Great Alternative to Replace 15K SAS Drives [UPDATED]
One of the most expensive things to replace on servers these days are the 2.5" 15K SAS drives. Having many HP ProLiant servers at my place of employment, getting these drives from HP is a pricy thing for the average small business. Thanks to some clever work by my company's System Administrator, we found a great alternative if you don't care to or do not have warranty coverage for your servers.
It seems to me that the most expensive thing to replace in servers today is the spinning disks. My company has many HP ProLiant servers including the 360, 380 and 580 series servers. The modern generations of these servers, the G6, G7 and Gen8, all utilize the 2.5" 15,000 rpm SAS drives from either Seagate or Hitatchi. When looking at the 146GB sizing of these drives, I typically see pricing from $168 up to $252 per drive for HP name brand drives. Yes, these drives come with HP's warranty but in some cases, that is useless. An example is my company in healthcare. If the drive had ePHI (electronic Patient Health Information), I have to wipe or destroy the drive. If the drive was bad and I can't wipe it, then I have to destroy it. HP will not certify destruction so I have to do it myself thus buying a new drive anyways.
Are you utilizing your warranties or are other business needs blocking you from using them? What do you think of having stores of spare parts instead of buying warranty programs from vendors? Put your thoughts below in the comments section.
UPDATE: I just noted that the price from Yobitech was $120 per drive. The lower $96 per drive cost is from another vendor. The drives themselves are solid and worth every penny. I am ordering from the new vendor and will update on how the customer service is.
Easy Caddy for SSD Drives, Part 2
I wrote in an earlier article about a 2.5" drive caddy that holds two 2.5" drives in a 3.5" drive bay. I purchased 3 of them to install in systems at my home. I finally got the first installed into my Mediacenter PC and I am in love! If you have smaller form factor drives in a system with 3.5" bays, you got to get yourself one of these.
In several of my systems, I have moved from the internal hard disk drives to SSDs, specifically Samsung 830 SSD's. They are great performing drives and have incredible longevity from my experience. Other SSD manufacturers have fallen short while the Samsung 830's continue to impress me. I am at the point of having almost all of my systems utilizing Samsung 830's of some size where I manage the hardware.
When installing the SSD's into the systems, there is no easy way to install. Some manufacturers included a 2.5" to 3.5" installation piece but none of my Samsung 830's included that. As such, they were set into the case loose because there was no good place to install them. Since they have no moving pieces, I was not worried at all. I did want to find a better way to keep them and found it thanks to Amazon.
In searching around, I found the StarTech.com 2 Drive 2.5-Inch Trayless Hot Swap SATA Mobile Rack Backplane (HSB220SAT25B)
My first installation was into my Mediacenter where I had two SSDs installed, a Samsung 830 128GB boot drive and a Samsung 830 256GB data drive. Removing the drives and setting up the backplane was simple. I installed the StarTech.com Backplane into the 3.5" floppy drive bay, making a beautiful installation.
This was a very easy installation for me. I can't wait to get these installed into my servers with their SSD's. One thing I can test there is that my servers have hot swap capabilities. I will make one more post on that specific installation.
Do you have SSD's in your systems? Could you use an installation system like this to help you? What have you used for installation of small SSD's into your cases?
Easy Caddy for SSD Drives
As I am working on my systems at home, I am noticing a larger use of 2.5 inch drives in my systems. This is due to the increased use of solid state drives (SSD). In fact, in my newer server rig I spoke about, I have mirrored SSDs for the OS. To help make it easier for installation of these drives into my systems, I looked for a nice drive caddy and found one!
Solid State Drives are a new standard anymore for computer systems, especially for operating systems and data that is needed fast. The larger, "slower" platter-based drives are great for storage long-term and of large data that does not need to be returned fast. I have seen servers that receive, process and forward files onto other systems outperform the software written to do this when SSD's are used.
Going through Amazon, I think I found the answer … StarTech.com 2 Drive 2.5-Inch Trayless Hot Swap SATA Mobile Rack Backplane (HSB220SAT25B)
Given this, I am ordering a few in to try out this weekend in my systems. I will post an update to this post to give you all my findings and some technical knowledge from Rick Smith on how the backplane has been built to provide the hot swap capabilities.
My new Hyper-V Rig
We all want new toys, right? That excitement about opening the gifts … wondering what was inside … hoping for exactly what you want … the thrill of seeing the new toy. I remember my birthday and Christmas of many prior years; the excitement of the wrapped packages; the adrenaline as the wrappings are pulled off; the joy on my face as the new thing was in my hands. Those are the same feelings that we get into today. While I may be the one buying those gifts, the joy of opening everything I get from the places I order from.
In January, I read a blog entry (http://www.expta.com/2012/01/blistering-fast-windows-server-parts.html) by Jeff Guillet (pronounced GEE-yay for all of you) about his new Hyper-V server rig for his home lab. Reading through, I was really interested in building my own rig. I have my own machine right now. It has a Quad core processor with 12 GB of RAM and running Windows Server 2008 R2 from my TechNet licensing. This has allowed me to do some testing of systems like Exchange 2010, SQL Server 2005 and 2008, Windows Server, client virtual machines, and Windows Home Server. This rig has been pretty good at providing me what I need for testing but I have to run specific machines at differing times because of the processor and memory restrictions. I also have learned how to run machines on smaller footprints; something I can't tell is a good or bad thing.
