Seagate Internal Hard Drive ST8000AS0002 8TB 128MB Cache

D

Dev Singhania

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Hi guys,

I am about to set up a data server for my business. My storage requirements are about 400TB. So I have finally decided to get 50 units of Seagate Internal Hard Drive ST8000AS0002 8TB 128MB Cache (50x8TB = 400TB). We are in small scale film making business and our data generation is about 30-40TB every month (approx. 1TB/day).

I was planning on import the Seagate drive from Newegg from US, but after reading this post: (Seagate International Warranty), I realise it wont be a good idea, because I most like will not get any warranty coverage in India. So I will have to source these drives from here. I live about 250~km from Delhi, does anyone know a reliable and genuine place in DL where I can source my drives from? I will be purchasing around 50 units at the beginning, and will continue to buy more as per my business' requirement.

I checked out the import price from global easy buy from ebay here: Seagate Internal Hard Drive ST8000AS0002 8TB 128MB Cache , and they are selling it at a decent price. Any ideas how much would it cost to buy it from India?

Thanks!
/d
 
read the extensive data reports released by backblaze.
contact your local reseller/retailer and ask them for bulk prices of the model you settle on.
do not buy online unless you buy from something like AmazonBusiness.in
 
I second that. Offline prices are cheaper now a days compared to online prices. Considering OP is ordering huge number of drives, he would get better discounts from offline retailers
 
dextermorgan said:
I second that. Offline prices are cheaper now a days compared to online prices. Considering OP is ordering huge number of drives, he would get better discounts from offline retailers
Click to expand...

yup, thats what i thought. any known good re-sellers in delhi for comp hardware? I am not from there, but i think i will get a better deal from delhi than from my local town...
 

You would need support. If you are running a business, you cannot rely on suppliers from Delhi for under-warranty replacements. Any possible discount you might get would be negated by shipment costs between the two cities. In any case, if you are generating 40TB of data every month that you do need to store... you would need a constant supplier of hard disks and replacements. 50 drives are unlikely to last you for long considering you would need to create RAID to have multiple copies of same data for reliability. I guess you would also need to create a small scale data center with 24x7 cooling and tech guys monitoring the servers...
 
It would also be a good idea to make sure all drives are not from the same batch (so that they are less likely to fail at the same time).

Also make sure that you can hotswap the drives on the servers that you buy. See this as an example of a rack server with hot swap drives on the front: File:HuaweiRH2288HV2.JPG - Wikimedia Commons . To replace a drive you can just pull the failed drive and push the good drive.

For extra money, server vendors such as HP, Dell and Lenovo will give you 1-day on-site replacement warranty on the drives. Nice to have if you have an unlimited budget. 🙂

How will you be connecting the 50 drives to the server? No motherboard has 50 SATA ports so you would need either RAID cards or HBAs or SATA port multipliers.
 
Thanks for the tip about them not being from the same batch, I will keep it in mind during my purchase 🙂

I have decided on a Rosewill server chassis with hot swap bays.

Having a server vendor would be great idea, but my budget won't allow that at this stage, maybe in the coming future when we are big enough!

I will be using LSI 9260-8i SAS SATA 8-port PCI-E 6Gb RAID Controller Card (there are 16 and 32 port versions as well, but I don't need those).

I won't be connecting all the drives to a single machine. They will be divided between four different machines, each serving a specialized purpose.
I will post a diagram for my setup soon to give a better visual idea!
 
vedantlath said:
How will you be connecting the 50 drives to the server? No motherboard has 50 SATA ports so you would need either RAID cards or HBAs or SATA port multipliers.
Click to expand...

Okay, so here is a rough diagram of what I am planning on building: http://i64.tinypic.com/2yo1vnl.jpg
It should give a better idea of what the mission plan is. You will notice I have only utilised 40 drives (out of 50), there is a reason for that.
Out of the remaining 10, 4 will contain the raw footage from the current project we are working on and stored at a different location (probably a safe in a bank), another four will be kept as standby drives in-case of a drive failure. And remaining two will most likely end up in the surveillance server.

In future I will also be adding a render farm for Adobe Premiere over the network with Dual INTEL XEON 18 CORE PROCESSOR E5-2699V3 2.3GHZ on a
Asus Z10PE-D16 WS motherboard, but thats a conversation for another day. 🙂
 
chromaniac said:
You would need support. If you are running a business, you cannot rely on suppliers from Delhi for under-warranty replacements. Any possible discount you might get would be negated by shipment costs between the two cities. In any case, if you are generating 40TB of data every month that you do need to store... you would need a constant supplier of hard disks and replacements. 50 drives are unlikely to last you for long considering you would need to create RAID to have multiple copies of same data for reliability. I guess you would also need to create a small scale data center with 24x7 cooling and tech guys monitoring the servers...
Click to expand...

Exactly for this reason, if you're buying it from a single dealer, he'll actually lend you new drives while your old corrupt drives are in RMA process. He'll even recommend you good tech support guys he knows. This is what usually happens in CTC hyderabad. A friend of mine had to buy 8-i7 core systems for his employer and we got a very good deal at CTC hyderabad.
 
10 GbE everywhere. Awesome.

Why are you using RAID 5 with high capacity drives? With large arrays, RAID 5 has a significant risk of failing to rebuild after replacing a bad drive.
 
vedantlath said:
Why are you using RAID 5 with high capacity drives? With large arrays, RAID 5 has a significant risk of failing to rebuild after replacing a bad drive.
Click to expand...

The mission Critical machine needs high speed read and write speed, I didn't wanna go with RAID 0 completely because of no redundancy at all, so I decided to mix it up with RAID 5 + RAID 0 (Nested). Because multiple editors will be hitting this machine, higher read and write is very important for a 4K (and sometimes 5K) video edit.

I understand the risk of using this setup, but that's why I have the low speed archive server (and four drives with a copy of the current project on it in the bank safe), so that I can use those to recover data in an event of a failure.

But is future, (if the budget allows), I will add a mirroring server to the Mission Critical machine on the network, which will sync itself to high speed (mission critical) server every hour (or half hr, if I can get away with it!). And that of course will require more drives. But that's for the future.
 
But I am open for suggestions for the config. My need requires at least 2GB/Sec Read and Write speed from the Mission Critical Server...
 
You should prefer RAID 6 with high capacity drives. The problem with RAID 5 is that when one disk fails, then you replace the disk, then the RAID controller rebuilds the array from other disks. While rebuilding the array, the chance that another disk will fail becomes very high (due to the increased workload and the long time it will take to rebuild the array), and if a disk fails while rebuilding the array, then the whole array is gone. See Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009 | ZDNet , Anton Kolomyeytsev » RAID 5 was great, until high-capacity HDDs came into play, but SSDs restored its former glory and Dell "RAID 50 is not recommended for arrays with 1 TB or larger disks".

As is usual in enterprise, Dell thinks it knows better than you and will not obey you if you want RAID 50 with 3 TB disks: "The Dell Group Manager GUI will not allow for any members with 3 TB or higher to be configured with RAID 50 (firmware 7.0.0 and higher)".
 
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