SSD or HDD?

that

akira181 wrote: »

Hairs are being split over port speeds. Unless you're regularly transferring very large files, you're unlikely to notice any difference. The speed gains between them are barely noticeable in the real world.

If it's just for data storage, go for whatever gives you the most storage for your money. If it's for running programs and/or is your boot drive, then go SSD for the faster read speeds. That's where the noticeable speed differences are found.

For you the above could be the case, but some people copy large files. I often work with text files over 12GB a good few times a year, and only now you mention it I would say these are large files, but in the grand scheme of file transfer 12 GB is a drop of water in an ocean.

Maximum time I've spent copying files was 6 weeks (one continuous copy 24/7, no faults, or re-do). all small 2kB-12kB-ish files. For the same bulk size, it take s far long to copy loads small files than one large file.

I am also in the process of looking inti 3x14tb (might be 12T - depends on price) drive for my self to be use as a san at home, and the drive will be rust spinners. not old cost wise, but because the data lasts longer on the platters

arciere

that wrote: »

I am also in the process of looking inti 3x14tb (might be 12T - depends on price) drive for my self to be use as a san at home, and the drive will be rust spinners. not old cost wise, but because the data lasts longer on the platters

You'd better use a reliable RAID for 3x14TB drives in a san (which I don't think you can have with just 3 drives)

that

arciere wrote: »

You'd better use a reliable RAID for 3x14TB drives in a san (which I don't think you can have with just 3 drives)

Thanks, 3 drives minimum for raid 5, but I will go down the "Unraid - Lime Technologies" path. They use a parity disk, instead of striped parity. The positives are that the files are not striped, so can just be plugged in as normal drives if the raid set fails and the files can be just be copied off, and you can keep adding any mixture disk sizes providing it is smaller or equal to the parity disk

zfs is better, but offered no disk addition, the last time i looked at it.

arciere

that wrote: »

Thanks, 3 drives minimum for raid 5, but I will go down the "Unraid - Lime Technologies" path. They use a parity disk, instead of striped parity. The positives are that the files are not striped, so can just be plugged in as normal drives if the raid set fails and the files can be just be copied off, and you can keep adding any mixture disk sizes providing it is smaller or equal to the parity disk

zfs is better, but offered no disk addition, the last time i looked at it.

RAID5 is deprecated and should never be used with spinning disks (even more so with 14TB drives, it would be pretty much impossible to rebuild).
I am not familiar with Unraid, but it sounds like you still give up one disk for parity, and if that is the case, in order to rebuild a disk (any) you still need to fully read all remaining disks (=28TB), which is asking for trouble since the chances of a successful rebuild would be minimal.

With such an array, the best sensible RAID option would be RAID 10, even though it means you need to add a forth drive without any additional available space.

EDIT: if your infrastructure permits it, it would be much more sensible to add more, smaller disks rather than those huge 14TB ones. Even with RAID10, which is the best RAID option in your case, the chances of a rebuild failure would be quite high. You could pretty much double your chances of success with 8 6TB drives instead of 4 12TB drives.