I want to start using storj.
I need to buy a 2.5 inch hdd for my server.
For now, I want to buy 2Tb hard drives.
Given the problems with SMR, what do you recommend?
thanks!
2.5 inch, 2TB drives
I don’t see many inexpensive options… but maybe I’m not searching the appropriate vendors.
WD Red has a 1TB 2.5 inch drive: WD10JFCX
Yes… that’s i asked…
What do you say about ST2000LM015 ? I dont know about SMR … is they use on this device…
Thanks!
I want to start using storj.
I need to buy some 2.5 inch hdd for my server.
For now, I want to buy 2Tb hard drives.
Given the problems with SMR, what do you recommend?
thanks!
Why post your question twice? You already opened a new thread: Hdd drive recommended for start
Edit: Thanks Alexey for moving it back here.
2 Likes
@Rotty
there are minimal advantages aside from slightly less price on SMR drives.
i would recommend you go with a conventional HDD CMR and because it’s very latency demanding getting 7200 rpm should be preferred, some report that their SMR drives don’t feel much different from a CMR, while others (often owners of the older models) are quite angry for being mislead when buying them.
that point aside, even if we say they are at 80% write speed of what CMR drives are… then the price difference is rarely more than also 10-20%… so imo it’s not worth risking buying SMR drives at the moment, ofc that also very much depends on the workloads… but storagenodes are presently very demanding on the drive write ability.
if you where buying a hdd for storing personal data, then SMR would be fine great even because their price point is among the lowest possible on the price pr TB
Another thing that might be worthy of consideration is how much extra you need to spend to get a drive that is a notch above the usual consumer grade, which tho runs fine for 24/7 operations, but isn’t really designed with that in mind… and supposedly has a more limited lifespan.
and try to avoid seagate, their drives tend to be cheap… for good reason
but again some of their models in latter years seem to have been performing quite good, so who knows recommendation like that often shift faster than the wind…
so long story short…
avoid SMR avoid 5400 rpm and avoid seagate if possible… that would be on the top of my list when looking for new drives.
else i look for stuff like NCQ, which means the disk reads or writes in a smarter / faster way.
also keep in mind that there are consideration of 512, 512e and 4kn drives, but if you are only buying one it doesn’t matter much, however the 4k drive format will reduce overhead from 10% to 3% when formatting the drive… meaning the actual space you get isn’t 90% but 97%
or should be… haven’t really had much luck with getting that to work myself…
also depending on if you intend to utilize the drive in a raid, it is by far the best all the drives are the same model if possible and that they all run the same sector size… ie 512, 512e or 4kn
else you can run into all sort of issues… IO Amplification or Data amplification
it’s a damn science good luck lol
Why 2.5 inch? The 2.5 inch are generally also more fragile, weaker/slower (often 5400rpm). I’m not sure the energy benefit worth it (also its the only marketing argument to buy these craps). They are usually made for mobile storage, but if you want an old experience with a good WD 2.5 drive of a friend during the studies, his drive have been killed after only a few months, we were in class when it happens (of course, he moved the drive between the house and the school, but that’s supposed to be the way to go, and he was very careful with that). For 2.5 inch, I should recommend more SSDs (for cache) since there are reliables pro grades Terrabytes SSDs, but its still a lot more costly (like 10 times for the tb), so just use them for cache or just for yourself, and put 3.5 in another enclosure. If you’ve sata ports, you can buy longer sata cable to put them in separate rack with 3,5 formats.
I remind you Storj don’t recommand to invest in any hardware or hard drive for them, but use mostly the spare storage and hardware you already get for others projets or your own use.
But its only my two pences, I’ve ZERO trust in these 2.5" drives. They die easily, though, I don’t know if 2.5" enterprise-grade HD exist on the market. But I’ll never go back in public consumer-grade products when I can afford to take enterprise-grade, because it come with a longer garantee (usually 5 years against 2 or 3), way more reliable, like typically a MTBF of 2,5 millions versus 500 000 . Also, 2,5" HD drives are not made for 24/24 work.
