Purchasing Concerns, Future Proofing With 4KN Format Drives?

[julianboolean]

Hi All,

I am researching the purchase of 3 sets of hard drives, for three RAID arrays. I have a bad case of analysis paralysis and hope to get some assistance on this issue.

Question : Should I invest in 4KN drives now? I am wondering If 5 years down the road I will be kicking myself for investing big bucks in a dozen hard drives which are 512e or 512n. 4KN are usually a bit harder to find and almost universally more expensive.

As best I can tell, there is no real advantage to 4Kn on the user end (right now) it simply means that the new 4Kn format is more a economical method of presenting data blocks from a hard drive to a computer. About 7-11% more data on the same size of platter. To me, this seems to be a manfacturing issue. So I am not chasing capacity here, or the last drop of speed. I am just hesitant about investing when technology is always advancing and old tech eventually drops off the map.

Background : I am not building a Data Center. I run a Retouching & Animation Studio from a single workstation on a Mac Pro Tower (Mid 2010 MP 5.1, 6-Core Westmere). I am planning a 4x Raid10 array internal (Booting from a PCIe SSD) Then a 4x RAID5 for external BackUp. And another 4x RAID5 for Backup once per week and stored out of studio for theft, fire, flood, tornado insurance.

I have figured out how to tell the format from the digits, and these are the drives I have on my short list:

HGST He8
8TB 4Kn ... HUH7280xxALN60y
8TB 512e ... HUH7280xxALE60y
8TB 512n ... None

HGST UltraStar 7K6000 (2-4-5-6 TB)
6TB 4Kn ... HUS7260xxALN61y
6TB 512e ... HUS7260xxALE61y
6TBB 512 ... HUS7260xxALA61y

HGST Deskstar NAS (4-6 TB)
Cant figure these out by product number

Western Digital RE
6TB 4Kn ... WD6001FXYZ
6TB 512e ... WD6001FSYZ
6TB 512 ... None

5TB 4Kn ... WD5001FXYZ
5TB 512e ... WD5001FSYZ
5TB 512n ... None

4TB 4Kn ... None
4TB 512e ... None
4TB 512n ... WD4000FYYZ

3TB 4Kn ... None
3TB 512e ... None
3TB 512n ... WD3000FYYZ

Thanks!

Links:

Not taking advantage of 4Kn? You will be soon.
http://www.mbx.com/community-blog-posts/taking-advantage-4kn-will-soon/

Dell
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/19/shared-content~data-sheets/documents~512e_4kn_disk_formats_120413.pdf

Toshiba
http://storage.toshiba.com/corporateblog/post/2015/06/08/The-4Kn-Storage-Architecture-e28093-Think-about-it.aspx

Seagate
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/221411en?language=en_US

 

[RealBeast]

After several months of researching the issue over the summer, I decided that it is a non-issue for the foreseeable future and went with HGST He8 512e SE 8TB drives (0F23668) from Provantage at $441.1 each, although you have to watch the site for a while to get that price as it changes dramatically up and down (and is up right now). They are compatible with pretty much all hardware and are AF drives set to emulate 512 for compatibility. Their performance in the latest set that I used in November (5 drives in RAID 5 using an Adaptec 8805 controller) was excellent. I wrote about 13 TB of data at an average speed of 550-600 MB/s from an adjacent PCIe slot 8805 controller when copying from another array.

I've also done several other arrays with them this Fall (also using Adaptec 8805 controllers) with larger RAID 5 and RAID 6 setups and have had no issues and find them to be excellent drives. With those I also bought from Provantage at a price around $452 per drive.

 

[julianboolean]

After several months of researching the issue over the summer, I decided that it is a non-issue for the foreseeable future and went with HGST He8 512e SE 8TB drives (0F23668) from Provantage at $441.1 each, although you have to watch the site for a while to get that price as it changes dramatically up and down (and is up right now). They are compatible with pretty much all hardware and are AF drives set to emulate 512 for compatibility. Their performance in the latest set that I used in November (5 drives in RAID 5 using an Adaptec 8805 controller) was excellent. I wrote about 13 TB of data at an average speed of 550-600 MB/s from an adjacent PCIe slot 8805 controller when copying from another array.

I've also done several other arrays with them this Fall (also using Adaptec 8805 controllers) with larger RAID 5 and RAID 6 setups and have had no issues and find them to be excellent drives. With those I also bought from Provantage at a price around $452 per drive.

Thanks for your informative reply, much appreciated

1. I have decided to buy more HGST He8 8TB drives for my external back up RAID. I actually bought one of these a few weeks before this post and it's working well. I too have noticed the price fluctuations on the lowest price, purchased mine at $442.00.

2. Still undecided on my internal drives. I have it boiled down to two choices, but probably better to address the specific concerns there as a separate thread.

Thanks again!