Recommend RAID Class 3.5" SATA Drives

[bigdogchris]

I'm looking for 6, 3.5" SATA 2TB RAID ready drives for a backup server. The drives must be 2TB due to limitations of the RAID controller.

I was originally going to pick up some WD Red drives since they are priced well, but after reading this article it seems like the Reds suck at anything RAID 5, even on a good controller.

I also looked at the Constellation CS's, which are priced between the WD Reds and Se's, but can't find much information on performance in RAID 5.

What do you guys suggest? 3 or 5 year warranty is fine.

 

[drowsyhaze]

HGST 5K3000, but I can't really afford enterprise drives.

 

[ekotan]

I only ever use and recommend Hitachi drives. I use eight 2TB Ultrastar models in my RAID driven by an Areca PCIE card and five 4TB Deskstar models in a Drobo 5D to which I back up that RAID nightly.

Ultrastar drives are proper enterprise-grade disks and they have been super-reliable and very quick. You can find the 2TB models cheap if you hunt for bargains, although the 4TB models are expensive. That's why I went with the Deskstars in the 4TB category, those are used for backups anyway, so performance is not critical. Even so, they are fast and even though Deskstars are marketed as desktop drives, they're still certified for 24x7 operation.

I wouldn't touch WD with a bargepole. Too many failed units in the past left a bitter taste in my mouth. Hitachis are faster and cheaper, so I wouldn't even consider another brand for mechanical storage now.

 

[westrock2000]

I was originally going to pick up some WD Red drives since they are priced well, but after reading this article it seems like the Reds suck at anything RAID 5, even on a good controller.

Well, that may all be relative. What is your expected usage for the drives as far as data performance?

The Red's, while certainly slower, were still hitting greater then 90-100MB/s in most cases, which is about the realistic limit of a gigabit Ethernet. How will this array be backing up from the source?

What size data are you looking to move on a regular basis? Are you expecting to have to move a terabyte of data frequently, or several gigabytes, or more like a couple hundred megabytes at any one moment?

You then have to look at do you really need the performance at the cost of heat and noise in your computer? My current server has 10 HDD's in it and its noisy and it does noticeably heat up the room it's in. I am looking to move to 4TB drives to cut down on those qualities.

Is this home or business?

Even my paltry RAID5 on my Intel motherboard can only muster about 35MB/s, but I use that array just for television shows and it is more then enough bandwidth (movies only use 1 - 4MB/s while streaming).

What I'm getting at, is that once you move away from your system hard drive, how critical is absolute data bandwidth? Is it something that is more important that other qualities such as noise or heat?