Its maybe better to spare your money and wait to buy a real trustful enterprise-grade higher capacity grade, because, wathever you’re a S.N.O. or not, you’ll use that drive for yourself, and even you don’t need more space, you could just do a backup of your few data on this drive. At the price market of the hard drives, I think its a bad idea to continue to seek for “cheap” hard drives. They are cheaper because they are also a compromise of performance/reliability, and basically, you buy only for storage with a shorter lifetime (usually 2 to 5 times shorter).
Of course, its up to you, I won’t take that risk for my nodes and for my own data on it. It’s an interesting shorter-term option if the drive is like 5 to 10 times cheaper than the enterprise-grades by terrabyte (because of MTBF), when it comes in promotion (but it’s not the case I think). So you could buy 5 to 10 times more of these drives in the future if it dies earlier. But one drive, whatever the capacity, is still take one same slot in your server.
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@Rotty 3.5" are also cheaper pr TB
but i would suspect his server only have 2.5" bays… which is why i didn’t mention the 3.5"
i really like the buy a 2.5" ssd which then could be cache for a larger storage pool in the future… that might not be a bad way to start out actually… ofc ssd’s are considerable more costly… which i would assume on a 2tb purchase is a big factor… 
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Sure, its costly, but now, there are a few decent 512gb SSD’s who could be cheaper than 1 full x tb SSD drive to use for cache. I’ve now 5 years experience with the Samsung 850 Pro 256gb used 4 years for the system and also for a computing trading software writing a lot of data (years of history of trades and trading robots scripts). For 150tb written on the 256gb drive, the wear leveling count in SMART is estimated to 84% (on 100% when new). It’s quite amazing.
So, I really trust the Samsung Pro series, and you can use the Samsung Magician soft which can combine a built-in RAPID Mode for RAM cache (only available on SATA SSD models, since its almost useless for NVMe), and its very efficient (and it can eventually save I/O and preservate wearing). Also, its important to say I directly enableed the “Over Provisionning”, so it affect/lose 10% of capacity but increase the expectancy of the drive. So 512gb would be a bit tricky for running a node, but of course a nice cache SSD as you mentionned.
On the other side, I understand the users buying a bunch of drives in promotion. Of course, when its very cheap, the ROI could be reach very fast before the drive dies, and it could make a RAID also cheaper eventually (like with WD RED consumer-drives). And I know a lot of SNO joining Storj are taking that option. But, if you ask the question to keep your own data, I’ll never trust again these drives, except for making backups for myself… anyway, since Storj makes also multiples backups, it’s not a problem if these drives are less reliables.
which wouldn’t be big enough for a storagenode.
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Yes, especially with file system, over provisionning and databases. In that case, 1tb should be better, or use 512gb SSD for cache drive. Or… just don’t use 2,5" bays actually, haha. But yeah, at price market here, its 10 times more expensive than hard drives, so I don’t think I would use it for storagenode space directly. I was more suggesting to avoid buying 2,5" HD hard drives, also not made for a 24/24 intense work. Okay, I edited my message.
The specific drive mentioned has a rated transfer of less than 55TB per year.
My node has been running since Sept 2019 and has seen about 13 TB of bandwidth over the network. The drives themselves have exceeded 30 TB of transfer due to general drive operations. So, in my particular situation, the specific drive you mention would very likely exceed its rated specification within the first year.
The drive has a 2-year warranty, and one of the disqualifying conditions of the warranty is exceeding the rated transfer…
So, in good faith, I can not recommend purchasing the specific drive for the singular purpose of running a Storj node.
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Backblaze is pretty open about their hard drive failure rates. They list out the models, run times, etc.
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The Backblaze drives are almost entirely Enterprise drives… except for the 4TB 3.5 inch Seagates.