HD204UI Questions

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war9200

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 9, 2010
Messages
273
Hi,

1. Has anyone RMA'd a SAMSUNG disk? How does the process compare to WD?
2. Has anyone tried putting 24 of these in a RAID-6?

Samsung $80/ea (when on-sale), call it $100.
WD RE4 2TB: $279

24 disks;
Samsung: $2400
WD: $6696

When on sale, $80 for 2TB
The 2TB RE4, $279

Hitachi's also go for a low cost as well but people say their RMA process is horrible.

Comments? I have RE3 1TBs and have not had a single failure in 1-2+ years since the drives were installed. The RE4 2TB seem to be the right way to go but they are almost 3x the cost as the Samsung 2TB disks..
 
I've got some of the Samsung F3EG 2TBs in a mdadm RAID6 and they have been working well for nearly a year now.

But I use RE4-GPs with Areca RAID cards, and they also work well. I've never tried the Samsung's on the Arecas because they are not on the HCL. But I would not be surprised to hear that the Samsungs work okay on the Areca cards.

Note that the RE4-GPs are the closer equivalent to the Samsung F4EGs, since they are both slow (~5400rpm), as opposed the the RE4s which are 7200rpm. But they are only about $30 cheaper.
 
Make sure you get a RAID card that support the drives that you plan on getting. The WD RE4s are really a waste of money though. If you want to spend that much, I would get the 2TB Constellation ES drives instead. Hitachi drives are hard to beat though especially if you're going with an Areca card. Their RMA service seems to be no different from WD or Seagate however, but out of the 70 or so that I've bought, I've yet to RMA one, so I can't really comment on it from firsthand experience. Same goes for Samsung.
 
I've used RMA services within the past 2 months for WD, Hitachi, and Samsung. I'd give small props to WD over the others simply for the fact you can do an advanced RMA with a small deposit. Personally I prefer Samsung as I am on the east coast and their RMA center is as well. Honestly I've only had to RMA 1 Samsung drive over the past 3 years, and the drive they replaced it with was bad out of the bag, so stuff happens no matter who it is. I own a small web hosting company so have hundreds of drives in service. I flat out will not buy Seagate ever again. WD I try to avoid as I was seeing 30-40% bad out of the bag, but RE series I will buy, even though I still see similar bad out of the bag levels, but once you have good drives in service, you are pretty much home free for the life of the machines service (3-5 years). As smartmontools-5.40 and above now support scterc settings, I see no need to purchase enterprise class drives any longer, and that is the nail in WD's coffin for me as they purposely disable that feature of S.M.A.R.T ATA 8 standards on all but the RE drives now. They wish to play funny games, my dollars can play funny games too and never fall into their laps.

At home, my choices are a little different, price matters for my personal purchases. I made the mistake of purchasing some WD 20EARS drives, no SMART support for scterc, and even the WD20EADS which seems to support the setting I've had some timeouts for the raid array. I have a 32 drive media server with 2 16*2tb raid6 arrays, with an even mix of WD/Hitachi/Samsung drives I bought 5 at a time when NewEgg had them on sale, I now regret every one of those WD drives. I had 1 Hitachi drive fail, and not a single Samsung has failed.

It seems most in the forum are using Areca raid cards and HP SAS expanders for their big monsters. At the time I built my monster, I chose a 3ware 9690SA-4i and a pair of Chenbro SAS Expanders which I do not think are as forgiving on make/model of drive as the Areca/HP combo.
 
definitely YMMV... I have yet to own a Samsung drive and would love to hear more people's views...
 
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