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Are consumer drives bad for hardware raid?

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[H]F Junkie
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Jun 17, 2003
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As the title suggests, I'm curious if there is any specific feature set in consumer drives which make them bad fits for hardware raid. Alternatively, are there specific hard drives that have special feature sets that make them ideal for using with, say, a p410 512 BBWC card from HP?
 
I hear tell that there are some models of WD drives that aren't that well-suited due to certain firmware settings resultingin drop outs from the array...but I haven't personally encountered any issues with the Caviar Black drives I've used.

Additionally, I also have a pair of the Seagate Barracuda 3TB Drives in RAID and they work just fine so far...
 
green drives which automatically power off may cause problems
a drive that powers off to save power may be detected as a dead drive and cause the array to fail
 
Search this forum for TLER. This is a big problem with consumer drives in with hardware parity raid when you can not shorten the timeout for bad sector recovery.
 
I'll echo the previous comments about WD green vs anything else.

I have 4 WD BLUE drives in RAID 1+0 (w/ 3ware hardware RAID card) at home, and they work perfectly. I did pull a drive from the array (physically) and added it sometime later. They still recovered like more expensive drives do, although performance while rebuilding is unpredictable.

The TLER issue is real however... in a server situation (more than 4 drives or 25% duty cycle), I would not go consumer drives.
 
Decelerate said:
There was an article detailing Google's tech infrastructure, and how they used consummer-grade hard drives for storage (raided of course) because they didn't detect any significant price/performance advantage to go enterprise.
Click to expand...

You have a link to the article? I'd like to read it.
 
Links in my previous post, though it was not the original article I read (because I remember the picture used).

It was a LONG time ago, when Google was still rocketing post-IPO.

The gist of it, iirc, was not that enterprise drives weren't better but that they weren't better given the cost difference of enterprise drives over consumer ones.
 
E4g1e said:
It should be that consumer drives are bad for parity RAIDs, such as RAID 5 or RAID 6. RAID 1, on the other hand, mirrors an entire hard disk, so consumer desktop drives work fine even with a hardware RAID card.
Click to expand...

That's complete bullshit. Desktop-class and portable-class HDDs can handle RAID 5/6/10 with ease, depending on the workload and environment.

Also, it depends on the type of RAID, be it hardware, Fake, or software.
No, it would not be wise to use desktop-class drives in an enterprise environment, but it certainly does not mean that they are not capable of high data transfer rates and small multi-user, non-enterprise environments.

You do realize that when the drives are being written to in any RAID array, all the drives are working simultaneously, don't you?
So why is it that desktop-class drives would be better at RAID1 and not RAID 5 or 6?

That makes zero sense.
 
It depends on the vendor. I have a ton of Seagate and Hitachi consumer drives in various RAID levels with no issues. WDs have all sorts of issues with drops.
 
IMHO, the only real difference is that the enterprise disks are probably validated in RAID arrays while the consumer grade drives are not. Meaning that you might have oddball problems that take time to fix...

I've run RAID-0, 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10 with nearly everything - Maxtor, Quantum, Seagate, Samsung, Fujitsu, and Western Digital. For me, every issue I've run into has presented itself rather quickly. I had, at one time, a bunch of 300GB Maxtor drives that would simply drop from the array in about a day. Maxtor rev'ed their firmware and I never again had a problem.

A good rule of thumb with hard drives is to assume that they will all fail in the worst way possible. Make lots of backups.
 
^ There are huge differences between enterprise-grade and consumer-grade drives outside of RAID arrays.
So much misinformation in this thread.

WDs have all sorts of issues with drops.
Click to expand...
That's because WD desktop-class drives do not have TLER, and the Green drives are terrible for Fake and hardware RAID due to the head-mounting issues.
 
Red Falcon said:
So much misinformation in this thread. That's because WD desktop-class drives do not have TLER, and the Green drives are terrible for Fake and hardware RAID due to the head-mounting issues.
Click to expand...

I can confirm this, I had to go out of my way to get WD20EADS because you can change the TLER and IDLE settings on these consumer drives and saved hundreds by doing so. Sold my WD20EARS because they were dropping out of hardware raid to a friend who put them in FreeNAS (no issues yet).

I think it ridiculous to have to pay enterprise prices for drives to put in RAID, my next build may have to avoid WD entirely

I've had 18 WD20EADS drive, have lost 4 total in 5 years (most of these are only 2years)
lost 2 to bad sectors never being recovered and 2 to click of death

knock on wood for luck
 
^ You don't necessarily have to pay enterprise-grade prices for a decent RAID array, at least one in a non-enterprise environment.

