Best Hard Drives for Recordings?

[Brent]

Hi guys,
I thought I'd throw this out to the crowd to get some feedback on what you think is the best hard drive for a recordings drive. I currently use a slowish 2TB Green Drive with a second slowish 1TB drive. I'm thinking of upgrading one or both of these in terms of access speed as opposed to size and want your input.

Do I need a faster drive because of the many times the recording drives are accessed for comskip, recording from 6 tuners, viewing from 3 extenders, etc etc? Or is my "green drive" fast enough?

Note: I have my movies, music & photos on these slower drives and doubt that is a problem since they are used sparingly as opposed to the frequent disk access the recording drives get.

[Lucas]

Brent,

can you clarify what you mean by "slowish".

I have a few Seagate LP, WD Green and a Samsung EcoGreen drive. I believe they are almost if not as fast as other 7200rpm drives since I consistently get 90-110 MB/s transfer rates. To me I see no difference in speed and I haven't had any issues in recording up to 4 streams to a drive.

I was running 2year old 500Gb drives for recordings and these were noticably slower.
I first switched to a 7200 1.5 TB drive which was OK but also tried the 1.5LP drives and couldn't notice any difference.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by Lucas

Brent,

can you clarify what you mean by "slowish".

Here's the specific drive purchased from NewEgg - it's a WD Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s

I'm just wondering if there's any reason to go with something like the 7200 6Gb/s for instance.

[Skirge01]

A better question is probably: What makes you think you need a faster drive?

If you aren't seeing any spinning circles, sluggish UI, stuttering, freezing, or bad recordings, and comskip is able to keep up with a live show, then it sounds like the green drives are just fine. For me, I have found instances where my green drives have slowed things down (comskip, movie rips, FlexRAID, RDP, spinning circles, sluggish UI), so I'm moving away from them.

[stanger89]

The two 1TB WD Caviar Blacks I recently added have been working great. I went for the fastest drives I could find (within reason) because DVR drives hit rather intense use. Theoretically up to 4 recordings, plus (for me) 2+ clients reading, plus up to 3-4 comskip/SAs running.

If nothing else SA is way faster now.

[Brent]

Is there a good way to determine if the drives are taking a hit - something measurable and reportable I could use for comparison in an article for instance

[Fuzzy]

Might look into the WD AV-GP drives. Lots of the power saving features of the Green drives, with a bit more reliability (designed for higher temp, full-time environments - like DVR's).

[ccsmoke]

I also am a big fan of the wd black series, have 3 1tb and 6 640 in various rigs and are as fast as the first 10,000 rpm raptors and the durablity is far superior. I am a little hesitate going over the 1tb mark for hard drives as their fail rates seem to be quite a bit higher than I like. Larger HDDs nowadays come with fewer platters with greater areal density, which is great for file transfer speeds but is slower in terms of seek-times. I'm sure the bigger drives will only get better over time, if it was me however, I would make sure it has a 5 yr warranty.
As far as green vs black series the only thing that would concern me is the how fast the green drives spin back up. I think the green series would work fine, however.

[Brent]

Great input so far guys. So assuming we went with a 2TB (I know, more than I need), here's the lineup:

• Western Digital Caviar Black WD2001FASS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s $280
  
• Western Digital AV-GP WD20EVDS 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s $177 with shipping
• Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EADS 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s $150
  

I own the third one - several of them and I think those are perfectly fine for movies & music and even a "normal" HTPC recordings drive. But despite the higher cost I'm leaning towards the thought that the AV-GP or possibly even the Caviar Black would be good for my heavy-use HTPC recording drives... Hmm.

Oh, and if anyone has other suggestions throw them out there. Doesn't have to be 2TB as I'm guessing others will be interested in this thread also.

[ccsmoke]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136533

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136544

http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/

http://www.hdtune.com/

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by Brent

Is there a good way to determine if the drives are taking a hit - something measurable and reportable I could use for comparison in an article for instance

I used Process Explorer to figure this out. Well, that and the WHS Disk Management add-in, since that shows the KB/s and it was very obvious when FlexRAID was maxing out every single drive.

