I would go for a SSHD. These are fast platter drives with an area of solid state that speeds up frequently accessed information. Seagate does one, and I believe WD does as well.

But if you can afford it, a proper SSD + 2 TB platter drive would be even better.

Unless WD's policies have changed, their Black drives have 5-year warranties; something that's unprecedented as far as HDDs are concerned and a testament to their quality. :o

Another option is to buy a smaller SSD specifically for your operating system and often-used programs (something between 64 and 128 GB should be fine) and then get a smaller 1TB drive to go with it for handling everything else.

I guess what it comes down to as well though is why you need 2TB of space on a single drive. My 1TB drive only fills up because of the video editing I do, otherwise it would still be over half empty. :B

Zup wrote:

Normally, I'd buy a WD Caviar Blue, but... now they are Caviar Green disguised.

It seems that WD has phased out Caviar Green HDDs and renamed it to Caviar Blue. Although there are still some models that run at 7200 rpm (like the old Caviar Blue), newer models run at 5400 (like Caviar Green). Unfortunately, the only 2Tb model available runs at 5400 rpm.

Never noticed this, but I did have some suspicion after I checked for WD Blue 1TB drives and noticed there was a new 1TB Blue drive which had the 5400 RPM instead of the 7200 RPM it should have,

So I just checked again and it seems you are right?
When looking at the WD Blue WD10EZRZ and the WD Green WD10EZRX, there's very little difference?

I used to really like the Samsung Spinpoints before Seagate took over, then I tried a couple 1TB drives (a Hitachi, but right afterwards they left the harddrive business) and finally switched to the WD Blue WD10EZEX. This drive is already a couple years on the market but it's really fast for such an old drive and very silent (except for when it spins up, then it makes a louder sound, but only for a couple seconds and I can live with that). It was very cheap too and I bought another one some time later, friend of mine also bought 1 or 2 of the 1TB EZEX's.

But one can't be sure WD didn't change the internals of this model and the Blacks are very expensive indeed.

When I shop hdds, I give quality much higher consideration than performance. The Backblaze blogs have shown clear differences in overall quality between brands and models. Read the link for more info, but in very general terms, Hitachi are easily the most reliable, followed closely by WD, with Seagate a distant third. Granted, some particular models within each brand show some deviation from the trend (there are some very reliable Seagates, for example). Drive manufacturers have done an amazing job in caching and firmware algorithms with drive performance, to the point where 5400rpm drives perform very well, almost indistinguishable from 7200rpm drives. What I do is come up with a price point, then see what hits it from Hitachi, then Western Digital. I avoid Seagate unless it's a specific model that Backblaze has shown has a low failure rate.

This could be interesting: SSD vs SSHD vs HDD

I took a system image, restored it onto the other drives and measured how long it takes to complete a full restart. I did several restarts as the performance improves as you restart over and over.

Does anyone still use RAID 5?

Tetrium wrote:

So I just checked again and it seems you are right?
When looking at the WD Blue WD10EZRZ and the WD Green WD10EZRX, there's very little difference?

This page shows the name changes from green to blue, and the specifications page lists which drives are 7200 and which are 5400 rpm.

I guess the new "blue" (i.e.: intermediate performance drives) would be the Blue SSHD drives (What about those? WD SSHDs seems to decide which data will be on the SSD part by themselves, but I don't know if that data is duplicated from the HD part or it is stored only on the SSD.)

Errius wrote:

Does anyone still use RAID 5?

It's still used on servers, NAS and enterprise storages. I don't think "plain users" are interested on this stuff...

RAID 5 is generally used less these days as larger drives present an unacceptable amount of risk during rebuild. Loss of a drive during rebuild will fail the entire array.

RAID 1 is very wasteful.

Zup wrote:

(...) SSHD drives (What about those? WD SSHDs seems to decide which data will be on the SSD part by themselves, but I don't know if that data is duplicated from the HD part or it is stored only on the SSD.)

You just need to use the mechanical portion like a normal HDD and let the SSHD's firmware automatically assigns/copy most used files to the SSD portion.

Errius wrote:

RAID 1 is very wasteful.

Not quite. For 24/7 operations it is the baseline for data redundancy, being it is the most cost effective RAID when IOPS isn't a decisive factor. It does little sense for PCs, except if one assume a array as a backup (which it isn't).

My main concern about those SSHDs is the SSD part and its reliability. I've heard that some SSDs run hot and their controllers fails more often than the memory cells. That would not be a problem if:
- The controller failure does not affect to the HDD part.
- The SSD data is a copy of data stored in the HDD part (so a failure on the SSD part don't means data loss).

Now, the safe bet (for me) would be buying a SSD disk and using it as a cache (using bcache or the windows built-in cache) so I could remove it in case of failure.