Getting desktop-class drives with TLER or a TLER-like function will work just fine.
All Green-type drives, be it from Seagate or WD, will have issues because they were designed to have internal functions to reduce power consumption which bypasses the RAID controller, unfortunately.

The only time I would recommend Green drives in RAID would be with software RAID as the OS can manage HDDs and their internal functions much better than any controller can.
The only downsides are the lack of performance from RAID1 with Fake and hardware RAID, and the caching functions of hardware RAID.

By software RAID, I mean MDADM or a Linux/UNIX variant, not Windows RAID.
If one does use Windows RAID, I would not recommend using it for anything other than RAID1 with any class or grade of HDD, it is simply not robust or reliable enough on its own.
 
Red Falcon said:
^ You don't necessarily have to pay enterprise-grade prices for a decent RAID array, at least one in a non-enterprise environment.

Getting desktop-class drives with TLER or a TLER-like function will work just fine.
All Green-type drives, be it from Seagate or WD, will have issues because they were designed to have internal functions to reduce power consumption which bypasses the RAID controller, unfortunately.
Click to expand...

That I agree. However, an increasing number of consumer desktop hard drives have their TLER or similar feature permanently disabled in firmware, with absolutely no way at all whatsoever to enable it even with a third-party utility. Some of the newer Seagate Barracuda hard drives have their ERC (Seagate's version of TLER) permanently disabled. This can force a user to purchase that company's enterprise-class Constellation and Cheetah hard drives (many of which are still based on two-generation-old platter designs) for use in a parity raid.
 
^ Which is good for their business, just not for us.
I agree, it is unfortunate to force customers to purchase such hardware for such a simple feature.

However, software RAID does not require TLER and can work well, even in RAID6 with Green-type drives as the OS can handle HDD internal functions far better than controllers can.
 
been running a pair of new WD Green EARS 1Tb drives in XRAID in my new Netgear ReadyNAS NV+, no problems so far, they have been in a 24 hour data copy task, no problems
 
nobody_here said:
been running a pair of new WD Green EARS 1Tb drives in XRAID in my new Netgear ReadyNAS NV+, no problems so far, they have been in a 24 hour data copy task, no problems
Click to expand...

Try letting them sit idle for a bit, you might be surprised.
I do have to agree with everyone in this though, Green-type drives are not good for RAID controllers.
 
ill try it, haven't had a chance yet, copying 1Tb of data from a USB drive to the NAS takes a while...lol
 
haha, yes it does.
Hopefully the OS on your NAS will be able to handle the head-parking issue of those Green drives though.

Let us know how it works out.
 
Red Falcon said:
^ There are huge differences between enterprise-grade and consumer-grade drives outside of RAID arrays.
Click to expand...

Do tell. My experiences with seagate's barracuda v. Es drives indicate that they're pretty much the same thing, save for firmware and mtbf. I always figured Es went through additional validation as well. Otherwise, it's the same drive with the same interface logic, etc.

Perhaps I should have said "meaningful difference" rather than "real difference." While I wouldn't buy green drives for an array, I wouldn't waste money on enterprise drives either without some meaningful performance difference.
 
Enterprise-grade drives are far more robust and have different categories, low-end-server-class, nearline-class, and online-server-class.

Search for Seagate's documentation of enterprise-grade drives, you'll find a PDF with the answers you're looking for.

Yes, there are some serious differences between the drives aside from firmware.
If you think otherwise, then it's time to get educated. ;)
 
Never used the hardware raid on consumer drive and doubt I ever will. Don't want to locked in with the raid card manufacturer when something goes wrong with the card. Never had a problem with software raid. I always disable advance power management features of the drives.
 
Is there a list of consumer hard drives that have TLER?

I've read about those issues before and now my plans for a ZFS file server will be on hold until I can figure out which hard drive to get. Enterprise hard drives is like paying for an SSD with a size above 128 GB in size. (More or less...)

Or, just to be on the safe side in the long run, preferrable to get all enterprise hard drives for such a server?
 
Enterprise drives are overkill (even for Enterprises in some cases). Building out a RAID is mostly about redundancy, regardless of the drive. Make sure you choose the correct raid level for your peace of mind. Do not skimp on power either. Get a good PSU and UPS. A lot of drive failure I encountered are due to bad power.

