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

[Peter Corlett]

On Sun, Jun 06, 2021 at 12:32:41PM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> On 6/6/21 2:56 AM, Peter Corlett wrote:
[...]
>> 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.
> Useful data point, thanks. Though I confess to having never really been a
> fan of WD.

The products they got from their HGST aquisition are lovely, and the ones
they made themselves were okay but nothing special. Almost the opposite of
Seagate's acquisition of Maxtor where their own disks were fine and Maxtor's
were a curiously slow and power-hungry implementation of /dev/null. Maxtor's
own woes could perhaps be blamed on their acquisition of Miniscribe.

So we now have the (forme) WD and Maxtor lines for the consumer-grade disks,
and HGST and Seagate for the enterprise disks. If I'm going consumer-grade,
I'm not touching Maxtor, leaving the Hobson's choice of WD. Enterprise-wise,
I lean slightly towards HGST but am otherwise not to bothered.

[...]
> Ah yes, I've bought a bunch of HGST (and IBM) Ultrastors in the past. Very
> good drives. Most of the ones I've found are reconditioned. No. Just no. I
> did spot the WD DC HC310s though.

I did a price check on amazon.com and some of those reconditioned disks
would have been tempting were I in the USA. Being SAS, they'd have had
rather less chance of being thrashed and burned out by idiot coiners.

>> 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.
> That too is useful to know. Which category would you consider their
> Ironwolf Pro to fall into?

The Ironwolf Pro seems to directly map to the WD Red Pro; likewise the
regular Ironwolf is the WD Red Plus. Encouragingly, Seagate don't have a NAS
offering which maps to the unadorned WD Red, which is SMR.

I'd probably be okay with an Ironwolf if the price was right.

>> 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.
> Given that these are going into a Sun Thor, I don't know that that's an
> option.

I fancied one of those 48-drive Sun boxes at the time but the price was
outragous new, and none have turned up cheaply since. Today, I'd pass due to
the power consumption of its CPU. Online resources are unclear as to what
storage controller is actually in there, mainly due to there being several
generations and people not being clear about whether they have a Thumper,
Thor, or whatever.

AFAICT, at least some models have SAS support on at least some ports,
although there might also be a 2TiB drive size limitation due to the SAS
chipset. I'd look more closely at the "SATA" ports to see if they are
actually SFF-8482 connectors, and if so, pick up one of those cheap(ish)
used 4TB SAS disks for testing.