3 x WD7500AACS in Raid 5 ?

[Phimp]

Looking for three 750GB drives for a raid5 FreeNAS setup w/ GigE.
Average read/write for the WD7500AACS drives are ~65 MB/s.
They consume half the power of the faster 7200rpm 750GB drives. But what's ~10 watts 24/7? Nothing to get excited about... especially when I'm turning on the AC Unit far too often and leave my mini-fridge in my room on when nothing is in it simply so I don't have to deal with melted ice, lol
But they do run a lot cooler and quieter, which is a major plus.
What kinda speeds would these produce in raid5 over GigE? (GigE tops out at ~120MB/s right? Although tech specs would say 125MB/s, or am I missing something?)

Opinions?

And are the GP Drives likely to go on sale anytime soon? A $10 price drop would be sweet so I could save $30 on the purchase. I'll go for under $360 for all three but the lower the better.

 

[XS Janus]

I dont think you will get more than 60MiB/s betwen windows network clients over any win network.
Usual limit is around that per client.
So 2 clients using the server full will cap your gigabit nic.
Recently I found out that a guy using new Server2008 is capped by his network for just one client and is getting around 100MiB/s but only in some cases. New protocol i think.
Maybe someone can correct me, as I probably explained this wrong.

I have 8 of those drives in Raid 5 and copying files over the network is max 60MiB/ for big files. I get the same results when doing 4 drive Raid5 aswell.
Raid5 performance itself is capable of much, much more. When I copy the files locally on the server I mean.

I will find my results for 4 and 8 drive setups and post them for you.

 

[Phimp]

Thanks for the info!

I've never heard of the 60MB/s top speed per client for Samba, but if that is the case, I guess that's still the same speed as the drives I'm using for storage directly attached in my pc right now, so at least it won't be much slower than my attached storage.