Hello,
What drives do you use? I know red are for nas porpuse so the best, but can I use other types besides red or purple?
Purple is designed for video. Red designed for people who don’t know better.
Buy the cheapest used enterprise drives you can find off of eBay. Brands don’t matter. Avoid new disks. Aim at $9-$11/TB price point.
Don’t buy anything or otherwise bring online anything specifically for storj. Use space on already online array. Doing otherwise defeats the point.
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Toshiba MG09´s and Shucked WD Whitelabels from MyBooks. I look for used Drives (max 2 years old) trying to get them fo around 10€ per TB.
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Mostly shucked WD white label drives and some Exos. There have been some high capacity Barracuda drives for cheap but Seagate doesn’t want people using them in NAS applications.
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Seagate’s opinion on how the drives should be used is heavily irrelevant. If you find them cheaper than Exos – go for it.
The underlining tech is the same. Difference woudl be within ASPM/EPC tuning: barracuda will have more aggressive power savings hinting – you want to ensure that your drive won’t end up parking heads 5000 times a day. With storj workload this is generally not a concern – there is a low but constant stream of IO.
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I agree. The next time I get around to building a new server or upgrading my old drives I’ll probably be trying for those HAMR drives, or the dual actuator drives.
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I have bought WESTERN DIGITAL ULTRASTAR DC HC530 14TB data center drives which consume less power than standard drives (6 watts). I buy them on Ebay at a cost of around $10/TiB. I have not had to replace any since I started using them about 4 years ago.
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used or refurb drives that have a good capacity per dollar.
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I use Toshiba mg10 20TB drives.
Great price, low noise and 512MB onboard cache instead of 256MB that many competitors use.
Does it make a difference? Probably not, but I like the smug feeling, when I point it out.
EDIT: If you are to buy new (which you should not purely for StorJ), the mg11 series has 22 and 24TB sizes, but with a full gigabyte of onboard cache.
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Mainly refurb Seagate Exos X-series disks
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I use mainly refurbished or new Seagate Exos disks. SAS preferred but SATA fine too.
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80% WD/HGST model HUH or WUH
10% Toshiba MG
10% Seagate Exos
the 90% disks are SAS, the others are SATA
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I buy whatever is cheap.
I picked up around 10x 6TB Seagate used a few years ago for $10 each locally, and only 1 or 2 had some bad blocks on them. Sold 2 good one a few days ago for $45 each, they had around ~50000 hours when I sold them.
Around 2018, managed to get 12x 4TB HGST used SAS drive for $10 each locally as well, 2 had bad blocks during the warranty period, and I RMA it. Sold the replacement for around $40 or $50 locally as well.
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What about staying away from SMR drives? With a Storj node I do not see heavy traffic so I don’t see why an SMR drive would not work, however I’m new to Storj so asking seems prudent. I have a 5TB SMR drive that I could repurpose for my node and then just give the node 4TB and leave 1TB for housekeeping (trim).
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I always buy some of these:
Also SMR have been proven to not be usable for storj. See Hard disk access time, according to size - #5 by SGC as example.
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I am very happy with Toshiba too. They are cheap and my most reliable hard drives so far. I would buy them again if I need new ones. Most of my fleet es Toshiba and WD at the moment
(I use only the MG series of Toshiba)
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I mean, I just try to avoid SMR drives all the time, for all purposes. They are like normal hard drives but inferior. And it’s become less popular on the large capacity (20+TB) drives).
Now in you’re case you’re talking 5TB which means 2.5" drives so you either have a constrained chassis or are using an external drive. So… if constraints mean that’s all you can have… then fine.
Note that other SNO’s have had problems with SMR drives. They can bog down under heavy write activity and heavy delete activity. I recall some SNO’s would set a feature to limit the number of simultanous ingress requests.
You know, I have mostly SAS drives but that’s because they’ve always been cheaper on the used market. All things equal I’d actually prefer SATA drives (even with a SAS controller) because there isn’t a significant speed difference and the SATA drive is more flexible on where it’s plugged in or in future resale value.
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This sounds like a bad deal: the “cheap” shall include operating cost. For example, 5W drive will consume about $20/year at my local electric rates.
Means those 60TB over 5 years would cost $10*10+ $20*10*5 = $1100. If you bought instead 3 20TB disks, your operational cost over the same time would be only $300, leaving you $800 for disks. Provided you can buy $20TB disk for about $200 give or take, you are overpaying $200 by buying “cheap” disks. And this is before we discuss extra cooling requirements and noise.
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It’s the same thing though 
You can’t have it both ways 
The key is to buy a good backplane and stop worrying about interfaces. For home use SAS does not provide any benefits – only maybe indirectly that it’s harder to stumble on shitty by design sas disk, but this is a minor advantage.
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I don’t worry too much about interfaces. My 2 servers both have SAS hot swap backplanes and so if I can get good deal on a SAS drive in the size I need for a replacement or larger drive, then that is what I use. Otherwise I just use SATA.
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