Decent dBA 9/18/36 GB 10K SCSI disks?

jasonb885 · Post by **jasonb885** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 9:11 pm

My original 18GB SCA 10K U160 Seagate Cheetah finally died last night.

To address the forth coming questions, I have already considered a wide variety of options ranging from recycling an existing ATA disk, buying a new SATA disk and controller, migrating to my existing RAID 5 array, and so forth.

For the moment, I simply want to know if anyone has any information or first hand knowledge with drives in the 9GB to 36GB range that are SCSI SCA and not insanely loud. I intend to run two in a software RAID 1 configuration, which I should've done in the first place, as I would've survived last night's disk failure and probably had time to purchase a replacment.

I've been hunting around on Ebay, but there's little useful information in the vendor specs for the drives I'm seeing, which are mostly Seagate 10K Cheetahs, Dells (just rebranded Seagate), Compaq (rebranded what?), and HP (rebranded what?) drives.

While I'd love to get something brand new in SCSI that actually has FDB, for that price I might as well buy a SATA controller or a sturdy external disk box for my SCA disks instead and have money to save!

Thanks.

(The not necessarily relevant background: The system is a 370DLE mainboard based on ServerWorks IIILE chipset which only has slow ATA33 support on-board. I don't have two identical existing ATA disks to run in RAID 1 on it, as slow as it would be, anyway. I could run the OS on my RAID 5 data partition, but that would be far too slow and I don't have the free space to convert it to RAID 1+0 for decent OS performance. I could also buy an ATA100/133 expansive card, but, again, I have no spare ATA disks whereas I have an existing two drive SCA hotswap back with a U80 SCSI controller already, just waiting for two new disks.)

epiphane · Post by **epiphane** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 10:14 am

My Seagate 15K rpm (v2) isn't that noisy. I suspended it w/ Stretch magic & can't hear it at all (see the Gallery forum for pics). I think v 3 & 4 r even quieter.

Even before suspension, it was a lot quieter than my older 7.2K SCSI disks.

Cheers
peter

jasonb885 · Post by **jasonb885** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 11:33 am

epiphane wrote:My Seagate 15K rpm (v2) isn't that noisy. I suspended it w/ Stretch magic & can't hear it at all (see the Gallery forum for pics). I think v 3 & 4 r even quieter.

Even before suspension, it was a lot quieter than my older 7.2K SCSI disks.

Cheers
peter

Cool. I wish 15K weren't so expensive...

I think I might just find two FDB ATA disk, although they're going to be so huge for just an OS install, and set them up in RAID 1 on my spare 3Ware 6200. At least, eventually.

Right now I might just borrow a 9GB SCSI from another system to use as the OS drive and not buy any more SCSI SCA drives since there's no way to be sure they won't be insanely loud.

Nothing quite like the noise a SCSI disk makes when it enters the latter stage of its life. That's a sound you can hear though anything...

slugwy · Post by **slugwy** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 1:13 pm

I own a Fujitsu MAP3367NC (36GB, 10K, U320, SCA). Although I cannot make any direct comparisons with IDE/SATA drives, I am pleased with the noise level (especially compared with the awful 73LZX which the Fujitsu replaced).

I chose the Fujitsu primarily on the basis of noise comparisons at storagereview.com.

TomZ · Post by **TomZ** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 2:03 pm

jasonb885, what is the benefit to you of staying with SCSI?

I have been all too glad to pitch my old, expensive, noisy SCSI HDDs and replace them with SATA drives. SATA cabing is pretty nice, and SATA RAID is a piece of cake.

jasonb885 · Post by **jasonb885** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 6:08 pm

TomZ wrote:jasonb885, what is the benefit to you of staying with SCSI?

I have been all too glad to pitch my old, expensive, noisy SCSI HDDs and replace them with SATA drives. SATA cabing is pretty nice, and SATA RAID is a piece of cake.

A good question and one I have been increasingly pondering myself.

Mostly, it's a cost issue. Two used 18GB SCA drives shipped are cheaper than buying two new ATA or SATA disks, and especially so if you can't wait for one-off rebate deals at OfficeMax, OfficeDepot, Staples, Best Buy, Circuit City, et al and buy two piecemeal for RAID 1.

At this point, since older SCSI SCAs are fairly likely to be noisier than I'd like, I think I'm going to hop on a ~ $36 after MIR rebate deal for a 160GB ATA at CompUSA and pair that with my older Maxtor 120GB ATA in RAID 1.

It's nearly as cheap as buying two used SCA drives, but likely far quieter. I'm not entirely sure the mounting will be as convenient as using the existing SCA hotswap bay, but I can probably deal with the mounting issue.

Primarily I was looking for a drop in solution, which SCA would be, as I had everything configured to boot of SCA SCSI. Moving to 3Ware RAID 1 on ATA will be more work, but since the original disk is already crashed, it probably won't be too much more work. I will have to build a new kernel with the 3w-xxxx driver and such for my new root filesystem.

The SCA would've just been less of a hassle.

But I can run with one less disk if I move to ATA, since right now I'm already running 120GB Maxtor as a dump drive. If I pair that with another ATA, I will have a ton of extra space I can keep using for dump. If I go SCA, I'll end up with two SCA drives in RAID 1 _and_ a dump drive.

So, one less drive if I walk away from SCA. Plus, I can probably sell the SCA bay for $20 or $30 on Ebay and the SCSI Qlogic 1080 for another $20 or so.

So, yeah, I think it probably works out better in the end to move to ATA disks on 3Ware RAID 1 (already have an extra 6200 around). The only draw back is I lose 40GB of space if I go RAID 1 with 3Ware since the smallest disk is only 120GB whereas with SCA I'd have two identical, say, 18GB disks. I prefer to use identical disks. But then I could go Linux software RAID 1 and then I won't lose any space at all as I can use the 'lost' 40GB as a partition that isn't under software RAID control.

So, I think, moving ATA is actually a winner all around. I just wanted to minimize my upfront cost to resolve this and initially it seemed like retaining SCSI and getting two cheap SCA drives would accomplish that. However, it no longer seems that is the case.

So this thread can probably be disregarded.

(Meanwhile I have a NIC that failed in yet another machine -- parts fail in groups, I think.)