Which 4TB HDD for RAID 5?

T

The Real Zardoz

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 29, 2002
Messages
107
Heya,

I'm trying to decide which HDD to relace my aging 12x1.5GB (16.5TB usable space) RAID 5 array with. I've got two drives with SMART errors and a third one failing - and I'm down to one spare. Drives are Seagate 7200.11.

I'd like to replace these with 4TB drives. My options seem to be Hitachi 4TB 7200RPM ($259, end of life though) with a three year warranty, a Seagate 5900RPM 4TB (where are the 7200s??? sigh) for $209 and WD Black for some crazy expensive price which I cannot justify. I am specifically not including RAID optimised / enterprise drives here because in my experience, I have had less success with them than the desktop variants.

Controller is a 3ware 9650SE-24M8 which I will migrate to an Areca 1880IX when I can pick one up at a decent price.

Will I see a hug performance hit by moving to the Seagate 5900RPM drives? Otherwise I'll just jam the array full of those drives and call it a day... the Hitachi drives are tempting at 7200RPM but are more expensive and the prospect of dealing with WD's RMA process which s very poor for Australian customers, does not excite me.
 
I went with 4TB Hitachi's, they go on-sale every so often to $189. Using them on a 3ware 9750-24i4e. Before that, I used 3TB Hitachi's, overall I like them (7200rpm variants).

I'm not sure you'll see a huge speed increase, especially with RAID-5 but a newer controller would be helpful. I have 60TB (24x3TB, RAID-6) and 30TB (10x4TB, RAID-6).
 
Speaking of 3ware cards, aside from eBay, do you know of anyone interested in a 3ware 9650SE-4PML w/BBU?
 
Assuming your talking gigE access the 5900RPM drives will easily saturate it. I'm running 15 of them in RAID 6, mdadm linux.

For the price of one more drive I'd highly suggest RAID 6 over your existing 5.
 
With 10 drives (RAID-6) I can get ~800-900 megabytes per second read over lftp on 10GbE, I am happy.
I couldn't imagine moving > 30-60TB over 1GbE.
 
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Forget about RAID5, with 12 drives especially, a disaster waiting to happen. RAID6 or better.
 
raid 6 is definitely the way to go with more than six drives, if two drives fail in a raid 5 array that would a disaster.
 
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