I also have some of the AV-GP drives and, at the time, they were more expensive than the regular green drives. I don't see a higher failure rate on either model, currently, since... well, let's not jinx it, right? I don't see a reason to pay more for any model of green drive and, even at the same cost, will always opt for the higher speed, higher density, fewer platters (max of 2) models for all future drive purchases, due to reliability (fewer platters=less moving parts), less noise (if built right), and less heat.

That said, I don't see any issues with my day-to-day usage of the green drives as recording drives, other than the sporadic-but-by-no-means intrusive delays I mentioned earlier. Spinning circles are no more than a second every once in a while and the UI generally quite speedy. Keep in mind that the UI is on a 7200rpm OS drive, but the fanart is on the slower drives, so that's what (I believe) causes the slight sluggishness in the UI (primarily TVE).

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Might look into the WD AV-GP drives. Lots of the power saving features of the Green drives, with a bit more reliability (designed for higher temp, full-time environments - like DVR's).

Those caught my eye for my as yet theoretical server rebuild. But I'm not sure I'd want to run them for recording drives, I think I'd rather have the greater performance of the Blacks.

Originally Posted by Brent

Great input so far guys. So assuming we went with a 2TB (I know, more than I need), here's the lineup:

• Western Digital Caviar Black WD2001FASS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s $280
  
• Western Digital AV-GP WD20EVDS 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s $177 with shipping
• Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EADS 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s $150
  

Personally, I'd probably go two 1TB drives over a single 2TB drives. Sage sorta keeps writes separated (if you leave Sage alone to manage space) and you've got more headroom if that happens (twice the raw throughput plus lighter load per drive).

ShowAnalyer can pull upwards of 70MB/sec off one of my Blacks and I've never seen any hickup in Sage from that. I ran a couple old Seagates (IIRC, 250 and 300GB) previously with horrid performance and I'm pretty sure some of my hickups in recordings and usage were due to them hitting a wall with a recording or two + SA going.

[Fuzzy]

Using Win7, you can get a goot indication of the drives load by watching the Queue length in Perfmon. Anything greater than one means something is waiting on that drive. As for Green vs AV-GP vs Black, I really don't think even a VERY active sage server would ever neccesitate the blacks. I know my system with aging Seagate Barracuda7200.10 drives still performs JUST fine, and the queue hovers at 1 ish.

[paulbeers]

Alrighty, .02 worth (which has already been stated):

1. WD Black Drives are pretty much the fastest "standard" drives available. What I mean is they obviously aren't SSD's and they aren't (Veloci)Raptors.
2. I always recommend multiple smaller drives as opposed to big drives as it should "spread out" the reads/writes across the drives. Remember, it is the non-sequential read/writes that kill a drive's throughput (so multiple writes/reads at the same time on a drive).
3. If you follow #2, then technically there isn't a need to use WD Black drives as 3 Green (5400ish rpm drives) would be faster than 2 WD Black Drives. I would never recommend 1 drive for all recording needs (unless you are doing SD only or only reading/writing a few items at any time).

Just my thoughts. I should also point out I am using 2 - 640GB WD Blue drives and they are more than capable of handling 4+ HD reads and writes (probably more but it is rare that I am doing more than that at any time).

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

3. If you follow #2, then technically there isn't a need to use WD Black drives as 3 Green (5400ish rpm drives) would be faster than 2 WD Black Drives. I would never recommend 1 drive for all recording needs (unless you are doing SD only or only reading/writing a few items at any time).

Just my thoughts. I should also point out I am using 2 - 640GB WD Blue drives and they are more than capable of handling 4+ HD reads and writes (probably more but it is rare that I am doing more than that at any time).

