Which 12TB to Buy

[mike1961]

Hello Sage Users: I'm looking to upgrade my Sage Server and throw in a 12TB drive. I've always had good luck with western digital and I'm trying to decide between 7200 RPM Gold vs 5400 RPM Red. $344 for the Red on Amazon and $359 for the gold. I don't think SMR is an issue since from what I have read those only seem to be an issue with the WD drives from 2-6TB. Or...do you prefer a different brand and if so why? I have 5 tuners but rarely record that many shows at once.

Thanks,

[KryptoNyte]

Hey there, Mike. Folks were just having a similar conversation a few months ago. Check it out here;

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=66323

[mike1961]

Yes - I did read that but it didn't seem like everyone could agree on what drive is best and perhaps they are all good except SMR drives if you are doing a lot of simultaneous recordings and watching. I'm not sure if Seagate has improved their reliability over the years. In general though if I do go with Western Digital then I'm still trying to do decide between a gold and red 12TB drive unless I can find a larger one for not too much more money.

Thanks,

[NetworkGuy]

I use 3 1TB WD Blue drives for recording in my SageTV Server. I plan on upgrading this year, so will probably go to 2 or 4TB WD RED drives.

I like having the recordings (up to 5 at a time) spread across 3 drives.

About once a month, I move shows that I have not started watching to my 16TB Synology NAS. SageTV knows about the NAS video, music and photo directories.

My playback is probably evenly split between the SageTV and the NAS.

[mike1961]

Anyone have experience with Toshiba drives? Looks like they are CMR not SMR and I can get a 14TB for just over $300.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by mike1961

Anyone have experience with Toshiba drives? Looks like they are CMR not SMR and I can get a 14TB for just over $300.

I picked up a X300 12TB for backup. It's been working well for about 1 year in a external USB enclosure. Nice and fast and no issues so far.

Be careful when selecting the model number, as like WD, they make different firmware for different use cases.

[Malfunction]

Originally Posted by mike1961

Yes - I did read that but it didn't seem like everyone could agree on what drive is best and perhaps they are all good except SMR drives if you are doing a lot of simultaneous recordings and watching. I'm not sure if Seagate has improved their reliability over the years. In general though if I do go with Western Digital then I'm still trying to do decide between a gold and red 12TB drive unless I can find a larger one for not too much more money.

Thanks,

One of my drives is an 8TB red, works great. Actually, the only drawback I'm seeing with large drives is you get so many files that some of the UI functions get bogged down because of all the data.

[mike1961]

What kind of UI functions and how many files do you think start to slow down the UI? That's why I was wondering if partitions might help so as to not have so many files in one directory but I'm not sure if it's the number of files in one directory or it doesn't matter if there are several directories and it just has to do with the number of files.

[andre5006]

Ain't it amazing, I remember paying that much for a 20 MB Hard Drive!

[mike1961]

I remember the IBM DASDs that were around $50,000 per gigabyte back in the 80's and in the early 80's I think they stored around 360 MB and were the size of my washing machine.

[Malfunction]

Originally Posted by mike1961

What kind of UI functions and how many files do you think start to slow down the UI? That's why I was wondering if partitions might help so as to not have so many files in one directory but I'm not sure if it's the number of files in one directory or it doesn't matter if there are several directories and it just has to do with the number of files.

Scrolling through lists of recordings. If you're getting up past 15 TB you might notice this. I tried splitting a directory, didn't seem to help that much. I'm not entirely sure what causes this, but the effect is spinning cursors. I have 3 HDDs and 4 recording directories.

[mike1961]

I know for a fact that a LONG time ago (in prior versions) this would happen (spinning circles and delays) when there were too many recordings in Sage. I sent a support ticket (back in version 7) and they discovered that if I archived more videos and reduced the number of Current Recordings the problem went away. Since then I think the efficiency has been improved with the more recent versions over time but perhaps as hard drives continue to store more recordings and my family refuses to delete stuff as often as they could and the recordings continue to grow I sometimes still do see lags. I think it might help to Archive more stuff and not have too much in Current Recordings.

[tvmaster2]

reviving this question: does “archiving” programs help Sage’s access speed?
Thinking of grabbing a 14tb external, Easystore USB 3.0 drive for just this purpose, to clean out my internal, 4tb drives.

[wayner]

Here is the latest Backblaze data:


https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backb...s-for-q3-2021/

It's funny how different Seagate model numbers of the same drive have radically different failure rates.

[KeithAbbott]

I've refused to buy Seagate drives for many years now due to drive failures, now I guess I need to add Toshiba to that list. HGST for the win!

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by wayner

Here is the latest Backblaze data:


https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backb...s-for-q3-2021/

It's funny how different Seagate model numbers of the same drive have radically different failure rates.

I was actually more concerned with performance, frame rate, data throughput, multiple recording streams, that kind of thing.
I realize these larger drives are CMR and not SMR, so real-world usage is the focus. thanks

[jpwegas]

Just my own experience:

I've used external Seagate USB drives (with dedicated USB 3.0 PCIe cards on the computer) for storage for many years now. They fail eventually, but I keep smartd running to watch for early signs of failure and replace them ASAP.

Originally (years ago) I tried to optimize a bunch of drive related things for performance reasons but I stopped doing that as it didn't make a noticeable difference any more for me. I guess newer CPU/Motherboard (Sage host has been upgraded 3 times over the years) and USB 3.0 (originally drives were PATAs!) is fast enough.

Currently I have 5 drives with sizes between 5 TB and 14 TB for Sage use. The boot drive which also contains the Sage software runs on it's own SSD separate from the storage.

I've never noticed any performance issues. I've tested recording 8 programs and watching 3 at the same time (that was probably recording to 3 separate drives if I remember correctly) and never had any issues.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "archiving" - I just let Sage record to whichever drive it wants. Several of my drives are "full" so Sage doesn't record to them more, which I guess could be considered "archiving".

--John

[jhkoenig]

I am another fan of HGST and WD hard drives. If you have the ability, adding several smaller drives will give you much better performance than one big one. This lets you stream recordings to each drive in parallel, giving you great performance. I have 6 tuners and 6 storage drives, so performance is great, as Sage can automatically spread the shows across the drives. Cutting one drive into multiple partitions will actually harm performance, since there is only one read/write tower inside the drive and recording shows to multiple partitions will make the r/w tower dance madly across the drive to place sectors in each targeted partition.

In my experience, the spinning wheel of wait is caused by Java running out of free heap space. Once I upgraded to 64bit Sage and Java I was able to bump up the heap size to pretty much eliminate the spinning wheel.