Is Enterprize-class drive worth the price over consumer drive?

[symboint]

Enterprise vs Consumer hard drives? Is it worth it?

Hi -- I'm about to pull the trigger on a new NAS, and I'm trying to decide if the much higher cost of enterprise-class drives is worth it over the cost of consumer-grade drives?

For example, the Seagate 2TB ES ST32000644NS drive costs about $250, whereas the Seagate 2TB LP drive costs about $90. I understand the MTBF and performance differences, but in a RAID-6 or RAID-5 would that make any difference?

That's a big difference in price, though... which would allow me to buy a better NAS, and more drives. I could buy 8 LP drives versus 3 ES drives!

Any thoughts?

NOTE: The data usage would be for a very small business, where all data is critical. Everything would be backed up to an external device as well, of course.

Second NOTE: Apologies for the typo in the title -- I tried to edit the title, but no dice!

 

[BostonDan]

Enterprise Drives Not Worth It

I think it depends on your storage setup, but in my setup, I didn't believe they were worth the added cost. Currently, I have a Synology DS209 as my primary storage location and a Readynas-Duo as my backup. Everything on the Synology DS209 gets backed up nightly to the readynas. If drive fails in the Synology DS209, I still have a redundant drive, if both drives fail, I still have the ReadyNAS. I recently started keeping a spare drive on hand so that if a drive starts to show bad sectors or other signs of failure, I can replace it immediately and troubleshoot the suspect drive.
I think there can be a performance hit if a drive starts to fail with consumer drives, but there are many others on forum that are far more knowledgable than I on that topic.
Good Luck- Dan

 

[00Roush]

Also don't forget the longer warranty with the enterprise drives.

I would say yes the enterprise drives can make a difference in a RAID 5 or 6 setup due to the higher throughput and lower latency of the ES drives. (ie this is what they are made for) But unless you are planning on really needing the highest performance the difference is probably not worth it since you already plan on doing backups.

At the end of the day though it really depends on what you need. If you need a rock solid setup that needs to be up 24x7 and never goes down the enterprise drives are the best bet. This is why large companies buy these drives... it simply is cheaper than the cost of downtime. If you don't absolutely need that 100% up time and can stomach the possibility of downtime or even lost data the consumer grade drives are much more cost effective.

00Roush

 

[symboint]

Thank you, guys! Much appreciated. The application for this is for a very small business, and the server (and drives) will store EVERYTHING, and it's all important stuff... so ideally, I should probably choose enterprise-grade drives. Also, ideally, I should have two servers. So this is a tricky decision since budget is at play here as well. Either way, everything is backed up to external USB drives as well, so we have 3 copies of everything.

 

[BostonDan]

Check Out These Links

These links provide an interesting view:
http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/26/netapp-weighs-in-on-disks/

http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/

 

[symboint]

These links provide an interesting view:
http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/26/netapp-weighs-in-on-disks/

http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/

Thank you again, good reads! I had read the Google study a while back, but it was a good refresher and the response was new, with many things to think about. Basically, I'm now convinced more than ever that RAID-5 is inadequate for large consumer drives. The rebuild period is too risky. Of course, though, all that means we have to be very serious about server backup.

 

[claykin]

Seems that people don't pay attention to the difference in consumer vs enterprise Unrecoverable Read Error (URE) rates.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/da...d-related-unrecoverable-read-errors-ures/1752

 

[symboint]

Seems that people don't pay attention to the difference in consumer vs enterprise Unrecoverable Read Error (URE) rates.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/da...d-related-unrecoverable-read-errors-ures/1752

Some more great reads! Thank you!