When I was planning my NAS many many years ago, I had to grand vision of using SCSI drives. This was until I started researching drives and controllers and saw the prices. I promptly scooped up a bunch of PATA 120GB drives and two Promise Ultra100 cards. I am still running these drives to this day (bad sectors and all).

Years later, then I bought a bunch of the Seagate 1.5TB drives which had the firmware problem. Why? Because every vendor was dumping them for cheap. After getting a few firmware update from Seagate I ran the drives through the mill until I was confident they could store my data reliably. I am also still running these drives today. With all these risky moves, I have never had data lost due to RAID failure.

The moral is, drives are only one factor in your build. Crappy drives, on a solid RAID platform can still result in a very robust system. As long as your RAID can handle reasonable amount of drive failures base on the number of drive and their reliability.
 
ezno_matrix said:
Enterprise drives are overkill (even for Enterprises in some cases). Building out a RAID is mostly about redundancy, regardless of the drive. Make sure you choose the correct raid level for your peace of mind. Do not skimp on power either. Get a good PSU and UPS. A lot of drive failure I encountered are due to bad power.

When I was planning my NAS many many years ago, I had to grand vision of using SCSI drives. This was until I started researching drives and controllers and saw the prices. I promptly scooped up a bunch of PATA 120GB drives and two Promise Ultra100 cards. I am still running these drives to this day (bad sectors and all).

Years later, then I bought a bunch of the Seagate 1.5TB drives which had the firmware problem. Why? Because every vendor was dumping them for cheap. After getting a few firmware update from Seagate I ran the drives through the mill until I was confident they could store my data reliably. I am also still running these drives today. With all these risky moves, I have never had data lost due to RAID failure.

The moral is, drives are only one factor in your build. Crappy drives, on a solid RAID platform can still result in a very robust system. As long as your RAID can handle reasonable amount of drive failures base on the number of drive and their reliability.
Click to expand...

That was true during the days that the recovery feature could be adjusted on consumer desktop drives (and that desktop drives are always spinning). However, an increasing number of desktop drives have that feature permanently disabled, which means that the drive can take an infinite amount of time to attempt to recover the data. Plus, consumer desktop drives are now increasingly spinning themselves down to a complete stop regardless of the software settings! Unfortunately, hardware RAID controllers have not changed: They still give up after just eight seconds (even though almost all consumer hard drives still take far longer than eight seconds to spin themselves back up to normal speed), resulting in many of the desktop drives being marked as "degraded" or "failed" by the controller even though the drives are still good! That forces a complete (and unnecessary) rebuild of the entire array.
 
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ezno_matrix said:
Enterprise drives are overkill (even for Enterprises in some cases).
Click to expand...

That's crap. Enterprise-grade drives, especially in the 15K RPM, online-server-class, are very necessary for reliability and performance.

SATA is only half duplex, hence why SAS is very necessary for enterprise environments in which the drives and arrays have a lot of operations and need the throughput.

Go physically pick up a SAS drive and compare it to the weight of a desktop-class drive, they are much heavier and have far more robust components and added features which desktop-class and even nearline-class drives do not have.

There is so much bad information in this thread that it's laughable.
I pity the enterprise environment that has you guys for it's support team. :eek:


When I was planning my NAS many many years ago, I had to grand vision of using SCSI drives. This was until I started researching drives and controllers and saw the prices. I promptly scooped up a bunch of PATA 120GB drives and two Promise Ultra100 cards. I am still running these drives to this day (bad sectors and all).
Click to expand...
So you don't buy them for your personal use because you don't like the cost, well that's fine.
But don't sit here and say they are overkill just because you can't afford them.

It looks to me like you are shitting yourself about your PATA drives and had to work hard to convince yourself that those drives were good enough for your NAS.
Again, that's fine, but it doesn't mean those PATA drives could ever hold a candle to SCSI drives of that era, I know this because I still use them in and out of enterprise environments.

I can't even begin to tell you how many PATA and other desktop-class drives I've personally seen die over the years, not counting what others have seen and used.
Out of all the enterprise-grade drives I've seen, only one has failed, and it was a 10K Seagate Cheetah that ran in a high-usage enterprise environment for over 9 years straight.


Don't confuse personal use with what the drives were actually designed for.
Are enterprise-grade drives overkill for a NAS? It depends on the NAS, the environment it's in, and what it will be used for and is supporting, period.

Crappy drives, on a solid RAID platform can still result in a very robust system.
Click to expand...
Um, no, you will still have a weak RAID array with crappy drives waiting to fail.
That's not robust, that's illogical and makes no sense.

