anyone have any experience with the WD RE4 1TB drives? yeh what abou tthem? they're like the wdc blacks with tler. longer warranties they're noisy err longer mbtf i think warranty time is the same http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/1tb-hdd-roundup-4_6.html their performance is very similar to the wdc black with slightly higher max iops mercutio: yeah the only problem with them really is that they're a bit expensive they were especially expensive just after the thailand flooding like more so than seagate that said for pure iops 15k sas disks are better if you don't need lots of disk space like the cheetah 15k.7 300gb disks aren't that bad newegg (don't nkow many other places in the US) have a price roughly 2x for 1tb re4 versus seagate sas 15k but like if you can take 8 hard-disks (say) and make do with 1.2tb of data you'll get better performance from the sas. by quite a lot and lots of cases don't take enough hard-disks to get iops up :( you need a sas controller of course, but lots of people doing raid on lots of hard-disks use sas controllers anyway yeah I need the space though 1.2 versus 1.6 million hours mtbf looks like and big disk SAS, way expensive oh you do yeh 300gb is the sweet spot for sas it really dependes if you need iops or space the other thing you can do is you can short stroke on sata disks 1.6M MTBF is a joke if you ask me. I've never had a drive go longer than 30K hours heh howmany years is 30k hours? a bit above 3 oh i've had disks go for longer than that but what i've found is with some old disks once one dies others start dying I've tried Seagate, Hitachi and WD. Maybe I'm doing something wrong ;) hmm well generally speaking people say you should have stable power and stable temperature but how hot doesn't really matter unless it's extreme just consistent but yeah disks fail sas disks fail too :) mm one gotcha now days is that lots of new disks do that 4k sector bullshit which would be advantage of re4 4k sector bs? yeh they emulate 512 byte sector by doing a read/write cycle leading to really bad performance on some setups you basically have to make sure all your offsets are 4k aligned you hadn't heard of it? no, i haven't interesting it's actually kind of annoying if you replace raid set disks with 4k sector size disks you could very well run into performance degredation the emulated ness makes it more likely some things support it better than others i think lvm has some stuff to do alignment etc fdisk on linux now doesn't use the 1st megabyte of the disk when you do a new partition table mercutio: lol, yeah i noticed that fdisk issue; through me for a loop at first... up_the_irons: it took me ages to figure out how to fix it you press c in fdisk yeah i think it's 1 megabyte for ssds/flask etc flash which may have larger block sizes mercutio: i try to use parted now was annoying at first, but after you learn it, much easier to script stuff (which I need to do a lot) well i normalyl just have partition straight on the underlying file system but i had a "legacy" virtual machine that had a partition table i resized the partition... then went to fdisk to delete and recreate and it's like GAH my problem with having a partition table is that you have to reboot to get the change whereas if you just change the underlying volume you can get by without rebooting and just do resize2fs although don't know if that works in kvm parted seemed to wnat to handle resizing itself.. i don't trust it :) hah well with things that could destroy data i tend to like to take the familiar approach :) i suppose once you know it's safe you don't fret as much yeah up_the_irons: haven't really been looking since it first came back up, but haven't noticed anything. web sites are working and haven't gotten any alerts. jlgaddis: roger that My own VMs on kvr04 are also operating fine i did a full offsite backup this (thursday) morning, i'm using ~4.2GB so it at least hit it disk pretty good for a few minutes while that ran nice up_the_irons: what I intended to say was that .. you used to stop the process entirely and start it anew, which caused a drop of connectivity, but now with HUP it reloads w/out a connection drop toddf: cool.. i don't even remember doing that :) but i suppose i did it is very clear in my mind because I don't have an expect like thing to signin again after it closes. so i had to manually notice and re-login. mercutio: scroll down to "SmartAlign" : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148840 mercutio: is that the 4k / 512 crap you were talking about? :) yip those disks are real fast for desktop use but shit for raid likve 170megabytes/sec fast i've got 1tb in my desktop and 3tb on my file server file server has openindiana which uses more space for small files on 4k sector size but does align properly i have like 2tb free so i'm not too concerned that said under windows it seeems terrible with multiple simultaneous copies which although "generally" sucks.. some disks/filesystems deal better with