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Best 2.5" HDD for enterprise use
VPSSoldiers
Member
in Help
So shopping for new servers and equipment I'm trying to find the best / reasonably priced 2.5" HDDs around the 1TB mark but no less than 500GB. 3.5" HDDs enterprise drives are a whole lot easier to shop for...
Comments
I'd say WD blacks.. 5 yearwarrenty etc and have lived with the abuse I put into mine.
I have a performance raid 0 array built out of 4 320gb wd 2.5gb drives. Been this way for about 6 to 7 years. And all of them still pass extended testing.
And before you ask.. what's on the radio 0 is not important and can be re downloaded or I have backups.
It mostly has a plex system but I ran a statistics server with a DB of about 30 roms for Android devices on it. So it got some use.....
But you will get your haters.
@dacentec @mark_Turner
They might be able to provide real world enterprise opinions.
I'd focus less on the 'enterprise' label and more on the performance you're looking for and reviews/recommendations on reliability.
You're paying more for the same drives most of the time but you get a "better" warranty on them - but that warranty typically just means paying to ship it in and getting back a refurbished drive of questionable quality.
If you're colo'ing gear and don't have your own folks onsite you gotta add in the cost of remote hands to pull & package the drive for shipping, plus shipping costs. You're better off just tossing them in the trash most of the time.
Find good "consumer" drives, spread your order across different vendors so you get different batches. Take the savings from not paying extra for the enterprise label and stock some additional spares or keep more cash in your pocket.
I know a lot of the Delimiter blades take 2.5" drives so @MarkTurner can probably give some advice on brand/model reliability.
Reminds me that I have 4 different harddrives in my current workstation/gaming rig that is left on 24/7 and never powered down except for reboots...3 out of 4 of the drives are 5+ years old and going strong.
WD RE drives
Not enterprise but Seagate Momentus XT drives are very reliable and fairly fast.
Without heading into the enterprise drives the 2.5" WD Black 750GB Drives (WD7500BPKX) have really good performance and the entire WD Black range seem to be decently reliable. I have 4 of them in RAID 1+0 and see sequential speeds of around 330MB/s read and 320MB/s write.
Are some of you honestly implying that using some desktop SATA drives is a great idea for servers? Maybe, if the server is idling all the time, but then what's the purpose of heaving the dedicated server? If you do any average workload I wouldn't go into desktop drives at all. I would also never buy a desktop drive for my Customer.
There's no reliability reason to buy "enterprise" drives:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/
There are also performance considerations, but you'll always get a better bang for the buck with consumer grade.
My experience also shows that enterprise HDDs are almost as likely to fail as non-enterprise ones. The good thing about them is that they come with a longer warranty (5 years vs 2 years usually). But a failure is a failure and a warranty replacement doesn't save your data or compensate you for your lost time and stress.
Enterprise HDDs are 99% the same as consumer ones - They only have longer warranty and sometimes SAS instead of SATA.
There are also differences in the firmware, but the hardware in many cases is the same.