Topic: installing SME server on 3TB or 4TB Hard Drive

[calisun]

My SME server is running out of space and I was looking into getting two 3TB or 4TB hard drives (raid) but I was reading on 4TB HD box in a store and it says that it should not be used as a primary drive (With OS) and that it should be used as data storage only.
My question is, does this statement apply to Windows only? Can two 3TB or 4TB HD's be used as raid for SME Server installation?

[kruhm]

Yes, it will work.

WD has color coding so the packaging might have been for a red hd, which run slower and is meant for storage.

You will get better performance out of, say, a black hd but you might not need it.

It all depends on what you are using it for and where it's being deployed.

[ReetP]

At this size of storage you probably should consider using a proper storage device and using RAID 6 or RAID 10 (or even 60)

6 x 1TB drive RAID 6 will give you 4TB of storage and you can lose two drives

You may even be better getting a pile of smaller ones to reduce the rebuild time with drive failures - the bigger the drives, the longer the rebuild time, the more stress on the drives, and the higher the chance of a good drive going bad.

So when one of your 4TB drives goes bang, how long will it take to sync to a new one, and what are the chances the original will then decide to throw its hand in as well ?

An alternative if you are running a mirror is to actually run 3 drives. So data is written to all 3 at the same time. If one goes bang you still have a mirror, and the rebuild will be a bit less stressy on the mirror.

I have read similar to the following comment for some time now:

"Since sequential write speeds of hard disks have not increased as fast as the capacity the time to recover from hard disk failure on RAID arrays has become huge. To avoid a large risk to data we need to stop using RAID and move to new data layouts that better protects us from failure of these large disks."

Couldn't agree more, though my guess is the answer from Marketing will be use 'The Cloud' !!!

B. Rgds
John

[GSE]

I am also running sme9.2 on 2x 6tb WD Golds in raid.
1st time it did not work after install, did not find a bootable device.
I changed bios options to HDD mode raid and not ahci - did not use motherboard raid, only setting.
Also changed from eufi to legacy.
Then installed sme again and both 6tb work without issue now.

[Daniel B.]

I strongly advise to use AHCI, not RAID. I guess it's the uefi -> bios change which made it worked