Posts tagged hard disks

The SSD Swap

Don't Panik

A while back, my wife’s PC decided to throw up a couple of ATA errors. ATA errors are usually associated with disk issues so I took them very seriously. A series of disk checks reveal a couple of bad sectors. For me, a bad sector is a indicator to replace the disk ASAP. As this was the boot drive, my first priority is to update the backup image. I use Acronis TruImage to create backup images of my boot drives. Data drives are backed up to my NAS (1st level backup) which automatically replicates to my Storage Server that houses 6x2TB of disks.

After updating the image, and had chkdsk mark up the bad sectors, the problem went a away. Now this is a temporary solution as a bad sector usually indicates something is wrong or is going to go wrong on the disk. It usually never goes away. It’s like a tumor that even though you’ve beaten it into remission, it can always potentially rear its ugly head. Of course, if you cut the tumor out, it’s a different story. So, the analogy was to swap the drive.

I contemplated swapping with Seagate’s hybrid drive but decided to try out Corsair’s F60 SSD instead. It’s a Sandforce powered drive that’s been reviewed to be among the quickest at the time of writing. I went with 60Gb as it was an affordable size. SSDs are faster in larger sizes but any SSD will beat most mechanical disks anyway so…

The result, well, cold boot to usable desktop (i.e. I can launch Firefox or Photoshop) went down from about 119 seconds to about 31. This is Vista 64 by the way. Application launches went from 21 seconds down to 4 seconds for Photoshop CS4, Firefox takes about a second to pop out. Outlook took about 6 seconds (not too bad considering all the offline and email folders are on a mechanical disk).

Overall, definitely very, very snappy which is the main point about SSDs. It makes my other systems boot time feel like forever. Even shutdown times are under the five second mark.

Well, my next SSD upgrade will probably be a Sandforce 2 powered drive. I can’t wait!

Storage & Backup again

Photography 1 Comment

Seems like there’s a raft of people I know who recently lost some stuff due to disk crashes or are looking at ways to store that ever growing pile/stack/stash/gigabytes/terabytes/petabytes of data that people nowadays are generating. Even non-photographer friends I have are either busy downloading TV series or accumulating lots of media here and there such as e-books, songs, photos of their children, etc. Generally, media is usually the biggest culprit. I mean how large can a collection of excel spreadsheets or word documents be?

My approach is a two-tier storage system with my QNAP NAS playing primary on-line storage and a custom-built machine serving as the full storage backup. The following is a simple sketch of my network with my QNAP and my storage server. They’re connected to my Cisco switch using Link Aggregation (802.3ad) which offers both redundancy and faster transfer speeds. The little diagram on the right is how my content is stored between the server and the NAS. In a nutshell, my main storage server contains everything but the NAS has a little sub-set of the data.

Basically, my server stores everything in 1TB & 1.5TB disks, mirrored of course. I use rsync/robocopy to mirror as I’ve mentioned much earlier about using cheaper RAID cards. The mirrored pair is exposed on the network with one disk primarily for reading and the other for writing. What basically happens is that I back up to my NAS and my Storage Server (when it’s switched on – which is like at least a few times a week), pulls the backup from the NAS. When working on photos (especially for paid clients), I usually back-up simultaneously to both my QNAP and my Storage server. You can see below where I have my disks…

In case you are wondering (which you will), my disks are all short-stroked. My two swap disks are 150Gb 10,000rpm Raptor disks. Also, if you noticed, my storage server seems rather short of space… well, that’s because all the files are using NTFS junction points since I don’t have a RAID array… there’s actually 3 sets of mirrored disks. Total capacity is 1TBx 2 and 1.5TB x 4 / 2 due to the mirror. Usable capacity is about 3.4TB. Using junction points, 2001 and 2002 directories can reside on Pair A while 2003 and 2004 can be actually on Pair B. A bit complex but cost wise, all you need is a system with more than 4 SATA ports and you’re set. Recovery is also easier. Currently, the Samsung HD154UI 5,400rpm 1.5TB disks are good value but I’ll be moving away from them considering their slow-as-snail spin-up time and generally overall poor performance. I’m testing Hitachi’s affordable (runs a little hot though) 2TB, 5-platter, 7K2000 drive and see if it’ll give me back some performance lost to the Samsungs. Green drives may consume less power but the slow speed may result in high power consumption if we end up leaving more systems on just to complete back-ups and disks synchronization.

So far, I’ve been satisfied with my Seagate 7200.12 1TBs but looking for 1.5TB and 2TB drives are tough if you’re trying to avoid the green marketing crap.

