2.5" 10K SAS Disks

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I'm looking at possibly buying some of the above drives to use in a RAID 10 array. I can get a good deal on some older Seagate 10.3 Savvio disks at the moment, so was wondering if anyone could comment on noise/power usage for a desktop case?

Benchmarks look good, but anyone with real world experience?
 
What capacity are you thinking of? As you'd probably be better off with a single SSD than SAS drives and an expensive controller to hang them on.
 
What capacity are you thinking of? As you'd probably be better off with a single SSD than SAS drives and an expensive controller to hang them on.

4x 300GB Disks, so 600GB or 900GB capacity depending on if I go RAID10/RAID5.

The intention is to put Steam/Games and Media on the array, and preserve my 60GB SSD for OS/Programs that can really make use of the SSD speeds.

I already have a spare SAS controller to put them on, thankfully, so no additional cost there.
 
10K disks are generally "noiser" in the sense that the whine is higher pitch.

For me, I find them more annoying than a 7.2K disk but YMMV.
 
I suspect that a RAID10 setup of decent SAS enterprise drives would rock performance wise.
Depends on the controller really. RAID 10 on something like a Dell PERC H200 is a horrible experience. The controller needs proper battery backed cache.
 
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What are you trying to achieve with a RAID10?

Why not 2 x 256GB SSDs in RAID1?

Because i can get 4x 300GB SAS 10K 2.5" Drives for half the price of a single 256GB SSD atm.

Depends on the controller really. RAID 10 on something like a Dell PERC H200 is a horrible experience. The controller needs proper battery backed cache.

It would be a Dell PERC6/i with BBU.
 
In an enterprise server you would not hear the drives over the chassis fans.

They put out muchos heat though, a HP 2U Server for example has an entire bank of screaming fans behind the backplane/disk slots.

Hard to really say what the noise would be like in a home environment, I dare say the disks actually will not be that loud but I would give serious consideration to the cooling and where the hot air from them is exhausting.

I have had SAS disks attached (Not the particular ones you are looking at) and running outside of a server chassis and could not say noise was ever an issue.
 
Noise aint really a problem, even the 15k sas drives are reasonably quiet. Heat on the over hand is crazy!
My PC case has 4*120mm fans and 2*80mm fans + a 120mm in the PSU and even then it was kicking out a fair amount of heat.
That was with 2*15k drives and 2*10k drives.

Going from that to a ssd and single 2tb drive was a welcome change. And tbh the performance loss was fair outweighed by the cooler temp.
 
Thansk for the feedback guys. Feel like I'm getting somewhere now.

I've just checked a few benchmarks out on the drives, where disk surface temperature was also measured.

58degC for the Savvio 10K.3 vs. 42degC for your average 3.5" 7200RPM drive.

So will definitly have to take alook at some cooling measures, methinks.
 
Just a catch up here, finally got a bracket for my PERC card, and got it all installed last night.

The disks are very quiet, the usual noticeable clicking when there doing some intense stuff (Installing Games :) but tbh its no where near as bad as I imagined it could be.

Temperatures on the drives themselves fell good, all 4 drives are sat behind a pair of 120mm fans so there getting some direct airflow for cooling.

Will bench the set-up tonight, see how good it actually is :)
 
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