Q and A Tangents 2 - Dell hard drives and storage

Q and A Tangents 2 - Dell hard drives and storage

Q: What hard drive can I put into a dell r510
A: Apparently 2gb is the maximum you can put into a dell server, not sure if that's with Perc 6i only or also with the H700.  Even then, there are certain harddrives that are preferred and others that won't even be recognized correctly.

Need to find a list of supported drives for r510 etc and why others might work, but not be recommended. Need to find a list of sata3 and sata6 capabilities too. TODO

My favorite reddit  r/homelab/ actually answered this, I copied their answer down below so I can find it faster in the future.  Blogger quotes screws up everything so the rest of this Answer is directly from r/homelab.  But for me and my Perc6/i it basically forces me to find some 2tb WD RE4's YYS which are slowly going out of production. Below doesn't mention what is available with the Perc 6'i though. TODO

Dell Perc6/i

Lots of Dell servers still have Perc6/i Raid cards in them.

These cards will not be able to use a drive over 2Tb and Dell have no plans of ever updating the firmware to support the larger drives we want to use.

If your server comes with a Perc6/i and you want to use larger drives then you will need to upgrade it to a newer card, the 2 most popular options if you want to stay with Dell are the H200 or the H700.

Now which out of the 2 you want will depend on your needs, -if you are going to be running FreenNAS or any such solution for your storage you will want to go with the H200 as this card supports JBOD mode which is what you will want to pass SMART data through to the OS, The H700 does not support this mode so will not be suitable for these types of storage solution. If you are interested in Hardware Raid from the card then both cards support this, the H700 is the better of the 2 cards as it supports both a BBWC and Raid Levels 0,1,5,6,10,50,60 Whereas the H200 does not support BBWC and will only do Raid levels 0,1,10.

If you are not using drives over 2Tb is possible to use the Perc6/i but be aware the card is only a 3Gb/s card where as the other 2 are both 6 Gb/s.

Q: What are the advantages and disadvantages of using (WD) Western Digital RE drives
A: Power Consumption and sound seem to be large problems for WD RE drives and interestingly enough the link below talks about Red Pro drives and how similar they are in power requirements and sound to the RE drives vs the normal REDs.  I've got dual 870w gold power supplies so power shouldn't be an issue, but I'm not looking to go broke paying to run a server either.  I can supply it, but do I want to.

The main problem for me is going to be sound volume.  I need some quiet drives

Found the jackpot...by looking where I'm supposed to look.



NOTE. The WD website is no longer selling Red Pro 2gig's chances are if you need them, now is the time to get them.

https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-800022.pdf

Specification Sheet (PDF) (WDxxxxFSYZ, WDxxxxFXYZ, WDxxxxFYYZ, WD2004FBYZ, WD1004FBYZ)

Specification Sheet (PDF) (WD1003FBYZ, WD5003ABYZ, WD2503ABYZ)

https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-800022.pdf

https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-800002.pdf

Not sure if you noticed, but Only red's can come in 2.5" the rest are pretty much all 3.5" and SAS is never mentioned.  If you're got an r710 SFF (small form factor?) you might need to source something else.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Understanding-the-WD-Rainbow-674/
-link talks about the differences between the colors, but goes into a little more detail than normal, does not seem to cover gold drives, which I believe are just RE's rebranding
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10541/western-digital-adds-helium-filled-wd-gold-10-tb-hdd-to-lineup
-talks about the New Gold Helium filled.  However the chart goes from 10g to 4gig, and I'm capped at 2gig in a dell r510 Perc6i*source is anadtech.com

*Edit. So upon looking at the model numbers of all the available drives above, you're probably wondering "None of these drives match the CHEAP ones I'm looking at ebay, what gives."  I noticed this myself and started hunting around. a very good post on tomshardware, while the links in the tomshardware article were outdated it put me on track to finding what I needed to. Western Digital Legacy Item Support  is the key to looking for information from them.  The majority of harddrives I was looking for, despite being listed as RE, are actually under RE4.


Q: Whats the difference between model numbers of NAS drives and RE drives with the same capacity for dells.
A: Still unknown about everything available for dells I know there's WD, Seagate, Fujitsu, Maxtor, etc??? but I found this interesting statement at r/homelab/ TODO

[–]dxm765ESXi | FreeNAS | HP 2 points 1 year ago 

i wouldnt trust all white label drives, such as the wd2003fyys vs wd2003fyps , i looked at alot of white label drives, and i stumbled across a almost similar hdd but the price was sooo much cheaper. Until i looked into it the FYPS drives are RE4-GP's which im just gonna call shitty, tons of failures within months or purchase, and they're slower then there FYYS. So i ended up with 14 2Tb FYYS, i am not sure if this is across the board with WD....but at least for the 2Tb RE's it seems to be

I have no idea what a White Label is...

I want to find his source for that information so I can compare things in the future

maybe seagate with their ES.1 ES.2 ES.3 drives might be the way to go.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/szmanuals/f939bee4cb5e79c3705ffbcfe703a4c7 . 
No decibel or power meter though

Q: What are some sound levels, vibration measures and some watt/power draws from harddrives

A: Thank you lord for silentpcreview. Not the most updated site like anandtech or maybe tom's hardware, but for niche well researched posts instead of just ad/news articles silentpc is tremendous

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article29-page2.html

wish they had some more updated stats.  need to check storagereview TODO

Q: What is a White label Harddrive

A: 

As hard as it seems, white label hard drives are actually drives that has failed in the past, and fixed somewhere outside the original place it was made in. For example, a that white label drive could be (and looks like) a Caviar Green that failed in the past, and fixed in my garage. What that means to you is that it is considerably cheaper, but also considerably less desirable because you do not know where it was fixed, or how accurate the rating is for the MTBF. At least you have the 1 year warranty, but I wouldn't be surprised if it failed on the second month of the year. - Brad hawthorne

http://forums.evga.com/What-is-a-quotWhite-Labelquot-Hard-drive-m958703.aspx

Q: How do I assess the health of my harddrive, run diagnostics, etc to know it's performing well.

A: I know theres some ability to read SMART data, however, everything that I've ever read doesn't make sense to me. I sorta know how to do this on a home system within an OS.  At home I use speedfan or speccy.  These utilities seem like their readers of information, rather than generators of information.  I'm looking for a testing utility instead of a reader.

*can't put pictures side by side blogger?

If you'll notice, you'll see a the fourth value, Reallocated Sector Count val=200, worst =200, Warn 140. Harddrive is OK.  to me that makes no sense. warning at 140 and the value is higher.  Still teh bottom bars are pretty good, I've seen them not as high on other systems, At 2/3 I had a seagate 1tb harddisk go bad after 2 or 3 years.  Pretty shitty, most of mine last around 7-10 and that's only because i get a new system.  This is probably going to make it intos it's own blog posting. TODO
~A continued: I hit f10 at startup and went into UEFI boot screen, this enabled me to enter a window with some choices and one of them was hardware diagnostics.  Writeup coming soon, as soon as I figure out how to get a few screenshots of the process.