[OPLINTECH] storage advice sought

Fri Oct 19 15:49:30 EDT 2012

If you have enough room in the server for an internal drive, that would be the best way to go in my opinion instead of an external drive. I know Seagate offers drives with different warranties. They do have some with 5 year warranties, be sure to read the length of the warranty before you buy it. Western Digital has their "Black" series of hard drives. I believe those also have 5 year warranties on them. In general I have seen hard drives with 1, 2, 3, and 5 year warranties on them, I haven't run across a sata drive with a longer than 5 year warranty on it. I generally think of a hard drive warranty as how long the manufacturer expects the drive should last. If the drive fails within the warranty period it has been my experience that the manufacturer will choose to replace it with a refurbished hard drive. This in my opinion isn't as good as buying a new drive to replace a failed drive that is covered under warranty if its being used in a mission critical machine. 

I am not sure if there would be any benefit for this application to look into a solid state drive or a nas type storage solution that would allow you to map a network drive this server as well as other devices. I know the NAS suggestion is not on the topic of a hard drive, but it does go along with the lack of storage space part of it.

King Win and other companies makes several different drive bay racks if you need to be able to easily remove a drive or swap them out. I recently picked one up for home use made by king win that allows me to easily put in a bare 3.5" sata drive and a 2.5" sata drive. http://kingwin.com/products/cate/mobile/sata_mobileracks.asp 
If you were leaning towards an external drive for ease of connecting and disconnecting it, you could achieve the same kind of convenience with a device like that which would also connect it to the machines internal SATA port. The SATA connection would also be a faster connection than a USB 2.0 connection. If your server has USB 3.0 ports and/or esata ports on it then depending on the version of internal SATA ports on the server, it may not be much of a speed difference for internal vs. external.  I should also note that I haven't personally used one of these racks in a piece of server hardware. I have only used them in PC hardware.        

Google did a study a few years ago about hard drive failure rates, Its an interesting read to try to help answer how long a hard drive will last.  
http://research.google.com/pubs/pub32774.html

I would also lean towards an internal drive because it would be less likely to get bumped or experience a drop or a fall if you have to move stuff around where the server is located, maybe plugging, unplugging a data line, installing a new piece of equipment, etc while it is in use. 

If you have to go with an external drive you could also purchase an internal drive with a better warranty and an enclosure to put the drive in to use it as an external drive. There are some of these that can also accommodate more than one hard drive and have some raid functionality built into them. I have one I am using at home that takes 2 - 3.5" drives and is set up to mirror the drives. It has USB 2.0 and ESATA connections on it. Being something that holds 2 drives, its bigger, heavier and not as likely to get accidentally knocked over. It also has a fan in it to help keep the drives cooler. Most of the single drive enclosures do not have fans in them.   

I hope this helps! 

-Ed Liddle

Marysville Public Lilbrary
http://marysvillelib.org
________________________________________
From: oplintech-bounces at lists.oplin.org [oplintech-bounces at lists.oplin.org] On Behalf Of Chad Neeper [cneeper at level9networks.com]
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2012 1:30 PM
To: oplintech at oplin.org
Subject: Re: [OPLINTECH] storage advice sought

Interesting thought. I think I'd have to toss in a NO vote, though, for several reasons.

For starters, you're considering adding an external USB storage device being used as primary storage to a server. In no particular order:
- The chance of accidentally disabling the external USB device is much higher...failing wall-wart power supply, accidentally disconnecting USB cable or power cable...
- Most USB hard drives are probably consumer-class drives...with consumer class life expectancies.
- Both of the above increase risk of failure to your WSUS server. How well will the server handle it or recover if its storage device suddenly disappears?
- The tangible cost of the external hard drive will be more than the same hard drive as an internal model (not that I'd recommend the same consumer-level hard drive you'd get in the external drive!)

If you DO go with an external drive, I'd suggest checking the warranty. Anecdotally over the years, I've seen a strong correlation between failure rates and warranty periods when it comes to hard drives. One and three year warranties are consumer-level with higher failure rates. 5 year or better are server-class with much lower failure rates.

If it were me, I'd find a 7200RPM SATA drive with a five-year (or better) warranty and throw it in the server. Shouldn't cost much more than a comparably sized external drive and eliminates a lot of the potential issues.

2 cents,
Chad
______________________________
Chad Neeper
Senior Systems Engineer

Level 9 Networks
740-548-8070<tel:740-548-8070> (voice)
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Full LAN/WAN consulting services -- Specialized in libraries and schools

On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 9:15 AM, R Young <roger.young at oplin.org<mailto:roger.young at oplin.org>> wrote:

My WSUS server is running low on disk space, and I was thinking of using an
external USB hard drive as an alternative to adding internal hard drives.
Any advice?  Good idea?  Bad idea?  Anyone recommend any particular
product/manufacturer?

thanks

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