Posted by christefano on March 26, 2010 at 8:44am
Is anyone looking for 500GB SATA drives? I need to upgrade our office's RAID and am looking at getting Seagate Barracuda 500GB SATA drives in bulk on eBay. While it would come out to about $50 for each 500GB drive, we only need 4 out of the ten that are being auctioned. If this is something you're interested in, let me know privately or in the comments here and we can meet at one of the local Drupal meetups.
Alternatively, if anyone wants our old 400GB drives after we've upgraded the RAID, let me know.
Comments
Be Careful
I bought some Seagate drives on ebay a couple years ago. When these drives gave me a bit of trouble, I did some checking. I read multiple accounts that Seagate had multiple grades of the same drive. Depending on which account you read, these either had the same, or a nearly identical part number.
According to what I read, these lesser-quality drives make their way to Fry's and Ebay. I realize I am relating third-hand info, but it might be worth a Google before you buy them.I have found nearly identical prices on newegg and have always been happy with the drives.
My 2¢
Jerry
Thanks, Jerry. I think you're
Thanks, Jerry. I think you're right. Your 2¢ can end up saving a lot of money!
A few days I talked about this with a friend who colocates a few servers at a datacenter and he recommends the ST3500320NS. It's an an "enterprise" class drive whereas most Seagate drives on the market are cheaper consumer versions.
but I thought that was the
but I thought that was the whole point of RAID. making use of inexpensive disks.
--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
Inexpensive drives was in 1995
Inexpensive disks meant mainstream SCSI drives back in 1995 when RAID first became popular. You know, the kind with a 5 year no questions asked warranty and which almost never broke, and they cost hundreds or thousands each. It's much different now. If you look at any manufacturer's lineup, warranties range from 1 to 3 years, and it is not uncommon to get DOAs and/or drives which fail in the first few months. On the other hand, you can get a terabyte drive for just over $100.
In my day job in high performance computing I oversee about two dozen RAID units and none of them, not a single one, contains non-enterprise drives. Not just for reliability reasons, but also because consumer grade drives do not play well with the stringent timing requirements of RAID controllers. Anything else will cause you so much trouble and eat away your precious time, it's just not worth it.
Mind you, desktop and laptop systems and server farms can house the cheapest drives on the market, IF they are backed up (preferably to your RAID). When a drive breaks you simply replace it and restore. In my line of work we have hundreds of slave servers with the cheapest WD Caviar Blue drives inside, and we treat everything as disposable and can duplicate the setup in minutes.
As to the bulk purchase idea: That's really cool, but stick with reputable sources and top end drives.
--
Christoph Weber
Thanks!
Thanks Christoph! I was really hoping someone would explain a bit more why it mattered... thanks for the insights.
I've only put in one network RAID system for a large document imaging system, probably around 1995, and at the time was around a "whopping" 500GB and based on the storage and redundancy of seven drives and cost in the range of $10k. I haven't setup RAID since. I've been considering doing something similar to what Christefano is doing, but mostly for home office & media center backup / redundancy.
--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
ZFS then
There's only one geeky solution for DIY storage: OpenSolaris, ZFS and RaidZ. Read up and prepare to say wow.
--
Christoph Weber
I second that
ZFS indeed rocks. A guy I know at MediaTemple built a DIY raid system based on OpenSolaris and his whole point was to build something that consumed very little power. Not sure of the specifics but I know he used a machine with an atom processor and was very pleased with the results. And with RaidZ, no need for a raid card, which reduces costs.
Would be nice if ZFS was in Linux too. Licensing issues :(
The ST3500320NS drives I
The ST3500320NS drives I mentioned earlier are on their way. In case anyone's interested, there are still a few left on eBay. I'll also be looking for a home for the smaller drives I'm replacing.
donate the older drives to K4K (C4K)
"Computers 4 Kids" has a booth each year at SCALE and I am considering donating a lot of PC hardware to them.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us