than others http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533 i think these are still safe i know the greens aren't safe http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop-Portable-Drives/Is-WD2002FAEX-an-Advanced-Format-drive-or-not/td-p/186430 this seems to say which drives are 4k but could be outdated, and it's only listing green have you used wdc blacks with your raid controller before? because some people have way more problems with the lack of TLER than others. and you can't disable it on wdc blacks now days err enable it mercutio: ah good info mercutio: supposedly the later 3ware 9650SE firmwares deal better with non-tler drives and i always load the latest firmware i may have a few blacks in my cluster non-tler hasn't really been a problem that i can tell well i'd go for a black then they have 5 year warranty i wouldn't go for a year long warranty disk but for a desktop i'd recommend that first disk you linked. the seagate well for a desktop for someone who has a ssd :) cos they're quieter than the blacks faster sequential (seagate has 1tb platter, i think wdc has 500gb) well yeh if you'refine with non-tler, you're fine you'd find out reasonably easily if you did have problems (i've never had problems) mercutio: the black's are not approved for raid though, afaik. so you can't rma them as easily. i definitely wouldn't go for a 1 year warranty disk, that is just sad no kidding seagate is just sad then go for re4? it costs more though we can rma blacks fien fwiw forward replacement which reminds me i have a black drive to rma :/ mercutio: a black that went bad? mercutio: so is the WD rma process decent? up_the_irons: it was for me about 4 months ago when i had a 640GB go bad the only thing that sucks is that they discontinued that model, and ended up giving me a 750GB blue I'm not really sure what they normally do when they have a current model which replaces it it's pretty disappointing that I only have one hdd manufacturer to rely on, and some of their newer drives aren't so great..... Webhostbudd_: sucks :( i mean, who do we have left? wd and seagate not trying to buy an enterprise drive from seagate with a 2 year warranty that's rediculous especially considering 90% of their drives get awful ratings and die all of the time granted, ratings on drives are mostly RMA's so it is hard to really say which is more reliable Webhostbudd_: we have tons of Hitachi's i also got burned by Seagate Seagate? how did seagate burn them? WD bought them...... i mean we've had lots of seagates fail oh oh our seagates have 5 year warranties though, i gotta get around to rma'ing some... but the replacements will have 2 day warranties if i know seagate well enough seagate probably learned after so many rma's, to drop their warranty down to 2 years ;) yes they did "we are looking to optimize our warranty policy" haha they made some pretty funny statements when they made that announcement up_the_irons: it's through your dealer normally i got burned by maxtor seagate and wd are basically the same webhost: the blues are actually pretty good maxtor,shiver although i can't complain all that much i have some maxtors still running today and impretty sure they are 14 years old i take that back, 16 heh i had a really old scsi/esdi disk which only worked if you left it on a while before using it if you left it on it was fine but if you turned it off and on again (it was in external enclosure it wouldn't work but if you left it on for 20 minutes then turned it off/on it'd work err if you turned it off and turned it on hours later that is it was also bloody huge and heavy and only 300 megabytes and only did like 700k/sec but it stayed in that weird state for ages and worked fine that disk must have been real ancient ESDI was popular in the mid-to-late 1980s, when SCSI and ATA technologies were young and immature, and ST-506 was neither fast nor flexible enough. ESDI could handle data rates of 10, 15, or 20 Mbit/s i don't think it went at 2mb/sec :) hmm toshiba have new disks i didn't know toshiba made desktop drives vps.. Y DNS NO WORK ON YOU ANYMORE?! mercutio: toshiba makes drives!? hahaha so apparently the toshibas are just hitatchis soon to be wd's it sucks that moving drive tech is pretty much dead, we need competition we need more nicks in here... invite your friends! :) i could log in again. I COULD SIGN UP FOR MORE VPSES TO IDLE FROM BUT WAIT YOU COULD INSTALL VIRTUALIZATION ON YOUR VPS sup dawg. I could invite my bots Heard you like virtualization. So we virtualized your virtual server, so you can idle while you idle. tooth: jdoe : LOL this new server i'm configuring (AMD setup, and man it smokes) supports nested virtualization. I'll be offering beta accounts soon. so you can offer a virtualized server to someone, who can in turn, virtualize themselves... Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! :) sounds neat. up_the_irons, I just submitted an upgrade request for my VPS. No hurry though. *wink* up_the_irons: Any eta on my upgrade?