Open Stack

Hi John,

It would be difficult to recommend a specific drive, because things
change so often.   New drives are being introduced all the time.
Manufacturers buy their competition and cancel their awesome products.
 So the short answer is that you really need to test the drives out in
your environment and in your use case.  I can pass on some wisdom from
our experience.

1.  "Enterprise" drives are not worth it.  We have not seen a
significant difference between the failure rate of enterprise class
drives and commodity drives.  I have heard this as well from other
large swift deployers, as well as other large storage providers.  Even
if enterprise drives had a significantly less failure rate, the added
cost would not be worth it.

2.  Be wary of "Green" drives.  The green features on these drives can
work against you in a swift cluster (like auto parking heads and
spinning down).  If you are going with a green drive, make sure they
are well tested, and/or at least have the capability to turn these
features off.

3.  Go big.  If you can, use 3T or larger drives.  You get a more even
distribution and better overall utilization with larger drives.

4.  Don't believe everything you read on the internet (including me
:))  Test! Test! Test!

--
Chuck

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 7:11 PM, John van Ommen <john.vanommen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone on the list have a disk they'd recommend for OpenStack swift?
>
> I am looking at hardware from Dell and HP, and I've found that the
> disks they offer are very expensive.  For instance, HP's 2TB disk has
> a MSRP of over $500, while you can get a Western Digital 2TB 'Red'
> disk for $127.
>
> Is there any reason to opt for the drives offered by Dell or HP?  (I
> assume they're re-branded disks from Seagate and WD anyways.)
>
> Are there any disk SKUs that you'd recommend?
>
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