NAS Purchasing Questions

Photography

Seems like after posting the NAS entries, I got a question from a friend trying to archive his photos as well as other data, i.e. media files, documents, backups, etc. So how do you decide which NAS to buy?

For everyone and anyone who asks me, I’ll always go with a dual-drive NAS. If you decide to go with a single drive NAS, you might as well go with USB disks like Seagate FreeAgents or WD Elements. So, basically you have to calculate how much storage you need. One area to start with is to see how much space you use in one year and how much that grows. My average storage needs (photos only) are about 600Gb/year. Chances are that won’t increase much unless I upgrade my cameras. I do budget a 10% increase. I do have other needs also so by the time I added everything in, it’s a large number.

Secondly, ask yourself f the NAS is your primary backup or not. If it is, it will need to be able to store all your backups. It’s good to take into account a 3-year plan so if you need 600Gb/year, then your NAS will be or must be able to grow to accomodate at least 2TB. This actually then dictates the size of your NAS. If it’s secondary storage (like in my case) where you have backups somewhere else (Hard drives, DVDs, BDs, etc) then the requirements are different. I wanted past 3-years of media (Photos & videos) on my NAS while my main backup stores everything. This required at least a capacity of 2.2TB at least which is why I went with a 4-drive unit. Most 2-drive NAS units max out at 2TB (2x2TB disks in mirrored/RAID1 config).

Finally, the next thing you need to consider is how fast you want to get the data off the NAS. I assume you’d be connecting at least via gigabit speeds. The specifications of the NAS play a part in the speed (excluding poor network speeds) aspect so normally I look at what CPU the NAS has along with the memory.

So what are my choices/recommendations?

Budget: DLink DNS-323
Cheaply priced (RM439/USD130), it’s the lowest cost 2-drive NAS I would buy myself.

I’ve only had experience with QNAP and Synology NAS units so that’s what I’ll stick with. You can go over to Smallnetbuilder and check their NAS reviews but not all are available locally in Malaysia. Here’s a handy performance chart for QNAP and Synology NASes.

Two-bay units:
Synology : DS210j or DS209
Qnap : TS-210 or TS-219

Two-bay units (higher performance):
Synology DS210+
Qnap TS-239 Pro II

Four-bay units:
Synology : DS410j
Qnap: TS-410 or TS-419P

Four-bay units (higher performance):
Synology : DS410
Qnap: TS-439 Pro II

note: this list above is from May 2010. If you need more space, you can consider the 5 and 6 bay models.

Disk Failure rate…

Don't Panik 1 Comment

After I mentioned on Facebook and Twitter about my recent Western Digital hard drive failure, someone asked me what are my other disk failures. So happens, I do keep records of my disk failures. So here goes, all the way from 2003.

2002 : Nov : Quantum Atlas 10k II QM318400TY-LW, 10,000rpm USCSI3. Some bad sectors, recovered from spare sectors.
2003 : June : Western Digital WD1200JB – 120GB PATA, 7200rpm. Disk crash after bad-sectors detected.
2004 : Oct : Western Digital WD2000BB – 200Gb PATA, 7200rpm, Bad-sectors, discontinued using
2005 : May : Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 (ST3160023AS) 160Gb SATA, Bad sectors, Warrantied, replacement retired.
2008 : May : Western Digital WD2500JD – 250GB SATA, 7200rpm. Bad sectors, retired
2008 : Aug : Western Digital WD5000AAKS – 500GB SATA, 7200rpm, Bad sectors. Replaced under warranty
2010: May : Western Digital WD5000AAKS – same drive above. Retired.

What drives do I have running on my desktops, server & NAS right now:

Hitachi Travelstar 5K100, 5400rpm, 100Gb, SATA (2.5″) – 1 drive
Seagate Barracude 7200.9, 7200rpm, 500Gb – 3 drives
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, 7200rpm, 1TB – 5 drives
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12, 7200rpm, 1TB – 2 drives
Seagate Momentus 5400.2, 100Gb, SATA (2.5″) – 1 drive
Samsung SpinPoint F3, 7200rpm, 1TB – 1 drive
Western Digital WD10EACS, 5400rpm, 1Tb – 1 drive
Western Digital WD5000AAKS , 7200rpm, 500Gb – 1 drive
Western Digital Raptor WD740, 10000rpm, 74Gb – 1 drive
Western Digital Raptor WD1500, 10000rpm, 150Gb – 1 drive

Guess what brand I’ll stick to for now?