Samsung F4EG/HD204UI vs. Hitachi 5K3000 for RAID6

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fleshconsumed

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Well, the time has come to upgrade my RAID array. I'm not running out of space yet, but it's getting there, and I'd rather plan ahead so that when the time comes I'm prepared, plus that way I can look for best possible hard drive deal.

I'm planning to use 8 2TB hard drives in RAID 6 configuration on Adaptec 31605 card under Windows Server. I already ruled out Seagate that has been plagued by never ending quality control problems and WD because of the parking head issues. So the only other two contenders are Samsung F4EG aka HD204UI and Hitachi 5K3000. Originally I didn't even consider Hitachi because the only Hitachi drive I ever bought went bad on me, and because some of their drives such as P7K500 spin down in idle. However, it looks like 5K3000 does not spin down and people have been recommending Hitachi drives for RAIDing because they are no nonsense drives without any gimmicky green issues such as parking heads, plus 5K3000 uses 667GB platters, so I'm willing to consider it.

That said I'm looking for some feedback on these drives in RAID. I'm pretty sure neither Samsung nor Hitachi spin down or park their heads, but I'm seeing conflicting reports whether one can enable TLER on those drives.

So the tally so far is:

Hitachi 5K3000
1. Does not spin down
2. Does not park heads
3. Cannot enable TLER
4. 512 byte sector

Samsung HD204UI
1. Does not spin down
2. Does not park heads
3. Cannot enable TLER
4. 4K sector, would this play nice with Adaptec 31605, or would I have performance issues?

At this point it looks like both drives are identical feature wise. I'd like to know if I'm missing something here, or if I'm wrong on the features, particularly about TLER. I'm almost positive that you cannot set TLER on either of these drives, but it would be nice to hear from someone who tried. Also if anybody knows if these drives play nice with Adaptec 31605 card, I would really appreciate it.
 
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You can disable the headparking on WD drives, so to discount the entire brand would seem premature and unnecessary. Samsung F4 is my favorite drive. It does not support TLER, but it does support CCTL. That is about the same thing, but unlike TLER the CCTL setting does not survive a reboot and thus must be sent on every power up. This means that the hardware RAID controller must support CCTL and send this command to every disk when powering up, then it would act like TLER=7sec.
 
I have three of the HD204UIs in Linux software RAID 5. As sub.mesa says, the drives support CCTL, and I have mine set to 7 seconds, using smartmontools. Additionally, these drives do spin down - if I leave the array for a while, it'll spin down, and then take a few seconds to come back up again.

I set the spin down value via

Code: 
hdparm -S <value>

Additionally, APM values can be set via

Code: 
hdparm -B <value>

It might be worth subscribing to this thread. Hope this helps.
 
BTW, at home I have both drives now (with the $69 purchase of the 5K3000 on sale at newegg on Tuesday) . Well actually 3 F4s and 1 5K3000 and a couple of WDC green 2 TBs as well.

I am not using any of them in raid however. The F4s are about 20MB/s faster than the WDC greens across the board. I have not measured the 5K3000 yet.
 
I have 6 sammys F4 2TB in a RAID 6 on a Perc 6/i. I am not sure if I like the speed of the array. It seems that some background activity always takes place.

The array looks stable though except for I think one of my drives might be bad, because the array constantly reports an unexpected error versus the expected result.
 
Here is a benchmark of the 5K3000 in linux.

Hitachi5K3000.png


Here are benchmarks I did on the Samsung F4s. (sorry those were done in windows). I am actually moving data on one of the F4s to move it to my other desktop. I could get the same gnome diskutility benchmark after moving the 700GB of data it has on it to the hitichi.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1547827&highlight=Samsung
 
Megalomaniac said:
I have 6 sammys F4 2TB in a RAID 6 on a Perc 6/i. I am not sure if I like the speed of the array. It seems that some background activity always takes place.

The array looks stable though except for I think one of my drives might be bad, because the array constantly reports an unexpected error versus the expected result.
Click to expand...

Stupid question: you upgraded the firmware on the drives right?

I get 500MB/s read and write from my 10 disk F4EG raidz2. What kind of dd performance do you get ?
 
@drescherjm

Those numbers look in line with the fastest of my Samsung F4EGs; two of them post ~140MB/s, the third posts ~149MB/s - that's using the same DiskUtility under Linux. Additionally, your Samsung numbers in Crystal Disk Mark look about right.

By the way, which image host do you use?
 
Note on Samsung F4 drives, the temp sensor works on s/n starting with H7JD5B102xxx (sample of two) but not with those starting with H7J1SZ901xxx (sample of two)
 
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