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We're acquiring several 1U servers with (8) 2.5" drive slots. Although we can use either SATA or SAS, there is a large price variance as soon as you order 16 or 24 of these drives, so we are looking at the 2.5" SATA interfaced drives.

I know that Seagate and WD both make "Enterprise" 2.5" drives, which are fast (10k and 15k RPM), but are also fairly expensive.

What issues would we run into using 7200RPM 2.5" non-Enterprise drives? By the way, these will be hooked up to a RAID controller (though, they may just be configured as JBOD). These drives are almost $100 lower in price, per drive.

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    It's like the difference between putting golf cart tires on your car. Sure they'll work, but I wouldn't want to ride in it.
    – joeqwerty
    Aug 16, 2011 at 15:48
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    All western digital 2.5" Drives have the same MTBF as the 3.5". I have 60 WD Black 750GB 2.5" in one Server Chassis and they have been in there for more than 4 years. Only 2 have failed so far.
    – Kara Kim
    Apr 26, 2018 at 20:57
  • @joeqwerty more like try to run "Le Mans 24 hrs" competition in a golf cart, you might finish it but probably not :)
    – adrianTNT
    Jan 19, 2019 at 13:58

8 Answers 8

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In addition to the problems above, you may have additional issue running these drives in RAID configuration due to the lack of TLER. (If you are considering a model without.) This quote references desktops and the RAID Edition drives but I imagine the same to be true in the 2.5" line if you substitute in "notebook" and "enterprise" or "SAS" where applicable.

Western Digital manufactures desktop edition hard drives and RAID Edition hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically in either a desktop computer environment or a demanding enterprise environment.

If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly unless jointly qualified by an enterprise OEM. This is caused by the normal error recovery procedure that a desktop edition hard drive uses.

When an error is found on a desktop edition hard drive, the drive will enter into a deep recovery cycle to attempt to repair the error, recover the data from the problematic area, and then reallocate a dedicated area to replace the problematic area. This process can take up to 2 minutes depending on the severity of the issue. Most RAID controllers allow a very short amount of time for a hard drive to recover from an error. If a hard drive takes too long to complete this process, the drive will be dropped from the RAID array. Most RAID controllers allow from 7 to 15 seconds for error recovery before dropping a hard drive from an array. Western Digital does not recommend installing desktop edition hard drives in an enterprise environment (on a RAID controller).

Western Digital RAID edition hard drives have a feature called TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) which stops the hard drive from entering into a deep recovery cycle. The hard drive will only spend 7 seconds to attempt to recover. This means that the hard drive will not be dropped from a RAID array. Though TLER is designed for RAID environments, it is fully compatible and will not be detrimental when used in non-RAID environments.

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  • Very insightful ! Aug 16, 2011 at 16:21
  • That's the only quantitative data that shows a real difference between desktop and enterprise models (apart from warranty time and price) Aug 16, 2011 at 17:32
  • I wouldn't say that necessarily. There's a huge difference in performance that is easily measurable. Aug 16, 2011 at 18:06
  • My main concern was that it was a limited command set in the drives. Of course, if we're doing software RAID, I'm not sure how much that will matter.
    – Anthony
    Aug 16, 2011 at 18:49
  • You'd need to have a very specific application for the command set of drives to matter. As long as it does NCQ, SMART and DMA it's a drive good enough for me. You still have to put redundancy in the system, and remember that controllers do fail too (in most studies at least, if not more, as often as the drives themselves, adjusted for population size). Aug 16, 2011 at 20:43
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The biggest difference? Failure-rate.

Those 'enterprise' drives are warrantied for 5 years, whereas the cheaper ones are probably warrantied for less. Also look into the spec-sheets for them and look at their duty-cycles. The Enterprise drives are designed to run for 5 years straight, where the 'desktop' drives are designed to run 8 hours a day for 5 years. Very different use-cases and will impact your drive failure rates.


A second thing to look at is a line on those spec-sheets named "Nonrecoverable Read Error rate", which is a measure of the frequency of bits that are unable to be read inside the recovery window.

As of this posting (8/16/2011), the Seagate Savvio 10K.5, a 10K RPM Enterprise 2.5" drive, has its rate listed as 1x10^16. The Western Digital Scorpio Black, a 7.2K RPM consumer oriented 2.5" drive, has its rate listed as 1x10^14 bits. By this measure, the Savvio drive is two orders of magnitude more reliable.

This error rate puts an upper limit on how large of a RAID5 set you can build with such drives. When a drive fails in a RAID5 array, the array then has to read the entire RAID volume in order to rebuild the parity. If a non-recoverable read error occurs, you can lose the entire RAID set. Some RAID cards can get around this, others can't. They're not all built the same.

The above error-rate measures are approximate, but are the point where such errors are more likely to happen than not.