I agree. The only time I've notice the "slowness" of the green drives, was when I was when I was backing a massive (300GB?) of smaller files. I was coping from a slow drive to a slow drive, and that took a while. If it would have been a faster drive at the receiving end, I think that would have saved a bunch of time.

I currently have 2x 1TB and 1x 1.5TB on each of my recording systems, but even when I had only 1 of the 1TB drives, I could record 4 HD feeds and play back 1 HD and 1 SD feed with ease.

[rrhorer]

Originally Posted by Brent

Is there a good way to determine if the drives are taking a hit - something measurable and reportable I could use for comparison in an article for instance

For my $.02, I believe Sage does a pretty good job of optimizing the use of the drives you assign for recording. I assign two 640 WDs for the task and find that they are each filled with new recordings in a balanced proportion. To my thinking (which is anything but expert), it seems that it is more important to have more drives from which to choose rather than a faster drive for the same purpose. It also seems that this will automatically help the heavy-duty wear problem that occurs with AV needs.

[blade]

My Sage server has the following setup as recording drives:

2 - WD10EADS Green Drives
2 - ST3500 (500 GB 7200 rpm Seagate Drives)
1 - ST3400 (400 GB 7200 rpm Seagate Drive)

At times I capture 4 HD and 2 SD shows, process all 6 in real time using comskip, and play back a HD show at the same time. I can't say for certain that all of the activity has ever fallen on a single disk, but I know for certain I've had 4 HD captures, processed all 4 in real time with comskip, and streamed a HD show from one of my green drives without issue.

I agree that comskip and SA should complete detection quicker on a faster drive if you wait until the recording is complete before starting the processing.

I run comskip on the recordings as they are being captured. I have dirmon2 scan my recording directories every 10 minutes for new recordings. I use comskip and the play nice setting so that the most time consuming 1 hr recordings are completed in 45 minutes. This ensures that if I start watching a show that is still recording comskip is running just fast enough to catch up with the live capture without using any unnecessary resources. I don't have to use the play nice setting, but it prevents comskip from hitting the drives hard to complete the processing of the 1st 10 minutes of the show in a few seconds when it's going to take another 50 minutes to complete the processing anyway.

The last time I checked comskip's accuracy wasn't affected by running it on recordings still in progress because it runs a quick check once the processing is complete. I may be mistaken, but at the time I looked into this I think SA's accuracy took a hit when processing live recordings because it didn't perform a similar check though I may be mistaken or this may have changed since I last checked (it's been a long time).

I know the whole comskip and play nice settings are a little off topic. Just wanted to point out that you can prevent the drive from being slammed by comskip and still have the processing complete within a few seconds of the completion of the capture without sacrificing accuracy.

[JetreL]

There were a lot of other post and I didn't read all of them so please forgive me if this is a bit redundant.

If you feel that your drives are slower or a possible bottleneck, I think your best bet is to have more drives instead of faster drives. SageTV does an acceptably good job with storage management and Reading / Writing to multiple single drives typically is more efficient that using a single super duper fast drive. The biggest down fall I can see is the heat generation but most super fast drives have a higher fail rate and generate a good deal of heat by themselves. I've even seen 10k or 15k RPM drives when they start to fail vibrate so violently that the adjacent drives in a storage shelf start error. Not that you would ever want to use drives like that in a sage server. (its a bit of overkill)

I am more personally more interested in storage sizes of the drives more that the speed. I am willing to wager I would probably do fine with 5400 RPM. I use only green drives in my system and it seems to hop along just fine. Hope this helps!

[valnar]

I have a single Western Digital 1TB 7200rpm Black drive for actual recordings. I can't imagine needing more than that. If I do, I'm getting way behind on watching shows! I used to use a "green" 5400rpm drive and had some hiccups - not with recording per se, but when I tried to do other things at the same time with that drive. I didn't want my Sage Server to be so touchy, so I bought the WD Black and it fixed it. I think the recommendation of a WD Black is going to be a solid one.

The rest of my static media is on whatever drives I have handy, with a nod towards newer green 2TB drives as I need them.