2tb options

TheGreySpectre

TheGreySpectre

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 1, 2005
Messages
439
I was going to buy the hard drives for my raid setup today but I ran into a little snag. I was originally looking at the Hitachi 2Tb HDS722020ALA330 owned by many people here but they seem to be out of stock at newegg, amazon and zipzoomfly I thought I would look at my other options.

Does anyone have any experiance with larger arrays and the Western Digital Green or Black Drives? The Greens are nice as they are cheap, but I don't know how they would perform in larger arrays.

Any drive suggestions would be welcome I would prefer 2TB 7200RPM drives that are under $200 per drive.

Setup will be an areca 1880-12 card with 4 drives in raid 6, expanding to more drives and raid 60 in the future. See this for specifics of what I am setting up

Thanks,
Grey.
 
You should use either Green or Black drives with a HW raid card unless you can enable TRIM. And I believe you can not enable it anymore.

Current hitachi seem to not have this problem.

Edit: Please replace the term TRIM with TLER. As others pointed out I used the wrong term.
 
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TRIM? You're looking for TLER and no, it cannot be enabled anymore. I would honestly wait for the Hitachis to come back in stock if you don't want any headaches.
 
I've been using 1TB hitachis for a few years now, they are older by today's standard but they are very cheap and good quality. I just ordered myself 2 for about 60 bucks each so I could grow my raid array. (actually resizing file system as I type, and I have my fingers crossed I did everything correctly and wont lose the whole array).

With 4 of them in raid 5 you should get a bit over 2TB. Though if you can wait, I'd probably wait to see if the 2TB ones come back in stock. You could then put 3 in raid 5 and get about 3.6TB.
 
Do those Hitatchi drives have TLER? What happens when you try to raid drives without it?

Thanks for the suggestion red squirrel but I am goign to stick with my 2tb Raid 6 plan.
 
Don't worry about TLER and Hitachi drives. There are plenty of threads detailing how well Hitachi drives work with Areca cards. Just look around a bit.
 
Yeah I figured they worked okay due to the 15 page thread on them :) I was just hoping to learn a little more about hard drives.
 
I'm using linux mdadm raid for mine so don't know if that changes things, but have to say it works well. I just recently went from 3 drives to 5. Going to add 2 more later down the road.

And I was also debating on using raid 6, but decided to stick to 5 mostly for performance.

If you don't need exactly 2TB, 4 of those drives in raid 6 could also work. Would come up to about 1.8TB. At this point some would argue you may as well just go raid 10, but by going raid 6 you can easily expand, and you can lose any 2 drives without the array being destroyed. With raid 10 it depends which two drives you lose and I'm not sure how well it expands, if at all.

I originally missed that part in the OP, I see that's basically what your plan is.
 
Thanks, but I already established the type of raid I am doing as per the other thread I linked to this was just to work out if it was worth waiting for the hitatchi drives to become available again.

The reason I am doing raid 6 instead raid 10 is that I plan on adding more drives. Raid 10 is expandable but it expands in pairs. My plan when I get enough drives is Raid 60 with 12TB groups consisting of 8 drives.
 
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