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WD Reds with an Areca

B

brunobell

n00b
Joined
Feb 18, 2009
Messages
19
Hey guys,

I've currently got a HTPC setup at home and I have a few questions. First, here are the specs.

Norco 4224 case
Areca 1880i
HP SAS Expander
12x3TB Seagate (ST3000DM001) in Raid6

I basically use it to store and play movies/tv shows to my tv and as NAS.

Background:

I've had 4 drives fail so far and drop from the raid. 2 actually died where they could not be read in another pc/boot up. (you could hear clicking noises). But the other 2, only "timed-out" and when plugged into another pc, they spun up fine and passed the Seatools tests.

I have an IT professional at work who's suggested I use the WD Red 3TB NAS drives (WD30EFRX)

Here are my questions;

1) Why would the drives "die" in the raid, but still be able to be read and pass all Seatools tests? More importantly, is there any way to make those Seagate's "usable" in my server again?

2) Would the WD Red drives work well with my setup? I know some other WD drives spin down when not in use and could cause issues in Raid setups. But seeing as how these are NAS drives, I think they should be ok. But wanted to check with you guys to confirm.

3) I also know that it is generally advised against mixing drives in an array. My IT pro says it shouldn't be an issue, but again, I wanted to check with you guys.

Let me know if you need any other info. Thanks.
 
1: Hardware RAID controllers are picky, if they don't respond in <x> seconds the controller will mark them as unavailable and move on. Consumer drives don't work because they'll try many times to get the data from a sector, longer than the controller will wait. (that's why you don't run hardware raid for a home environment, it's almost never necessary)
2: Reds use TLER, they're ment to be a part of a RAID array and they know it, if they can't read a sector they give up quickly and inform the controller which will rebuild the missing sector from spare data.
3: As long as the capacity is the same it's fine. Some schools of thought say mixing drives is good, that way you won't get several drives from what could have been a bad batch.
 
I would not try to reuse those seagate drives that dropped out.

From my experience, Seagate drives in general are pretty unreliable, even the Enterprise calls ones.

Haveing multiple Seagate drives fail in multiple different SANs at different sites all in the same week gives me no confidence in them whatsoever.

Also having multiple Seagate drives fail in the same way at different time in the same SANs gives me even less confidence in them.
 
Thanks for the responses guys. I'm going to try to find some decent prices on reds and swap out my seagates one-by-one.
 
It could be the 5v rail of your power supply.
I have one with a weak 5v rail and drives drop out of the array when I'm using it.
Only 2 drives can be hooked up to it with any level of reliability.
 
Also check if the failed drives are on a specific Norco backplane. Most times drives have failed on me it turned out they were connected to a Norco backplane that had gone faulty. I've had 3 out of 8 Norco backples failing in a period of 2 years. I suspect the power design of the Norco backplanes cannot always handle 4 drives.
 
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