  • 10^14 bits = 12.5 TB
  • 10^16 bits = 1.25 PB

Only, you don't want to build arrays that large. The largest you want to build them is about 50% that size to minimize the likelihood of the rebuild failing. For those really cheap 1TB 2.5" drives, you can only fit 7 of those in a R5 array, where with the more expensive 10K RPM drives you could fit 15 of those 900GB drives in an array and feel safe in the knowledge that it'd rebuild just fine (but take a long time); your parity-losses are worse with the cheaper drives, which impacts your overall capacity.

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  • there were few studies that showed no difference in reliability between enterprise and user models. The Nonrecoverable Read Error rate is different but mostly depends on model, not enterprise/desktop. What is important is the amount of time a desktop drive and enterprise one will take to try read data from damaged sector. You don't want your RAID array stalled for 4 or 5 seconds while one of the drives tries to read data... Aug 16, 2011 at 17:30
  • @Hubert Kario, how about a link to these studies?
    – Zoredache
    Aug 16, 2011 at 18:42
  • Any links to any of this data? We've run three servers in RAID-10 (4 drives each), using software RAID, and consumer drives, for almost 4 years now - the only failure we've had is from Seagate drives. WD consumer drives have kept ticking away.
    – Anthony
    Aug 16, 2011 at 18:51
  • cs.cmu.edu/~bianca/fast07.pdf "Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?", it's in the bibliography of the Google disk study "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population" labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf , also a good read Aug 17, 2011 at 6:09
  • Every RAID card MFG recommends running at least weekly volume checks of your arrays. Some even recommend daily checks. Either way the volume check will find and correct any errors before you need to do a rebuild. So it's not like the drives have been running for 4 years with no maintenance like what you seem to be indicating. I have see arrays fail rebuild more than once, and most of the time it is because a tech did something stupid like unplug a drive, or bad cabling. When a rebuild takes 2+ days a lot of people have issues "letting it run" I do not recommend running R5 ever, use R6
    – Brian D.
    Apr 11, 2016 at 20:23
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Apparently everyone saying to use enterprise drives...just because...are mistaken.

There are several articles from companies that have actually done this vs just making stuff up.

In short: enterprise drive failure rate 4.6%, consumer drive failure rate 4.2%.

I really hate it when a well thought-out, passionate argument is destroyed by one tiny ugly little FACT.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/

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    If there was some significant amount of tested disks, it might be good answer. This article compares 368 enterprise drives to 14719 consumer drives, which has so large difference that it is not FACT, but just thought.
    – Jakuje
    Mar 6, 2016 at 18:05
  • Just because there is less data then what you want, doesn't make the data irrelevant. For instance the ST4000DM000 is looking pretty nice, especially since it is a desktop drive, and they have over 20k of them in use.
    – Brian D.
    Apr 11, 2016 at 20:15
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This is a really bad idea. There's a good reason laptop drives are so much cheaper than their server-grade cousins. Plain and simple - they are not built to be used 24x7. You will see incredibly high failure rates with these drives if used in a server capacity.

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  • 10k and 15k are different, thats for sure, the difference between 7.2k enterprise and desktop models is at best a different firmware. Aug 16, 2011 at 20:44
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I have (5) WD Black 2.5" SATA HDDs in raid-5 in a server. It's been running for about 3 years now without any issues. The difference between 15K rpm SAS drive and 7.2k rpm SATA drive isn't noticeable. Don't believe everything Joe and Jane say on the Internet. Just try it for yourself (but be sure to have a good backup plan just in case...)

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One thing to take into account regarding the failure rate on drives designed for RAID vs single drive systems is the vibration factor. Raid drives are designed to handle the additional vibration caused by a cage full of drives where as consumer class drives are not.

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It depends entirely on what you're trying to do with the server.

If it's a single node in a large failure resilient cluster (like hadoop or some such), that's fine.

If the drives are just for booting and swap, and all the real data is on a nice reliable SAN or enterprise NAS system, again, it should be just fine (but in that case you only need two or three drives, so why bother skimping?)

If you're just trying to be cheap because your budget is tight, make sure you have a hot spare (or three) in the raid array, and know that this could mean a frantic 2AM drive to work if two drives two fails at once.

The enterprise drives are preferable, and there for a reason, but if you're honest with yourself about the reasons you're not using them, and PLAN for the much more likely failure rate, go ahead.

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IOPS - how many do you need? Throughput - how much do you need?

If you're doing a refresh, and you're currently using ATA drives in your existing boxes, is your storage a constraining performance factor? If not, you could probably stick with the ATA drives, though as others point out, you may see a slightly higher failure rate.

If you're not sure about performance issues, look at perfmon if it's a Windows physical server, or whatever the equivalent would be for Linux. Virtual server products have their own utils to see disk performance. You can google for the metrics you'll want to investigate.

SAS has better IOPS & throughput, resulting from faster seeks & spindle speeds. Also, "enterprise" products will likely have better algorithms for dealing with cache (when to go ahead and write, when to accumulate writes before comitting, etc.).

But again, if storage performance isn't a factor, then don't spend money upgrading it. Or even it if is, you may get what you need by just using more slower cheap spindles than fewer faster, but more expensive spindles. Find out what your performance bottlenecks are, and spend money there.

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