I don't know why anyone would invest seriously into having a decent hardware RAID array and then go buy crappy drives.

As long as your RAID can handle reasonable amount of drive failures base on the number of drive and their reliability.
Click to expand...
So you would spend $600-800 on a hardware RAID controller, and then buy $50 HDDs... yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. :rolleyes:
That would be like buying a $100,000 sports car, and then buy the cheapest tires possible, it makes zero sense.
 
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Red Falcon said:
That's crap. Enterprise-grade drives, especially in the 15K RPM, online-server-class, are very necessary for reliability and performance.

SATA is only half duplex, hence why SAS is very necessary for enterprise environments in which the drives and arrays have a lot of operations and need the throughput.

Go physically pick up a SAS drive and compare it to the weight of a desktop-class drive, they are much heavier and have far more robust components and added features which desktop-class and even nearline-class drives do not have.

There is so much bad information in this thread that it's laughable.
I pity the enterprise environment that has you guys for it's support team. :eek:



So you don't buy them for your personal use because you don't like the cost, well that's fine.
But don't sit here and say they are overkill just because you can't afford them.

It looks to me like you are shitting yourself about your PATA drives and had to work hard to convince yourself that those drives were good enough for your NAS.
Again, that's fine, but it doesn't mean those PATA drives could ever hold a candle to SCSI drives of that era, I know this because I still use them in and out of enterprise environments.

I can't even begin to tell you how many PATA and other desktop-class drives I've personally seen die over the years, not counting what others have seen and used.
Out of all the enterprise-grade drives I've seen, only one has failed, and it was a 10K Seagate Cheetah that ran in a high-usage enterprise environment for over 9 years straight.


Don't confuse personal use with what the drives were actually designed for.
Are enterprise-grade drives overkill for a NAS? It depends on the NAS, the environment it's in, and what it will be used for and is supporting, period.


Um, no, you will still have a weak RAID array with crappy drives waiting to fail.
That's not robust, that's illogical and makes no sense.

I don't know why anyone would invest seriously into having a decent hardware RAID array and then go buy crappy drives.


So you would spend $600-800 on a hardware RAID controller, and then buy $50 HDDs... yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. :rolleyes:
That would be like buying a $100,000 sports car, and then buy the cheapest tires possible, it makes zero sense.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Except that hard drive prices right now are astronomically high (relatively speaking): That drive that cost $50 just six months ago now costs triple (or even quadruple) that amount due in large part to the floods in Thailand in October and November of last year.
 
^ The increased prices are unfortunate and are the only downside to anything beyond desktop-class drives, making it very difficult to get these drives for personal usage.

But again, it depends on the users needs and how critical the data being stored is, as well as up-time insurance.
It doesn't mean the drives are overkill themselves.
 
Red Falcon said:
That's crap. Enterprise-grade drives, especially in the 15K RPM, online-server-class, are very necessary for reliability and performance.

SATA is only half duplex, hence why SAS is very necessary for enterprise environments in which the drives and arrays have a lot of operations and need the throughput.

Go physically pick up a SAS drive and compare it to the weight of a desktop-class drive, they are much heavier and have far more robust components and added features which desktop-class and even nearline-class drives do not have.

There is so much bad information in this thread that it's laughable.
I pity the enterprise environment that has you guys for it's support team. :eek:



So you don't buy them for your personal use because you don't like the cost, well that's fine.
But don't sit here and say they are overkill just because you can't afford them.

It looks to me like you are shitting yourself about your PATA drives and had to work hard to convince yourself that those drives were good enough for your NAS.
Again, that's fine, but it doesn't mean those PATA drives could ever hold a candle to SCSI drives of that era, I know this because I still use them in and out of enterprise environments.

I can't even begin to tell you how many PATA and other desktop-class drives I've personally seen die over the years, not counting what others have seen and used.
Out of all the enterprise-grade drives I've seen, only one has failed, and it was a 10K Seagate Cheetah that ran in a high-usage enterprise environment for over 9 years straight.


Don't confuse personal use with what the drives were actually designed for.
Are enterprise-grade drives overkill for a NAS? It depends on the NAS, the environment it's in, and what it will be used for and is supporting, period.


Um, no, you will still have a weak RAID array with crappy drives waiting to fail.
That's not robust, that's illogical and makes no sense.

I don't know why anyone would invest seriously into having a decent hardware RAID array and then go buy crappy drives.


