Can you mix Seagate Exos X24 and Seagate IronWolf Pro drives in the same ZFS pool?

[LunarMagic]

I have 4 18TB Seagate IronWolf Pro drives and I was wondering if I could used Exos drives of the same size together? They seem to be basically the same kind of drives but I just want to make sure. My use for this is running Virtual Machines. Thank you

 

[cwt]

No, these are not the same. Exos drives have a higher read/write per year, 550TB vs. 300TB. The MTBF is also higher (2,5 million hours vs. 1,2). Different recording heads (Exos TMDR, IW Pro SMR), different cache (Exos write-through, IW Pro write-back). In short: the Exos is the more „real“ enterprise drive.

You can mix them in ZFS, but it’s always advisable to use the same type and modell of drives.

 

[LunarMagic]

so would i just have them in separate pools instead of the same pool?

 

[Kingneutron]

No, these are not the same. Exos drives have a higher read/write per year, 550TB vs. 300TB. The MTBF is also higher (2,5 million hours vs. 1,2). Different recording heads (Exos TMDR, IW Pro SMR), different cache (Exos write-through, IW Pro write-back). In short: the Exos is the more „real“ enterprise drive.

You can mix them in ZFS, but it’s always advisable to use the same type and modell of drives.

Ironwolf Pro is definitely not SMR. Even regular Ironwolf is CMR.

Theoretically, you could mix the drive types in the same pool but I would keep the drives the same per-vdev.

e.g.

4x18TB Ironwolf, vdev 1 and 2, mirrors - or I would go up to 6x and RAIDZ2 them
4x18TB EXOS vdevs 3 and 4 mirrors in the same pool, or create separate pool for them

You definitely do not want to try doing a RAIDZ1 with drives over ~2TB size, the chance of a 2nd disk dying during a rebuild/resilver is not exactly low.

 

[LunarMagic]

thank you so much yeah it definitely seems like 2 backups is required.

 

[cwt]

Ironwolf Pro is definitely not SMR. Even regular Ironwolf is CMR.

Theoretically, you could mix the drive types in the same pool but I would keep the drives the same per-vdev.

e.g.

4x18TB Ironwolf, vdev 1 and 2, mirrors - or I would go up to 6x and RAIDZ2 them
4x18TB EXOS vdevs 3 and 4 mirrors in the same pool, or create separate pool for them

You definitely do not want to try doing a RAIDZ1 with drives over ~2TB size, the chance of a 2nd disk dying during a rebuild/resilver is not exactly low.

Yep, CMR. Made a typo.