use of certain desktop drives. It’s just that they don’t recommend them due to TLER. So if you’re RAID6 then you would be fine to use them. RAID5 puts you at too much risk.
So everything I have said is supported by vendors.
The technical stuff is to clarify these positions and so there is no confusion (as it seemed there was here}. -
Paul,
Both Ron and Bob are focusing attention on a very minor aspect of the bigger picture this discussion should really be about, i.e. DATA SECURITY.”
Whether a person or company uses enterprise or desktop drives makes little difference in the real world, because no RAID protection scheme or longer hard drive warranty will ever provide enough data security on its own. All hard drives will fail, no matter how much money you spend on them and no matter how long they are covered under warranty.
The only way to insure real data security is to deploy a 3-tiered data protection scheme incorporating 1) online protected RAID; 2) nearline backup; and, a long-term tape archive, preferably with a second copy kept off premises.
Anyone arguing that chucking lots of dough at enterprise level drives significantly increases data protection is either 1) missing the point, or, 2) confusing the issue.
The bottom line is, at ProMAX we would rather have our customers spend their money on things that make an actual difference in their data protection scheme, such as backup and archive, in addition to the RAID-5 and RAID-6 protection we offer with the bulk of our storage products. If they want enterprise drives too, we will provide them, but we know they simply aren’t worth the extra premium to the majority of our customers.
ProMAX looks at the entire picture – we incorporate dual redundant power supplies, dual mirrored SSD boot drives, and our ultimate “fail safe,” USB OS recovery – these are “extras” we include that really do count in enterprise-level data security. So, to imply we are cutting corners or simply saving money by using desktop drives is misleading, and only addresses only a small part of a much bigger discussion.
For the record, ProMAX now manufactures more than 75% of the products we sell, including many of the highest rated and highest performing shared storage servers on the market – so, we test, and we vet, and we certify what works and what doesn’t, because we support what we manufacture. And, we don’t follow the rules – we establish the rules.
David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.comSales | Integration | Support
David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Dont want to touch Seagate since that aweful FW mess years ago that burnt me..
Hitachi appear to have removed the part in the info on Deskstars that says video raids. tut tut…
Enterprise drives in some cases are different. They have larger heads.
These are new and look promising for near line/NAS
https://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771475.pdf
Am on 2nd RMA for Deskstar for our Pegasus
You can buy a spare.. but it comes with sled and is.. wait.. £260 + Tax! lol…
S
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David writes –
Paul,Both Ron and Bob are focusing attention on a very minor aspect of the bigger picture this discussion should really be about, i.e. DATA SECURITY.”
Whether a person or company uses enterprise or desktop drives makes little difference in the real world, because no RAID protection scheme or longer hard drive warranty will ever provide enough data security on its own. All hard drives will fail, no matter how much money you spend on them and no matter how long they are covered under warranty.
REPLY – DAVID IS 100 % correct.
The only way to insure real data security is to deploy a 3-tiered data protection scheme incorporating 1) online protected RAID; 2) nearline backup; and, a long-term tape archive, preferably with a second copy kept off premises.
REPLY – DAVID IS 100% correct !
The bottom line is, at ProMAX we would rather have our customers spend their money on things that make an actual difference in their data protection scheme, such as backup and archive, in addition to the RAID-5 and RAID-6 protection we offer with the bulk of our storage products.
REPLY – here in the real world, where everyone wants to spend ZERO money, it is very very difficult to convince most users to buy even a single raw SATA drive backup solution with a eSATA toaster, least not a tier 2 near line backup, or more important, an LTO solution.
Should everyone be backing up ? Should everyone be using LTO – OF COURSE THEY SHOULD. So, why don’t they all do this – because they DONT WANT TO SPEND THE MONEY.David writes –
For the record, ProMAX now manufactures more than 75% of the products we sell, including many of the highest rated and highest performing shared storage servers on the market – so, we test, and we vet, and we certify what works and what doesn’t, because we support what we manufacture. And, we don’t follow the rules – we establish the rules.REPLY – I wish I was smart enough to tell ATTO, Areca, and Highpoint what to do. I wish I had the clout to tell Apple what to do. So I humbly state that I never establish the rules. I follow the guidelines that are told to me by companies like Apple, ATTO, Areca, Highpoint, Myricom, Solarflare, Small Tree, etc. I have to make the ASSUMPUTION that those guys actually understand the products that they designed, and I follow their rules. And when things don’t work out, I know that I have someone to call and say “hey, it’s not working”.
