Hitachi

It’s been a year and a half since we moved into the new house, and I finally have the servers racked in the garage. Looks pretty nice compared to my old setups. My old setup was as follows: Two DELL OptiPlex 990 small form factor machines with Windows Server 2008 R2 as Hyper-V servers. One server ran the important 24/7 VM’s, the other was used for testing and test VM’s. The 24/7 VM’s included a W2K8R2 domain controller and a W2K12 file server. For storage I used a Synology DS2411+ NAS, with 12 x 3TB Hitachi Ultrastar drives, configured in RAID6, and served via iSCSI. The iSCSI drive was mounted in the Hyper-V host, and configured as a 30TB passthrough disk for the file server VM, that served files over SMB and NFS. These servers stood on a wooden storage rack in the garage, and at the new house they were temporarily housed under the desk in my office. ...

In my previous post I talked about Western Digital RE4-GP 2TB drive problems. In this post I present my test results for 2TB drives from Seagate and Hitachi. The test setup is the same as for the RE4-GP testing, except that I only tested 4 drives from each manufacturer. Unlike the enterprise class WD RE4-GP and Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 drives, the Seagate Barracuda LP drive is a desktop drive. The equivalent should have been a Seagate Constellation ES drive, but as far as I know the 2TB drives are not yet available. ...