5400rpm vs 7200rpm for server?

lumencreative · 26 Aug 2017 at 15:04

just looking to buy some new drives for our new server (which will be used for Sage and file sharing).

Is it worth going for the 7200 WD Gold's over something like the WD Red's? There's a reasonably discount to be had by going for the Reds but would it make much of a difference to the speed data is accessed over a Gb network?

Buffalo2102 · 26 Aug 2017 at 15:17

Caged · 26 Aug 2017 at 15:55

5400RPM for archive storage, SSD as cache. Outside of very specific use cases I just can't see the point of 'fast' hard drives any more.

GDL · 26 Aug 2017 at 17:00

Nope. 5400's can still chuck out more data then a single GB nic will take.

lumencreative · 26 Aug 2017 at 19:12

Thanks, will get the WD Red's in that case

i have some Dell Enterprise drives but 3 of them are 5 years old now so don't want to risk it.

Armageus · 26 Aug 2017 at 19:14

What sort of Server/Raid Controller is it? Some will either flag warnings or worst case do daft things like run fans at full speed if unsupported (i.e. non-dell or non-hp) drives are used.

lumencreative · 26 Aug 2017 at 22:01

Armageus said:
What sort of Server/Raid Controller is it? Some will either flag warnings or worst case do daft things like run fans at full speed if unsupported (i.e. non-dell or non-hp) drives are used.

It's a Dell Perc H310. Thought dell restricting the drivers was a think of the past.

Armageus · 26 Aug 2017 at 22:06

lumencreative said:
It's a Dell Perc H310. Thought dell restricting the drivers was a think of the past.

Not necessarily a case of them restricting things, but for example on our HP G7 servers and associated disk shelves, you can use unsupported drives fine (with a warning in the raid software), but the disk shelf then can't read the drive temperatures and decides to run fans at higher than normal speed.

CaptainCook · 4 Sep 2017 at 15:13

You have not mentioned how you intend to backup the Server, but if your using Disk to Tape, you'll feel a lot of pain with slower hard disks.

We use LTO6 drives which can write much faster than hard disks, even 7200rpm ones.

lumencreative · 6 Sep 2017 at 10:32

CaptainCook said:
You have not mentioned how you intend to backup the Server, but if your using Disk to Tape, you'll feel a lot of pain with slower hard disks.

We use LTO6 drives which can write much faster than hard disks, even 7200rpm ones.

We will be backing the server up to a Synology NAS overnight using Veeam B&R. This will then be synced with a cloud service to generate offsite backups.

We actually decided to buy some Dell Enterprise 2TB SATA drives (couldn't quite justify the cost of SAS drives), so currently have 2 x 2TB drives and holding off setting up the server until we can get 2 more drives.

nutcase · 6 Sep 2017 at 19:35

If it helps, I use 8x WD Red 6TB (5400RPM) drives in RAID 10 with our LTO6 drive and they max the tape out easily. LTO drives don't like to be kept waiting.