[rescue] Baby needs new sh... oh, wait.

[Peter Corlett]

On Sat, Jun 05, 2021 at 11:47:18PM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> I'll start over.

> I think it's time for me to migrate my primary ZFS pool onto larger disks.
> It's almost full (in fact it WAS full and I had to migrate some storage
> off it). I wish I could spare the dosh to go 100% solid-state on it, but I
> can't. It looks like the smart price point right now is to go from 1TB to
> 4TB drives.

The smart price point was buying them a month ago. Then prices and lead
times pretty much doubled overnight. This was at the same time that the Chia
storage-based cryptocurrency all kicked off. Correlation isn't causation,
but Chia does seem to be at least partly responsible for pushing an
already-stressed supply chain over the edge.

I've just migrated my data to an array of 8TB disks. The cheapest way to get
these was to buy an external and "shuck" it for the bare drive inside. The
street price was around b,150, rose to b,220-300 (depending on lead time) and
is currently around b,180. However, I'd usually sit tight and wait for a
promotion so I've actually paid about b,125 for my disks, a price which I
don't imagine I'll see again for some while.

Curiously, SSD prices dropped about 20%. The price gap between the two had
thus narrowed substantially and while 8TB SSDs are still not yet cheap
enough to pique my interest, it's obvious where things are going and I'm
sure it pushed some people into building all-flash arrays.

Anyway, if you can, try and hold off for a month or two while it all settles
back down, although it's going to be a while longer before there are any
real bargains.

> So. Does anyone have 4TB drives that they particularly like right now?
> Particularly dislike? It goes without saying that Western Digital need not
> apply since practically all WD drives are SMR now.

To a rough approximation, consumer-grade drives are now all SMR. Any chap
non-SMR drive you might encounter is an enterprise drive which they made too
many of and have repackaged for the consumer market.

WD Red is SMR, but Red Plus and Red Pro are non-SMR. Sadly, boxshifters tend
to call them all just "Red" so it's not always easy to figure out what
they're selling. At the moment, WD's 8TB disks are all non-SMR: my shucking
nets me a mix of WD80EDAZ (air-filled; probably a rebadged Red Pro) and
WD80EZAZ (helium-filled; probably a rebadged He8).

The 4TB Red Plus is currently $104.49 direct from WD's online store. If I
was building a ZFS array today from 4TB disks and in the USA, it'd be a
no-brainer to them up on that offer.

My previous array was made of 4TB HGST Deskstar NAS disks which I was
getting for around b,125 each in 2017. These were basically enterprise disks,
as when WD bought HGST, they doubled the price of this model and rebranded
it as, IIRC, Ultrastar DC HC310. Lovely disks, excellent performance, but
loud and power-thirsty. That's enterprise disks for you.

I really don't like Seagate's consumer drives and give them a wide berth.
Their SMR implementation is particularly horrible: the drive firmware goes
out of its way to fake being non-SMR and the one I tested ignored TRIM and
ZBC/ZAC commands which would help mitigate the shoddy performance. However,
their enterprise disks are presumably alright or they wouldn't stay in
business. I've still got some of their 9GB enterprise SCSI disks rattling
about.

If stock of SATA disks remains tight, you could always investigate SAS
disks. SAS controllers based on the older SAS2008 chipset are pretty cheap
these days (I paid b,90, which is comparable to an 8-port SATA controller),
and you can mix-and-match SAS and SATA disks on them.