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home storage server - which HDDs?

S

snefan

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 14, 2005
Messages
303
Sup. Slowly putting together (or rather, upgrading) my storage server for home use (streaming movies and tv shows through network) to a single PC, so high performance is not needed.

Bought a Highpoint RocketRaid 2220 (8p) at a decent price, and now I need a couple 2TB HDDs to go with it (2 or 3 for starters).

Only trouble I have is deciding which brand to buy.

Samsung SpinPoint F4EG 2TB - 5400RPM, SATA 3, 32MB Cache, 8.9ms,"EcoGreen F4"
Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB - SATA 2 (or 3), RPM = IntelliPower, 64MB
Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB - SATA 3, 64MB Cache, 5900RPM

Or should I put up a little more (15-20 bux) and get the Western Digital AV-GP 2TB? SATA 2, 1M h MTBF, 64MB, 4.5W, 24x7 reliability, Whisper quiet

The next tier are way out of my budget (almost twice as expensive as the above drives).
All 3 HDDs have very good reviews, and I have very good experiences dealing with WD RMA.
Also, does the flexible RPM really work on the WD greens? I've heard that they dont (at least on the earlier versions).


Thoughts?
 
Wd green isn't good for windows home server because it constantly parks its headers. Life span would be shorten dramatically during use. The green series are at a great price, some places selling a 2tb OEM for 75! If you would like to use WD green drives you should download and use wdidle. It delays parking and makes them work just fine, however; I believe it voids warrenty. I myself have 7 WD 2TB all of them green and they never failed me. Also the new data storage format for some of there drives requires work around and/or pin jumpers if its either going to be the primary or data drive requires a different approach.
 
I will most likely run Debian or Server 2008. Will the WD greens work fine without wdidle on those?
 
I been using WD greens in my server ever since they came out. They are working just fine in MSserver2k8
 
geant90 said:
Wd green isn't good for windows home server because it constantly parks its headers. Life span would be shorten dramatically during use. The green series are at a great price, some places selling a 2tb OEM for 75! If you would like to use WD green drives you should download and use wdidle. It delays parking and makes them work just fine, however; I believe it voids warrenty. I myself have 7 WD 2TB all of them green and they never failed me. Also the new data storage format for some of there drives requires work around and/or pin jumpers if its either going to be the primary or data drive requires a different approach.
Click to expand...

Could you provide a link that supports such a statement? First i've heard of this....but I don't spend a lot of time mulling over HDD's.
 
I would go with either the WD or Samsung drives - I really don't think you can go wrong with either. I have a 2TB WD Green running in my Tivo and it runs great and is quiet. The price was right also. I have a friend running all Samsung drives and he is happy also. You could also mix and match your drives, some people consider it good practice to do so in case you get a bad batch - I don't subscribe to that school of thought personally but whatever floats your boat.

Also the new data storage format for some of there drives requires work around and/or pin jumpers if its either going to be the primary or data drive requires a different approach.
Click to expand...

If you're going to boot from anything over a 2TB drive you would need a motherboard that uses an EFI BIOS instead of the usual CMOS BIOS. That is an inherent limitation of the older style BIOS. So you would either need a motherboard that uses an EFI BIOS or keep your boot drive a 2TB drive forever. Also, the larger/newer drives now use 4K byte sectors vs. 512 byte sectors. The jumpers he's talking about is a physical jumper that causes 4K byte sector drives to emulate 512 byte sectors. This is only a problem on XP machines, anything newer like Vista and up will be fine (including W2K8).
 
i just did the smart check on my 1TB greens. They have been powered on for 730 days, and still going strong!

I would go with the hitachi drives. I believe they work better on hardware raid compared to the wd greens. Could be wrong though.
 
WD greens are not recommended for HW raid, I would look at Hitachis or Samsungs. What RAID level do you plan on using?
 
WD Green's do park their heads when idled every 8 seconds. The wdidle utility allows you to change it up to 5 minutes or disable it all together sometimes.

From my experience it does not void warranty as I've used warranty service on drives that had this done.

But yes if you are doing a parity raid, don't get the WD Greens, or any non-enterprise WD for that matter.
 
I have a 16TB server, I have some WD Greenpower 2TBs, have tried the seagate 2TB offerings as well,
however I really like the Samsung F4s, the HD204UI is a customer choice on newegg, inexpensive, quiet and is generally known to work with most raid cards out of the box (no messing with TLER settings). It gets my recommendation. Been running 2 of these for over a year with no issues.
 
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OldSchool said:
What RAID level do you plan on using?
Click to expand...
Initially Raid0, and in the future I might add a Raid5, or just expand on the Raid0 (or convert it all to Raid5).

I also remember hearing about the WD Greens not liking raid now that you guys mention it.
Looks like I'll be going with the Samsung drives as there are no Hitachi drives available on the site I buy from, and I'd prefer not having to run any extra software.


Thanks for all the input.
 
snefan said:
I'll be going with the Samsung drives as there are no Hitachi drives available on the site I buy from, and I'd prefer not having to run any extra software.


Thanks for all the input.
Click to expand...

Good choice; I personally do not like hitachi drives, because every single hitachi HDD I have owned has failed me, statistically I know that hitachi is rated pretty good as far as drive failures, and I just must be a fluke, but seriously, I have owned 4-5 hitachi HDDs, and every single one has failed within a year of purchase.
 
the google statistics show that the best life span on hard drives is when they are kept at 40-45C.
 
cbutters said:
Good choice; I personally do not like hitachi drives, because every single hitachi HDD I have owned has failed me, statistically I know that hitachi is rated pretty good as far as drive failures, and I just must be a fluke, but seriously, I have owned 4-5 hitachi HDDs, and every single one has failed within a year of purchase.
Click to expand...

That's a bummer about your Hitachi experience. I've had so many failed maxtors, western digitals, and seagates that I refuse to buy anything BUT hitachi.

But I totally understand where you are coming from. A run of bad drives would force me away too. I'm glad you took all the lemons out of the buying pool so I didn't end up with one :)
 
I have a single F4 2tb in my Home server/file server currently and its quick, from 90-115mb/s depending on what I'm transferring. Couldn't be happier and was only $70 to boot.
 
you say high performance is not needed yet you say Raid 0, you do know the down side to raid 0? and with such large harddrives, you stand to potentially lose ALOT of data

also high point cards are... well,. not that great.
 
MrGuvernment said:
you say high performance is not needed yet you say Raid 0, you do know the down side to raid 0? and with such large harddrives, you stand to potentially lose ALOT of data

also high point cards are... well,. not that great.
Click to expand...

Yes I do.
The reason for Raid0 if I get less than 3 drives, and so I can have a single partition.
I also said that the data is not that important to me.
 
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