Since reading this great article, I started in on my own certification path via the "60 Days to MCSE". In this endeavor, I realized that my current Hyper-V host was not large enough to use for this. I sat down with Rick Smith (@slegsmith) from my IT team at my day job to discuss what Jeff put together. The goal of this system was to utilize as much newer technology, have a minimum of 32GB of memory for virtual machines, and responsive drives for the virtual machines as well. In the end, Rick came up with some great hardware. I was lucky enough to have a case and power supply already but had to get motherboard, CPU, memory, and storage drives. Here is the order I made:
| Part | Name | Quan | Price | Part Total |
| CPU | Intel Core i5-2500 3.3 GHz 6 MB Cache Socket LGA1155 Processor | 1 | $209 | $209 |
| MB | ASUS LGA 1155 - Z68 - PCIe 3.0 and UEFI BIOS Intel Z68 ATX DDR3 2200 LGA 1155 Motherboards P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 | 1 | $201 | $201 |
| RAM | Komputerbay 32GB ( 4 X 8GB ) DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz DIMM with Low Profile Heatspreaders 240-Pin Dual / Quad Channel RAM Desktop Memory KIT 9-9-9-24 XMP ready | 1 | $179 | $179 |
| SSD | Samsung 830-Series MZ-7PC128B/WW 128GB SATA III MLC Internal SSD 6.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch MZ-7PC128B | 2 | $129 | $258 |
| HDD | Western Digital Velociraptor 600 GB SATA III 10000 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM 3.5 Inch Desktop Hard Drive - WD6000HLHX | 3 | $209 | $627 |
| Pricing as of 6/21/12 | Total | $1474 |
I finally got this system together in late May and I fell totally in love with this rig. I was able to put it all together and start building it with Windows Server 2008 R2 as a Hyper-V host. I could have built it with a "core" install but I have run into issues in management of "core" installs in the past. Once everything was installed, I was very impressed with the performance. To verify my person observations, I ran some performance tunes and got the following results:
Storage Performance Statistics
The Samsung SSD Mirror RAID statistics were:
The Velociraptor statistics were:
Memory and CPU Statistics
Memory Reads
| CPU | Clockspeed In MHz | Product |
| Memory Type | Memory Timing | Memory Read |
| Core i7-3960X Extreme | 3300 | Intel DX79SI | X79 | Quad DDR3-1600 | 9-9-9-24 CR2 | 16788 |
| Core i7-2600 | 3400 | Asus P8P67 | P67 | Dual DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR1 | 16252 |
| Core i5-2500 | 3500 | My system | Z68 Int. | Dual DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR2 | 15813 |
| FX-6100 | 3300 | Asus Sabertooth 990FX | AMD990FX | Dual DDR3-1866 | 9-9-9-24 CR1 | 14202 |
| Core i7-990X Extreme | 3466 | Intel DX58SO2 | X58 | Triple DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR1 | 14174 |
| CPU | Clockspeed In MHz | Product |
| Memory Type | Memory Timing | Memory Read in MB/s |
| Core i7-2600 | 3400 | Asus P8P67 | P67 | Dual DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR1 | 18438 |
| Core i5-2500 | 3500 | My system | Z68 Int. | Dual DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR2 | 18134 |
| Core i7-3960X Extreme | 3300 | Intel DX79SI | X79 | Quad DDR3-1600 | 9-9-9-24 CR2 | 15095 |
| Core i7-990X Extreme | 3466 | Intel DX58SO2 | X58 | Triple DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR1 | 12544 |
| Core i7-965 Extreme | 3200 | ASUS P6T Deluxe | X58 | Triple DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR1 | 12064 |
CPU ZLib
| CPU | Clockspeed In MHz | Product |
| Memory Type | Memory Timing | Calc Memory in MB/s |
| 4x Core i7-965 Extreme HT | 3200 | ASUS P6T Deluxe | X58 | Triple DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR1 | 214.2 |
| 6x Phenom II X6 1055T | 2800 | Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD5 | AMD790FX | Unganged Dual DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR1 | 208.2 |
| Core i5-2500 | 3500 | My system | Z68 Int. | Dual DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR2 | 198.8 |
| 8x Xeon L5320 | 1866 | Intel S5000VCL | i5000V | Dual DDR2-533FB | 4-4-4-12 | 180.5 |
| 6x FX-6100 | 3300 | Asus Sabertooth 990FX | AMD990FX | Dual DDR3-1866 | 9-9-9-24 CR1 | 176.3 |
CPU Queen
| CPU | Clockspeed In MHz | Product |
| Memory Type | Memory Timing | Score |
| 8x Xeon E5462 | 2800 | Intel S5400SF | i5000V | Quad DDR2-640FB | 5-5-5-15 | 41694 |
| 4x Core i7-965 Extreme HT | 3200 | ASUS P6T Deluxe | X58 | Triple DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR1 | 37793 |
| Core i5-2500 | 3382 | My system | Z68 Int. | Dual DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR2 | 32064 |
| 8x Opteron 2378 | 2400 | Tyan Thunder n3600R | i5000V | Dual DDR2-533FB | 6-6-6-18 CR1 | 30782 |
| 6x Phenom II X6 1055T | 2800 | Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD5 | AMD790FX | Unganged Dual DDR3-1333 | 9-9-9-24 CR1 | 27770 |
The tools I used were:
- AIDA - http://www.aida64.com/
- HDD Tune Pro 5.0 - http://www.hdtune.com/
I had started to build my SCCM environment but ran into time constraints before I was able to go to MS TechEd. After I returned home, I reinstalled the OS with Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate and just have to say "WOW!" Instead of running the 3 Velociraptors in a RAID or as separate drives, as I had with my initial install of Windows 2008 R2, I created a storage pool across the 3 drives with parity. This makes it act as a RAID but not using a RAID card and the through put was amazing; my IOPs were through the roof. Here are the different HDD Tune Pro results:
The Samsung SSD Mirror RAID statistics were:
The Velociraptor statistics were:
Clearly, the storage pool is the way to go for me in this build. I will blog again about how it is working in a few weeks.
Jared