Good drive to use for array?

[Strahan]

Hi. I currently have a server with 16 Western Digital 1TB green drives (WD10EACS) in RAID6 on an Areca ARC-1160ML2. I've been continually deleting things from the array over the last few months due to space issues, so I really need to blow this thing away and upgrade. I was thinking of swapping the 1TB drives for 3TB.

Problem is, the drive I thought I would use is Seagate's ST3000DM001 as I have a few in workstations that seem decent. However, while when I built the original array I flashed all the WD drives to enable TLER, I've read somewhere that they don't have something similar to that for the Seagate drives. I'm worried now that if I buy those I'll be suffering from drives dropping off the array randomly.

What would be the best consumer class 3TB drives to use? I'd love to go enterprise, but I don't have the budget for it. Thanks!

 

[drescherjm]

I believe WDC Red drives will work fine on hardware raid controllers while most (if not all) other current consumer class drives from Seagate or WDC will have TLER disabled.

 

[HobartTas]

Greetings

Have you considered the re-badged Hitachi's which are now toshiba dt01aca300, they appear to have TLER/CCTL enabled, I can't verify this last aspect as I am using 10 of them under ZFS, also will your controller support 2TB+ drives?

Cheers

 

[hotcrandel]

I'd use the Toshiba drives as well. $130 on the egg at the moment.

 

[Strahan]

Thanks for the input. Hmm good point about the controller, I have no idea. I bought it back in 2007, that may be an issue. Have to do some reading hehe. Thanks again

 

[hceuterpe]

Unless your drive has TLER, I strongly recommend against using it. WDC is awash for their blue/black drives because you cannot set it (even with a tool like smartctl).

WDC just released their Se drives. At least with the 4TB model, it close in price to the black (in fact black is more expensive on at least one site I checked).