And sorry Paul King – I am not throwing one of my vendors under the bus, even though I got burned by them. There are a limited number of vendors that make hardware for Macintosh Computers, and I am not about to burn bridges. These companies eventually fix their mistakes. But no matter what, David’s statements about multi level backup is SO TRUE, yet I know for a fact that almost no one follows these rules.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com -
[David Roth Weiss] “…this discussion should really be about, i.e. DATA SECURITY.”
The discussion was originally about the differences between desktop and enterprise drives, and various brands, wasn’t it?
Data security isn’t the only component of what matters to an editor: reliability and performance (i.e. uptime) are up there too. If your array is rebuilding three days in a year bringing performance down to unacceptable levels in addition to higher risks of data loss while the array is degraded – that costs money, too.
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[Alex Gerulaitis] “Data security isn’t the only component of what matters to an editor: reliability and performance (i.e. uptime) are up there too. If your array is rebuilding three days in a year bringing performance down to unacceptable levels in addition to higher risks of data loss while the array is degraded – that costs money, too.”
Actually Alex, reliabilty, performance, and cost are all equally important. One has to balance all three factors, not just those that make for a convenient argument.
And, what I’ve said all along is that a cost benefit analysis for “most” users in this space, with the exception of mission critical users, such as broadcast facilities and perhaps large post houses, will point to the fact that the siginificant cost of enterprise drives far outweighs the benefits, as concerns about the reliability and performance for desktop drives have proven to be virtually non-existant.
In the past, when hard drives were far less robust, reliability was much more of an issue than it is today. We hardly ever see hard drive failures these days, and so the extra cost of enterprise drives for only a longer warranty period is simply not worth the extra dough for most customers.
David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.comSales | Integration | Support
David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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[Alex Gerulaitis] “Just differences in MTBF and URE numbers alone make enterprise drives two to 100 times more reliable than desktop ones. It’s another matter whether (a) you can believe published numbers, (b) it justifies the cost difference if you do.”
Sorry Alex, but there’s absolutely nothing real-world about those numbers, and so I’m gonna have to ask for your source on this one.
And FYI, the quantitative measurements used on enterprise and desktop drives are completely different, by design, so it is virtually impossible to use the data supplied by manufacturers to achieve a true Apples to Apples comparison.
David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.comSales | Integration | Support
David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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All
This could go on for days. So this is what I get from Davids post. I guess Pro Max sells NON Enterprise drives and it works for them. If you want Enterprise then buy Maxx Digital because that is all we use. As far as all the back and forth I don’t care as if my clients asks ” what drives do you use” I say ” Enterprise” … So everybody is a winner here on the Cow. But TMI is starting to kick in.
Sincerely,
Ron Amborn President
Maxx Entertainment Digital
21562 Newland Street
Huntington Beach , Ca 92646
Direct 714-374-4944
Cell 714-713-4492 Fax 714-374-3404
ron@maxxdigital.com
http://www.maxxdigital.com -
[David Roth Weiss] “Sorry Alex, but there’s absolutely nothing real-world about those numbers, and so I’m gonna have to ask for your source on this one.”
Didn’t say anything about the real world, only “published”. If you have anything real-world, would love to hear about it.
The TL;DR version:
As far as “real-world”: there is a number of studies on the subject including this one where published AFR, MTBF, URE rate numbers deviate from real-world ones – however:
1. Nobody I know compared reliability of desktop vs. enterprise drives in any scientific manner.
2. Doing a statistically sound comparison like that is truly a gargantuan task not easily accomplished.
This is why we have to go by published numbers – which support reliability figures I mentioned above.
As Ron and Bob said several times, there’s also the matter of what’s supported and warranted for a specific purpose. Few desktop drives if any are warranted for high density parity RAIDs with a 24/7 duty and if you’re using them for that purpose, the customer should sign a waiver.
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Interesting discussion. On MTBF the published figures seem a bit meaningless. Desktop drives have a MTBF of 35 years. Enterprise, 70-200 years roughly. What does it mean? I’d say not a whole lot. It’s a reliability measurement, but not a particularly enlightening one. I’m sure the dud drives talked about here had identical MTBFs to their competitors. So how is it that their MTBFs were not lower? Fudged figures or a test designed to produce a certain result? And if it were truly a statistical test you wouldn’t end up with such round numbers. A lot to be skeptical about.
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