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Different size hdd's


CpN

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Hi

I'm new to this forum, but not to Stablebit Drivepool and Scanner.

My drivepool is made up by 5 hdd's.

4x3TB and 1x5TB.

I want to add a new hdd to the pool, but unsure what size would be best.

I'm considering:

6TB, 8TB, 10TB or 12TB.

What would you recommend?

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There's no issue with different sizes - &, within the context of your drives & what you're likely to be doing, there's no issue with sizes & using the capacity.

Yeah, the only time that there would be an issue is if the number of times you're duplicating wouldn't work... ...so, imagining someone were looking at duplicating the entire pool, for example -

- with 2x duplication &, say a 1TB & 8TB drive, they could only actually duplicate 1TB

- & with 3x duplication &, say a 1TB, 4TB & 8TB drive, they could still only actually duplicate 1TB

...however, unless you're after >=6x duplication (which is highly unlikely), there's no problem whatsoever.

 

If you are using duplication & your current drives are pretty full already, after adding the new drive then I would suggest pushing the "Duplication Space Optimiser" to the top & forcing a rebalance run just before going to bed... As this then should prevent there being any issues moving forward.

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On ‎3‎/‎18‎/‎2019 at 12:38 AM, Mermalion said:

8tb seems to be the best price/gb. I'd get a WD easy store and take the drive out. Only $140 for 8tb is pretty good.

That's assuming the OP's in the US, as certainly in the UK then the 10TB WD Elements drives have typically been cheaper per TB than the 8TB for a while now.

(& the EasyStore's are effectively not available)

So, whilst not the best price they've been as the price of the 10TBs is pretty volatile; well I picked up another 2 on the 5th of March for £174.10 each &, at the time, they were within a couple of pounds of the 8TB…

...atm Amazon have the 8TB for £174.99 (£21.87 per TB) & the 10TB for £194.78 (£19.48 per TB).

 

Obviously the downside to what we're suggesting though is voiding the warranty by shucking them...

…& certainly the latest 2 drives I bought needed the pin 3 mod to work with the backplane in my server case; & so had to buy some Kapton tape... …& whilst only needing a tiny bit for each, it was all of £1.54 delivered for 33 metres of the stupid stuff.

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Thank you guys for answering.

Sorry for not being clear about my question.

The reason for asking about different size hdd's, is if it is advisable to use hdd's with significant size difference of the already installed hdd's. Is the extra terabytes of an 8TB hdd usable for DrivePool when the other hdd's is 3TB x4 and 5tb x1?

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9 minutes ago, PocketDemon said:

There's no issue with different sizes - &, within the context of your drives & what you're likely to be doing, there's no issue with sizes & using the capacity.

Yeah, the only time that there would be an issue is if the number of times you're duplicating wouldn't work... ...so, imagining someone were looking at duplicating the entire pool, for example -

- with 2x duplication &, say a 1TB & 8TB drive, they could only actually duplicate 1TB

- & with 3x duplication &, say a 1TB, 4TB & 8TB drive, they could still only actually duplicate 1TB

...however, unless you're after >=6x duplication (which is highly unlikely), there's no problem whatsoever.

 

If you are using duplication & your current drives are pretty full already, after adding the new drive then I would suggest pushing the "Duplication Space Optimiser" to the top & forcing a rebalance run just before going to bed... As this then should prevent there being any issues moving forward.

Thank you for the explanation. How do I force a rebalance?

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On 3/13/2019 at 12:31 PM, CpN said:

6TB, 8TB, 10TB or 12TB.

What would you recommend?

As others have mentioned, this is a complicated question.

 

But basically, the best bet is to check the pricing in your area. Check the Price per GB/TB, and grab whichever is the best value. 

Also, keep an eye out for the warranty.  And you may want to look at NAS or enterprise storage. It comes at a price, but it's probably a better choice, long term. 

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9 minutes ago, Christopher (Drashna) said:

As others have mentioned, this is a complicated question.

 

But basically, the best bet is to check the pricing in your area. Check the Price per GB/TB, and grab whichever is the best value. 

Also, keep an eye out for the warranty.  And you may want to look at NAS or enterprise storage. It comes at a price, but it's probably a better choice, long term. 

Along with balancing personal budget, price/TB & warranty (if that matters to you) & whatnot...

...it's also about how many HDDs you can physically connect up vs how your data's growing - since many people get by with just a small SSD in a laptop - whilst others (like myself) are 'data-whores' have many 10s or 100s of TBs of random stuff.

 

As to looking at NAS storage, part of the reason why people look at shucking the higher capacity WD external drives is that they all use WD/HGSC helium 5400rpm filled drives - which are effectively equivalent to the WD Reds...

(some of the smaller capacity ones switched to using WD Greens/Blues - I believe only <=4TB but I don't know that for certain)

...though they 'may' alternatively be some version of a WD Gold or HTSC HC500 or...???

...all of which are designed for NAS - but buying the external drives is cheaper.

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7 minutes ago, PocketDemon said:

As to looking at NAS storage, part of the reason why people look at shucking the higher capacity WD external drives is that they all use WD/HGSC helium 5400rpm filled drives - which are effectively equivalent to the WD Reds...

Minus any sort of warranty. :)

 

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1 minute ago, Christopher (Drashna) said:

Minus any sort of warranty. :)

 

Oh, certainly... Which is why I'd written on the 22nd of March in the thread that -

"Obviously the downside to what we're suggesting though is voiding the warranty by shucking them..."

So, it was about agreeing with you that going for NAS/Enterprise drives is a good thing; esp as you start to increase the drive count - BUT that this didn't contradict what had been suggested earlier about shucking the WD externals IF purchase price trumped warranty.

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Just to piggy back off of this question; I currently have 6 drives:

  • 3x 3TB
  • 3x 8TB

For a total of 33TB raw in a BTRFS RAID 1 pool which gives me about 15.7TB usable space.

For reasons I won't get into, I'm likely going to be moving to a Windows platform for the server and I was wondering if a DrivePool with "entire pool duplication" enabled would be functionally similar to what I'm accomplishing with BTRFS right now? I'm not using any of BTRFS' advanced features (snapshots etc) so I'm not worried about that.

 

Thanks.

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