RAID1 is wasteful when you don't mind losing your data. Note that RAID1 with a good controller (hardware RAID, caché) won't impact much (or actually improve) read speed, but write speed will be (almost always) slowed.

I know many customers that use RAID5 (again: good hardware RAID controller) and I've had only one case of (genuine) dual disk failure on a RAID5. In fact I've had three of those failures, but two of them were caused by a lazy operator that failed to buy a new HDD when the first failed (the second HDD failed after a week). I've not had any case of a second disk failing during a reconstruction.

Note that most advanced RAID controllers have more secure RAID modes (may be called RAID6, ADG or so) to allow the failure of two HDDs on a RAID set before the RAID set failing. Also, note that storage cabinets use things like "virtual RAID5" to give the operator a idea about how much space will be used but internally use more advanced ways to deal with disk failures. On some cabinets (3PAR) you may even take an entire disk shelf offline without data loss (and those shelves have up to 48 disks), but that's on professional data storage and when it's properly configured.

With a SSHD, the 8 GB of SSD are the cache.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

... if you can afford it, a proper SSD + 2 TB platter drive would be even better.

^ That's the sweet spot, best bang for the buck combination nowadays.

If budget allows, a combo of high performance SSD for OS and main programs (something like a Samsung 950 Pro M.2 NVME 256GB), plus cheaper high capacity SSDs for storage (like 1TB Crucial BX200), is a killer.

. . . . .

I have not much to do with SSD drives since the ones with 500GB - 1TB capacity still have sky high prices. I use small cheap SSDs (120GB) in low profile / less critical machines though (like my daughters PC and our HTPC).

When it comes to HDD, my biggest concern is reliability, and I almost always buy WD Black HDDs for my main rigs. And I'm also quite insistent on RAID 1 in my main rigs, for a decade now. The machine I use daily has three 1TB + 1TB RAID 1 arrays in it. I also regularly update my HDDs in every 4 years, or so, not because the added capacity requirement, but because I want them younger.

I've had a less than pleasant experience with a RAID-1 array this year, running on a desktop chipset controller. A client of me had its server down for two days because one of the disks on the RAID degraded without giving any advice and the second one failed completely. Good thing is the backup was up to date. That teached me on not trust solely on RAID, but keep monitoring disks via a 3rd party app anyway.

For my main rig I use a 256GB (used a 120GB) SSD for the OS and main apps, and a 2TB for files, larger installations, etc. Works pretty well and I fully use the SSD's capability.

tayyare wrote:

I have not much to do with SSD drives since the ones with 500GB - 1TB capacity still have sky high prices. I use small cheap SSDs (120GB) in low profile / less critical machines though (like my daughters PC and our HTPC).

I too am slow to adopt SSDs. I have an SSD in my work laptop and to be honest, I don't notice much difference between it and a fast spinning disk. Where it is most noticeable is during bootup and Windows Updates. But I hardly ever boot my laptop (once a month for Windows Update) so in my use case, I'd rather spend money on more RAM than an SSD. But that's just me.

When it comes to HDD, my biggest concern is reliability, and I almost always buy WD Black HDDs for my main rigs.

Yep, that was my biggest point in my first post in this thread. All the speed in the world doesn't mean anything if you can't trust your drive to not die unexpectedly, or at least develop bad sectors and force you into an uncomfortable "data migration before it's too late" mode.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

With a SSHD, the 8 GB of SSD are the cache.

So you are saying it's a plain old school drive with a different kind of RAM used for the buffer.
Sounds like SSHD is just marketing hype to me.
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Snayperskaya wrote:

I've had a less than pleasant experience with a RAID-1 array this year, running on a desktop chipset controller. A client of me had its server down for two days because one of the disks on the RAID degraded without giving any advice and the second one failed completely. Good thing is the backup was up to date. That teached me on not trust solely on RAID, but keep monitoring disks via a 3rd party app anyway.

I would more blame that on using a chipset based RAID than the mode of RAID.
I've tried several flavors of chipset based RAID and none gave me a warm fuzzy.

Chipset based solutions try to pull off RAID using very little silicon (space in IC chips).
There is no way it can be as robust as a solution that uses an add-in card which has far more silicon for the purpose.
Add-in cards also have their own monitoring utilities and some (maybe all now) include automated email notification of any problems.
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I've been using the RAID1 + BU plan since the 90's in everything except laptops and it's saved the day several times.
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I'm with tayyare & clueless1 on this.
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Speed is nice but FAR less important to me than reliability and storage volume.
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Currently I use WD Blacks or RE series on 3Ware, Adaptec or Promise RAID cards in RAID-1 in everything except temporary test setups and laptops.
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