So you would spend $600-800 on a hardware RAID controller, and then buy $50 HDDs... yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. :rolleyes:
That would be like buying a $100,000 sports car, and then buy the cheapest tires possible, it makes zero sense.
Click to expand...

LOL. If you read my earlier post, you will see I don't use hardware raid personally so I make no such recommendation as a purchase option. You remind me of consultants that keep telling us we need a sports car to do the job of a minivan. Showing off with fast flashy things is usually compensating for something that you lack.

Cost was a major factor in my decision, but there was also the fact that I didn't need scsi nor enterprise drive to meet my needs, which were met just fine with PATA drives and currently with SATA green 5400 drives. I still use the PATA in RAID1 (with bad sectors) to store unimportant data. It's slow as hell, but it still meets my needs.
 
ezno_matrix said:
You remind me of consultants that keep telling us we need a sports car to do the job of a minivan.
Click to expand...

That's the big question though - is it the job of a minivan. It's going to depend heavily on your actual requirements, use cases, etc. There's going to be big difference between a storage array hosting hundreds of VM instances, and a storage array hosting lots of big, bulk, rarely accessed files.

SAS drives do have a significant, tangible advantage over SATA drives. Whether that advantage is relevant to the case at hand depends, well, entirely on that case. Making statements like "oh, you don't need them - they are a waste" would be just as wrong as saying "running anything but SAS drives means you hate your data".
 
Red Falcon said:
haha, yes it does.
Hopefully the OS on your NAS will be able to handle the head-parking issue of those Green drives though.

Let us know how it works out.
Click to expand...

No problems yet. Looking at release notes it appears they addressed the WD TLER issue in the NV+ firmware a couple revisions ago. One of the reasons I went with the Netgear Ready NAS hardware, very active support.
 
Red Falcon said:
That's because WD desktop-class drives do not have TLER, and the Green drives are terrible for Fake and hardware RAID due to the head-mounting issues.
Click to expand...

I have a dozen Seagate 5900RPM Green drives that lack TLER or the equivalent and they run perfectly with hardware RAID. Besides, TLER is only relevant when the drive encounters an error.

IMHO, WD does something to their consumer drives that causes the problems. Their Enterprise drives are flawless.
 
nobody_here said:
No problems yet. Looking at release notes it appears they addressed the WD TLER issue in the NV+ firmware a couple revisions ago. One of the reasons I went with the Netgear Ready NAS hardware, very active support.
Click to expand...

That's good to know, thanks for letting us know.
It will definitely influence some future purchasing.
 
Maybe I have been lucky, but I have a six bay NAS that has six 1.5TB WD green EARS running for almost two years, not one problem. Those were replaced with six 2TB EADS recently, running no problems. The six 1.5 EARS are not in another RAID ARRAY, so far no problems. I also have three 2TB WD EARS drives in a server RAID 5 for almost a year, no problems. Everything I have read about WD green drives being problematic I have not experienced first hand, but I realize it does happen so some people.
 
In general, in every case I feel you should use manufacturer recommended drives for whatever RAID application you decide to use.

The "deskstar" Hitachi drives work well in just about every RAID configuration I can find. Hitachi ultrastar drives feel... heavier? I feel heavier means higher quality but I don't have a reason why. I use both in different configurations for work. I've had pretty good luck with ultrastars and deskstars in RAID arrays.

I also like to use the western digital RE hard drives as well for RAID arrays. In general the RE3 and RE4 drives have felt really solid, and have warranties to back. I've used WD drives with Areca, 3ware, Adaptec, and Intel ICHR with good luck. If you take any stock in Newegg reviews you will find the 500GB WD RE4 drive is one of the highest rated [though also very expensive]

Western digital desktop products [blue/green/black] I *haven't* had good luck, without turning on TLER [time limited error recovery] in any RAID configurations. I would not recommend using WD "consumer" drives in RAID arrays. I am using 4 600GB velociraptors at home with Intel on-board RAID5/0 and had good luck with those, as well as 2x300GB in RAID0.

Seagates, I've had quite a bit of bad/mediocre luck. For example when I upgraded a 3ware 9650SE-8PL card at work, it started throwing Seagate .11 drives; On the previous raid controller firmware these drives were "recommended" from the manufacturer, but 3ware decided after years of data collection they are not suitable for their cards. .11 drives are notorious for failure, however, and I've ready pretty good things about smaller [500gb-1tb] .12 drives. Even their ES.2 drives and Constellation drives, I've had a noticeably higher failure rate. I do admit their RMA process is excellent.
 
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