Raid6 on LSi 9260-8i -which 2TB drives?

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XS Janus

Limp Gawd
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May 7, 2008
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Seeing how dice has landed on Raid6, and I will be doing it with 8 drives... the next logical issue is what drives...?
They definitely must be low power.:)
The obvious choice is: WD2002FYPS 2tb 6.8W 3.7W WD RE4-GP, 5400rpm, 64mb, 5yr warranty.
That however is $300 a piece, and while i love my current 1TB RE2 green drives, those came at way smaller premium than that...(currently $80 on my market):(

Other choices are:
1. WD20EADS 2tb 6.0 3.7 WD Green, 5400rpm, 32mb, 3yr
2. ST32000542AS 2tb 6.8 5.5 Barracuda LP, 5900rpm, 32mb, 3yr

The main thing here IMO is not which one of the last two is more reliable than the other, BUT weather the work in RAID5 on this LSi...?:confused:
I know they are "weaker" built and that they miss ERC and TLER functionality and that is a real problem, and WD disabled their tler utility to work recently...:(

What are your experiences with those? Anyone got them in RAID5/6?
If yes, what are your setups and tweaks?;)
 
I've read that the WD green drives aren't recommended for RAID setups and can lead to quick SMART failure. Though I've seen a lot of people who do it because the drives are pretty cheap right now.
 
Yes people do it for that very reason. But I'm not willing to risk my drives dropping out of Raid, because my card won't work with them properly.

Anyone knows a card that can be setup to work with these?
Onboard or software raid6 is not a very good option IMO...
 
You should probably make a power price projection for the drives you consider if cost is an issue. My guesstimate would be a power price of about...10-15 bucks per watt over a drives lifetime, if it's powered on for 3 years before failing on average, depending on your PSU efficiency.

You probably already know this, but I figure you'd rather be safe than sorry =]

Here are some hard drive power figures:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1004-page5.html

As can be gleaned, the WD drives "head clamp" feature is pretty spectacular when coupled with the drives low price. They almost pay for themselves, if it means you finally take your older drives offline.
 
The Adaptec 5805 works with those seagate lp 2tb drives from all reports and the HCL.
 
Aemsere:
I'm not sure what you meant?
The drives I want definitely need to be low power drives... you mean to compare them by this, as to how much will it cost to run on a setup with seagate vs. WD?

@novadude:
Thanks! I see the EADS WD drives are also on the list. They state firmware 01.00A01 as the compatible one.
Do you know or remmeber what is the firmware WD canceled the ability to turn on TLER?

A "big" difference is WD's better BER ratings, which is pretty important for drives this big...
10^14 BER ratings on the Seagate's and 10^15 on the WD.
 
They didn't change the firmware, which means until you plug in all of your drives you won't know which ones work and which won't; some in the same batch work while others won't. That worries me when a drive fails, you might not be able to get one that supports TLER so you may be fucked with a degraded array and no option other than buying RE drives.
 
Well that sure sounds like crap...
I'll be sure to keep an eye out for more info.

I heard there is a utility that can enable TLER/ERC on Seagate drives... anyone confirmed this to work and on what drives for sure?
http://www.hdat2.com/
 
Who knows; looking at the google results for that show a bunch of cyclical results on different forums referencing the SCT .pdf
 
Hitachi 2TB desktop drives work on (some, at least) intel controllers.
It seems to me that (some, at least) intel controllers are rebadged LSI hardware. In any case, the following work with the LSI driver under Linux.
Take a look at the SRCSATAWB, seems to me to be what you want, it supports RAID6, and some desktop-class drives (although you don't get much choice when gunning for 2TB drives.)
Hardware compatibility list here: http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/srcsatawb/sb/srcsatawb_thol_9_0.pdf
 
After some months of testing (including pulling the SATA cable, reinserting it, rebuilding the array, while running a large file copy + running Bart Stuff Test + running DVD Decrypter all at the same - if that isn't stress testing... ;)) I think I can safely say that the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB (CC35 firmware with NCQ enabled) is 100% compatible with the LSI 9260-8i (latest firmware + driver)

Although I must mention that the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB, as a HD, is a really bad product (of the 10 HDs I had, 3 broke down within the first week and all have an very noticable clicking sound when SMART polls the HD)

The only thing I havent been able to do, is get the SMART values from my HDs... The LSI 9260-8i does do "SMART polling" and I also hear it do this every 15 mins, but I can nowhere find the exact values of my 4 HDs... Does anyone know where to find this?
 
Samsung HD203WI. I just did two servers with 8/each of the 1.5TB Samsung on the 3ware version. I'm going 2TB for myself now. VERY cheap right now (I got a bunch for 110 each... Seen em as low as 100...), no problems with RAID after 3 months.
 
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