Recently I have been looking into the Samsung F series of desktop hard drives, Once I have move into my new place I am looking to build an unRAID server for my media and backup. If you haven’t heard of unRAID then have a peak at their site. unRAID is basically a network attached storage system with redundancy, where with normal RAID if you lose more than one drive or in the case of RAID6 2 drives then you lose the whole array, with unRAID you only loose that data on that drive, not the whole array! As the system uses a parity drive the write speeds are a little lower then RAID 5 or 6 but it’s perfect for what I want it for and that mainly reading data.
Anyway back to the HDD’s, I have been taking a look at the forums whilst looking into what hardware are required. I got a little stuck on drives so I made up the table below. I have chosen Samsung as I haven’t had any issues with them and there a good drive at a decent price. My first Samsung was an F1 back when they first came out and its still running fast and fine in an old external drive. I need new hard drives for when I build the new server as I won’t have enough space on enough drives to move everything over to the new file system. I first though, no problem, just get some new drives as there cheap enough but then I remembered that with me moving out I will have to pay my own electricity bills, the HP server which these are going into is pretty efficient thankfully. unRAID has a feature where it will spin down drives after a set time period of inactivity, this saves power aswell as drive life as I am only using standard desktop SATA drives. This saves on power but when the drives are being used how much power do they use? If you add it all up over a year that might be quite a bit and as I am looking at new drives I just got a little interested.
Below is an table, sorry I couldn’t fit the table in m current WP theme so it’s an image for now, click to enlarge. The table shows the model number, capacity, disc RPM, cache size, to disc and to buffer timings, average seek, average latency, spin up power drawn, seek power, read/write power, idle power, standby power and sleep power. I have only looked at 1 terabyte drives with 32MB on cache.
I have compiled this information from a Samsung brochure that you can view here. There seem to be a couple of differences, media to/from buffer ranges from 140mb /sec to 250mb /sec for instance.
There has been some talk on the forums comparing the RPM of the discs with access times and power i.e. for a disc running at 7200rpm is there an increase of performance over power requirements for the extra rpm? Well the answer is obviously yes or why would they make them, but by not as much as I thought. I will be comparing 2.5 and 3.5 HDD drives for both 5,7,and 10K RPM. I will be looking into this when I have another abit of free time.
