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RAID-5 from notebook drives?

C

charlesshoults

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 18, 2008
Messages
125
I am trying to decide on a new hard drive layout. Most of my data currently sits on my Windows Home Server, so I don't have a need for vast amounts of space in my desktop machine. I currently have Windows 7 installed on an old SATA-I 250GB drive, which is not the speediest thing in the world. I started looking at solid-state disks, considering picking up a small 40GB Intel drive, but that would put a severe limit on what I can put on the computer if that's my only drive. SSDs have come down a lot, but I still can't quite justify the cost. $130 for a 40GB and almost $300 for an 80GB drive. That, and there are a lot of mixed information surrounding SSDs, what you should do, what you shouldn't. Don't defrag, don't put your swap file on it. Some say don't put an OS on it, even though Windows 7 is supposed to be SSD aware.

On Friday, I'm ordering a pair of 1.5TB WD-Green drives to put into my WHS, then am pulling out five 400GB drives, leaving a 250GB boot drive, the two 1.5TB drives and a pair of 320GB Maxtor IDEs as backup. I plan to put the five 400GB WDs in my desktop as a RAID-5, but in the end, I don't need that much space and I don't want the power consumption or noise of five 3.5" drives.

How would five 7200rpm 2.5" notebook drives perform in a RAID-5 configuration? Is it even a wise thing to do? What is the lifepsan of a 2.5" drive versus a 3.5" drive? If I do this, I'll buy a pair of Western Digital Scorpio Black 160GB drives and stripe them. Then as funds allow, then expand one-by-one up to five drives.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=484&language=en
 
Ouch, those are not cheap.
I read that Western Digital has a utility that enables TLER, (WDTLER.exe) but was unsure if it worked on notebook drives.

I think if I have to spend $125+ for notebook drives that work reliably in RAID, I'll just stick to desktop drives.
 
WDTLER doesn't really work on newer drives. There's a whole thread on the issue a bit further down.
 
I have three 400GB ED drives that are 18-24 months old. I'm going to test it on those drives tonight. I've ordered two 1.5TB drives, which will allow me to pull my other two 400GB drives out of my WHS, if WDTLER works.

I'm going to pull the hard drive out of my Windows 7 machine and try to use WHS to restore the system to a 160GB Seagate 7200.2 2.5" drive to see how differently it performs before doing a RAID5 on my 400GB drives. I'm still thinking about buying one 160GB Western Digital notebook drive, just to see what happens with WDTLER. If it doesn't work, I can still throw it in a USB enclosure.
 
Why dont you just pick a used 300GB vraptor?

it will faster and cheaper than any raid solution posted above.

I sold 3 on here in the last month for $130
 
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